Playbook: Email answering agent

The same customer questions arrive fifty times a week

The problem

"Where is my order?" "Do you have this in stock?" "Can you resend the invoice?" Each one is two minutes of someone's attention, and there are hundreds of them. Meanwhile the genuinely difficult emails wait in the same queue.

What you end up with

An agent that follows a mailbox. When mail arrives it reads it, finds the answer in your data and documentation, and either replies directly or prepares a draft for a person to approve. Anything it should not answer alone — a complaint, a price negotiation, anything legal — it hands over with a short summary instead of guessing.

What it needs

• Access level: Power User or above.
• Instance: connected, if answers depend on orders, stock or invoices.
• Mailbox: a Microsoft 365 or Gmail mailbox connected to the agent.
• Pro app: not required.

Build it step by step

1. Open the Agent Builder and describe the job:

   Create an agent called "Inbox Assistant". It should follow my support mailbox. For each incoming email it decides whether it can answer from our documentation and from the customer's data in the instance. If yes, it prepares a reply in the customer's language. If the email is a complaint, a pricing negotiation, or anything about contracts, it must not answer — it should notify me with a two-sentence summary instead.

2. When the Builder offers to set up the mailbox, accept and sign in to the mailbox you want followed. This creates the activation trigger for you.

3. Decide how bold it should be. Start cautious:

   For the first two weeks, never send directly. Always prepare a draft and tell me it is waiting.

4. Give it the tone and boundaries you'd give a new colleague:

   Always be brief and polite. Never promise a delivery date that is not in the order. Never quote a price that is not in the system. Always sign as "Customer Care".

5. Save, then open the Activation tab and confirm the mailbox trigger is enabled.

Try it

Send a test email to the mailbox from another address — something ordinary like "could you tell me the status of order 10432?" Within a minute you should see a run in the agent's Executions tab, and a draft or a notification. Open the run to see exactly what it looked up.

Variations

• Triage only — no answers at all: it just labels and routes each email to the right person.
• Internal mailbox — the same pattern on an internal address for IT or HR requests.
• Multilingual — it replies in whatever language the customer wrote in; say so explicitly in the instructions.
• Escalation with a ticket — have it create a support ticket for anything it hands over, so nothing is lost.

Where it can go wrong

• Over-confidence. Agents that are told to "be helpful" invent answers. Tell it explicitly what it must never state without a source.
• Reply-all storms. Be specific about who a reply goes to.
• Loops. Exclude automated senders, bounce messages and your own outgoing addresses, or two robots will talk to each other all night.
• AI disclosure. Every email an agent sends identifies itself as AI — this is not optional. See AI Disclosure in Email.