Sales & Marketing Course Academy
There’s a lot of hype right now about AI “agents” that can just go off and do real work for you, log into your accounts, complete tasks, come back when it’s done.
We decided to actually test that claim properly, using our own sample WordPress site as a real-world task: log in, and draft a couple of blog posts.
It did not go the way the marketing suggests.
We’ve been rolling out AI-assisted customer service across a few of our own websites lately, and it’s given us a pretty clear, real-world lesson: the AI isn’t the hard part. The knowledge behind it is.
Take two of our own sites as an example. On computertrainingonline.com.au, our AI chat agent handles pre-sales questions about our Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks and Microsoft Office courses with genuine confidence, it gives specific, accurate answers about course access, certificates, payment plans, support channels, and more. Over on natbooks.com.au, our National Bookkeeping site, the same kind of AI-assisted chat doesn’t have nearly as much to work with, and it shows.
Same underlying AI technology. Very different quality of answer. Here’s why.
The reason our computertrainingonline.com.au chat agent performs so well is our FAQ’s page, and we don’t say that lightly. It’s not a token “top 5 questions” page. It’s a genuinely thorough, 30-question resource covering everything from course duration and certificates, to payment plans, refund policy, support channels, CPD points, and even how insurers and rehab consultants can enrol clients.
That page didn’t happen by accident. It’s been built up and refined since 2011 by actually paying attention to the questions our students and prospective students ask, then writing clear, specific, honest answers to them.
When you feed an AI system that kind of detailed, well-organised, first-hand knowledge, it has something real to work with. It’s not guessing or generalising, it’s answering the way one of our own team would, because it’s essentially drawing on the same accumulated knowledge our support team has built over more than a decade.
This is a pattern we expect to see everywhere as more businesses experiment with AI chat agents: the AI is only ever as good as what you give it to work with.
A generic AI chatbot with no grounding in your actual business will happily make things up, or fall back on vague, unhelpful answers. But an AI system trained on a genuinely detailed FAQ, your policies, your course structures, your actual support history, starts to sound like it actually knows your business. Because, in a very real sense, it does.
This is exactly the kind of thing we’re exploring further on our AI in Marketing, Sales and Customer Service page, where we go into more detail on how tools like Claude can be set up with custom knowledge, instructions and integrations so they genuinely reflect how a business works, rather than giving generic, one-size-fits-all answers.
If you’re a business owner thinking about adding AI to your customer service, sales or marketing, don’t start with the AI. Start with your knowledge base.
Sit down and write out, honestly and specifically, the questions your customers actually ask you, the ones your team answers over and over on email, phone and website chat, and answer them properly. That FAQ page, or knowledge base, or set of support documents, is what turns a generic AI chatbot into something that actually sounds like your business.
We did it the slow way over more than a decade on computertrainingonline.com.au, and it’s paying off now in a way we didn’t originally plan for.
Want to know more about how AI can be trained to work the way your business works? Read our AI in Marketing, Sales and Customer Service page, or get in touch, we’re happy to talk through what we’ve learned.
If you’ve ever typed out almost the same reply to a customer for the third time in one morning, you already know the problem we’re solving today. It’s one of the most common questions we get asked by our office admin and customer service students: “How do I stop rewriting the same email over and over?”
The answer is Outlook email templates, and once you’ve set one up, you’ll wonder how you survived without it.
We talk to a lot of small business owners and office admin staff, and email templates come up constantly, usually right after someone has spent their lunch break rewriting a refund policy explanation for the fifth time that week.
Templates aren’t just a time-saver, though that’s reason enough. They also help you:
We covered a lot of this same ground, from setting expectations with customers to speeding up your response process, in our Online Customer Service Training Course article. Templates are really the practical, day-to-day version of that bigger customer service strategy.
To use it later: go to New Items > More Items > Choose Form, set the “Look In” dropdown to User Templates in File System, select your template, tweak the details for that customer, and send.
The newer versions of Outlook (and Outlook.com) use a slightly different system called My Templates:
Simple as that. No add-ons, no extra software, no line item that blows out your monthly budget.
If you’re not sure where to start, these are the ones we see used the most:
Keep each one written in plain English, keep the tone friendly rather than corporate, and always leave a gap where you can personalise the customer’s name and specific situation. Nobody likes a reply that clearly wasn’t written for them.
Email templates are just one small (very useful) corner of what Microsoft Outlook can do for office admin and customer service tasks, calendar management, contact and CRM tracking, and task lists are all in there too, and most people are only using a fraction of it.
If you want your whole team working faster and more consistently across the entire Microsoft Office suite, our Office Support & Administration using Microsoft Office course covers Outlook email and meeting management, contacts and CRM, and tasks, alongside practical Word and Excel skills your admin and customer service staff will use every single day.
Got a Microsoft Office, MYOB, Xero or QuickBooks question you’d like us to cover in a future post? Get in touch, we’re always keen to write about what our students actually want to know.
While every bookkeeping job comes with its own set of unique tasks, clients seeking catch-up (or Rescue Bookkeeping) tend to bring with them a host of relatively predictable (if dynamic) issues that you can manage effectively if you are aware of them.
Recently we were contacted by the operator of a sole trader business – “Peter” (not his real name), seeking help with his bookkeeping backlog.
Many of the issues he identified are relatively standard in the rescue bookkeeping world. Becoming familiar with them will help you to effectively help your clients in the future.
When speaking with or taking on a new client, it’s important to ask the right questions so that you can be sure that you are the right person for the job, and if not, be ready to refer within your own network.
Asking targeted questions also enables you to develop an understanding of the person you will be working with. Knowing this, you are able to foreshadow (and then plan for and avoid) potential future issues, and focus on the client’s problem areas.
Our course design team were exploring recent job ads for accounting and office administration support and we distilled it down to an alarming fact – most of these jobs want all rounders!
Accounting knowledge in Xero or MYOB is important (mandatory), good skills in Data Entry and Microsoft Office (Word & Excel) is important (mandatory) and communicating via email and the phone is important (mandatory). This job ad in particular for a Sydney based property services business seemed to demonstrate that they were looking for an all rounder.
I’ve written about CRM’s for real estate agents in the past because they started popping up several years ago and all of a sudden you just need to inquire about a property for sale and you’d be on the “keep warm” segment of the agents mailing list!
I’ve since found a great CRM that is available on a Freemium model and it is built to work right in your email program!