As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly troubleshoot common product problems for customers.

What to actually do

1. Use a tool built for this

   The route this page recommends

2. Do it yourself

   Second choice

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

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your current help articles, set-up instructions, known-issues list, supported configurations, warranty or returns policy and escalation contact details.
   2. Remove obsolete instructions and paste the remaining product information into the prompt under "Product information".
   3. Paste a representative customer message under "Customer message", removing passwords, payment details, security codes and unnecessary personal data.
   4. Run the prompt and check that the proposed cause is labelled as an assumption, the steps are reversible and every feature or policy mentioned appears in your source material.
   5. Test each drafted step on the relevant product or test account, including the stated failure path and escalation point.
   6. Ask a support colleague to compare the customer-facing reply with the current product process and approve the safe cases that the chatbot may handle.
   7. Add the approved reply and escalation rules to your support chatbot, then route safety, security, payment, data-loss and unresolved cases to a human.

   Prompt

   You are a tier-1 customer-support assistant for [BUSINESS] and [PRODUCT]. Troubleshoot only common, low-risk problems using the product information below. Do not invent features, causes, policies, compatibility, warranties or fixes. Do not ask the customer to share passwords, payment details, security codes or unnecessary personal data. If the issue may involve safety, loss of data, account security, payment disputes, legal rights, a suspected defect, an outage, an unsupported configuration or a problem that remains after the documented steps, stop troubleshooting and recommend escalation to a human support agent.
   
   Product information:
   [PASTE CURRENT HELP ARTICLES, SET-UP INSTRUCTIONS, KNOWN ISSUES, SUPPORTED CONFIGURATIONS, CONTACT ROUTES AND BUSINESS POLICIES]
   
   Customer message:
   [PASTE THE CUSTOMER'S MESSAGE]
   
   Produce:
   1. A short summary of the problem, separating facts from assumptions.
   2. Up to three clarifying questions, only if the answers would change the next step.
   3. A numbered troubleshooting sequence, starting with the safest and easiest reversible check.
   4. For each step, state what the customer should expect and what to do if it does not work.
   5. A clear escalation point and the information a human agent should receive.
   6. A concise customer-facing reply in plain British English.
   
   Use only the supplied product information and the customer message. Mark anything that needs confirmation by a support colleague before sending.

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

3. Hand it to a person

   The distant third

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