AI Prompting Guidelines
In the age of generative AI, professionals across industries are leveraging tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and others to boost productivity and creativity. A recent survey found 78% of organizations use AI in at least one business function, illustrating how widespread this trend has become. Below, we provide an industry-by-industry overview of how prompting can be applied, guidelines for effective prompts, and example prompts (with recommended AI tools, difficulty level, and expected outcomes).
Customer Service AI Prompting Guidelines
Industry Overview
Customer service and support centers use AI prompting to create canned responses, power chatbots, and distill information from customer communications. Many customers are now familiar with AI-driven support — for instance, 68% of customers have used a chatbot for customer service inquiries . By using prompts, support teams can ensure consistent tone and accuracy in answers, quickly summarize long complaint emails, or generate troubleshooting guides. This improves response times and helps maintain quality support at scale.
Prompting Guidelines
- Keep Tone Empathetic and Polite: In prompts for support responses, emphasize using a calm, understanding tone (especially for upset customers).
- Include Relevant Details: Provide the AI with the key facts of the customer issue or question to get a targeted solution in the response.
- Conciseness Counts: Ask for clear and concise answers. Customers appreciate brevity as long as the solution is clear.
- Multilingual Needs: If needed, specify the language or ask for translation (e.g., "respond in Spanish") to assist global customer bases.
- Tiered Support Clarity: Indicate if the answer should include next steps like escalation or linking to knowledge base articles when relevant.
Example Prompts
"Respond to a customer complaint about a delayed delivery of their order. Apologize sincerely and offer a solution (refund on shipping or discount on next purchase)."
"Draft a help center FAQ entry for the question: 'How do I reset my password?' – include step-by-step instructions in simple terms."
"Summarize this long customer email into 2-3 bullet points of their main concerns: [insert email text]."
"Generate a troubleshooting guide for a user who says their device won't turn on. Include at least 3 steps they should try, in order."
"Provide a positive and concise response to a customer asking if an out-of-stock item will be restocked, including an expected time frame if possible."