As of 13 August 2026, AI can qualify incoming customer enquiries before you reply.

What to actually do

1. Use a tool built for this

   The route this page recommends

2. Hand it to a person

   Second choice

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, power-user skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your current enquiry inbox or chat export and choose a representative set of recent enquiries, removing unnecessary personal information before copying them.
   2. Write the qualification rules in one document, including who you serve, what you offer, exclusions, priority cases, routing options, required details and response expectations.
   3. Paste your current price, availability and eligibility information into the same document, or link the team to the source that staff must treat as current.
   4. Paste the prompt and one enquiry into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, then compare the proposed status with the written qualification rules.
   5. Test the prompt with clear enquiries, incomplete enquiries and ambiguous enquiries, and change the instruction if it does not route uncertain cases to a person.
   6. Send the output to a colleague for approval before replying, then copy the approved reply and record the classification and any corrections in your inbox or CRM.
   7. After reviewing a batch of real results, update the rules with recurring missing details and keep a human check for every case outside the documented criteria.

   Prompt

   You are helping qualify incoming customer enquiries for [BUSINESS NAME]. Do not make promises, invent facts or decide that an enquiry is unsuitable unless the rules below clearly support that decision.
   
   Qualification rules:
   - Ideal customer: [DESCRIBE YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER]
   - Services or products offered: [LIST THEM]
   - Customers or enquiries we cannot accept: [LIST THEM]
   - Required details before a human replies: [LIST THEM]
   - High-priority situations: [LIST THEM]
   - Normal routing options: [LIST THEM]
   - Opening hours and response expectations: [ADD THEM]
   - Current prices, availability or eligibility rules: [PASTE THE CURRENT SOURCE OF TRUTH]
   
   For the enquiry below, return:
   1. A concise summary using only information stated by the customer.
   2. The customer’s apparent need or intent.
   3. The facts that match or fail the qualification rules, quoting the relevant wording where useful.
   4. Missing information, separating essential information from optional information.
   5. A status of QUALIFIED, NEEDS INFORMATION, ROUTE TO HUMAN, or NOT A FIT. Use ROUTE TO HUMAN whenever the enquiry is ambiguous, sensitive, urgent, outside the rules, or requires a judgement not covered above.
   6. The recommended next action and the reason for it.
   7. A short, plain-English reply that asks only the necessary questions or confirms the next step. Do not claim that a service, price, appointment or outcome is available unless the supplied source of truth says so.
   8. A confidence note explaining what could make the classification wrong.
   
   Incoming enquiry:
   [PASTE THE CUSTOMER ENQUIRY HERE]

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.