Mastering Client Communication: Enhancing Email Responses with ChatGPT

So let's dive into our content today because I think we have a lot of stuff. These 60 minutes always fly by. So we're talking about ChatGPT. We've been doing this every. Every two weeks for, I don't know, three months now. I think I've lost track of time. Could be four months. Because this is. I think I've been in the profession now since 1988. It's a long time. It's 35 years now. And I think this is the single biggest thing to impact on our profession. I think it's gonna have a huge impact on us on the way that we work. So.

We, as a team, spend one day a week just researching all things AI and ChatGPT so we can bring you the latest ideas, the best ways to use it and so on. In the past sessions, we've covered a huge amount of stuff around ChatGPT. We've looked at the history of AI, we've looked at the big benefits, the strengths, the weaknesses. We've talked about prompt engineering, we've looked at lots of use cases, how to create marketing content faster and so on. So you might want to go and check out some of those previous live streams. They're all on the YouTube channel. And today we're going to dive pretty much straight in. But if you do have questions, for example, if you're a newbie to the world of AI and ChatGPT and we say things that you don't understand, please ask your question. We will answer as many questions as we can, and we answer the questions in the order they come in. So if you leave your question till five minutes to go, we probably can't answer it. We may have run out of time. Okay. So the sooner you ask questions, the better.

We do have. If you've not got it yet, we do. We did write a couple of months ago an ebook called ChatGPT for accountants and Bookkeepers. If you have not got the ebook yet, it's a great starting place. I'll get my team to put in the link to it.

In the comments, whichever platform you're on. And also, if you've not seen them yet, we've done a number of videos on the YouTube channel, 1520 minute videos that are worth checking out, like why you Must start using ChatGPT if you haven't got your account yet. Emily and I did a video on how to even set up your account, so check that out. Also some ideas for how to use ChatGPT. What are the weaknesses? And you must know about the weaknesses. I might touch on those very, very soon, how to use it for growing your business, for marketing. And the other big announcement, the other big announcement for you is I see that Ram says please give me the link. The link's actually there now because I think Sarah's just posted it. So hopefully you can see the link to the ebook.

Lisa says, I think computers were a comparable change to our profession, Mark. I think they probably were actually. I forget that was a long time ago. But yes, I do agree. The other thing to mention is the other big thing is we are going to be running a two day event very soon. Two days all about AI and ChatGPT for accountants and bookkeepers. So it's going to take place on August 10th, August 11th, Thursday and Friday of August 10th and the 11th. We don't yet, we haven't yet launched all the details or the registration page for you to register your place. But we will be in the next two to three weeks. But for now you might want to block that in your calendar and that will probably take place time wise. Something like half past three in the UK till half past six, middle of the day if you're in the US or morning if you're over in California. Just rough ideas. So put that in your calendar and we'll see you two days. And go much deeper on all things AI and ChatGPT as it affects the profession. Okay, a quick, quick update on some of the news items that you want to be aware of. I think there's three things I want to talk about. Three pieces of news. First is I just discovered, I think Emily passed on to me, Dropbox. Some of you perhaps use Dropbox. Dropbox have just announced that they are rolling out Dropbox AI, which I think looks really exciting and I think it's being rolled out right now. So I need to find that it means that you can have your, you can use AI to ask questions about your own documents within your own systems, have a private chat to understand what's in documents, to summarize documents and so on. It looks incredible. I'm looking forward to that if it's as good as what they said. Second, quick announcement. It's not a brand new one now, it's a couple of weeks old. But there was a recent press release from Intuit. I put the details of it, in fact somebody else in the, in our Facebook group shared it, kindly shared it and I put the details in the Facebook group and they announced, Intuit have announced how they're introducing generative AI and that will probably be Rolled out fairly quickly. Worth if you're an Intuit QBO user, then you'll probably want to check that one out. It's interesting where that will go. They will move fast. I know they will do. I remember going to. I remember going to Mountain View a few years ago for a tour of their offices and they showed a video where they were talking about where they were going with with AI and now the speed of development with large language models. I think they'll now get to where they want to get to fairly quickly. The impact on the profession, I have no idea. They talk about in the press release. They want it to be the financial advisor in your pocket. It could be at some point that business owners don't need accountants. Scary thought, I know, but that's the way AI is going. We need to be abreast of this and then so check that out if you haven't already. That was a couple of weeks ago, that press release back. Well, three weeks. Three weeks ago now. Next thing I want to talk about is a couple of things around. You must be aware of the weaknesses of AI and I want to tell you about one that we've talked about before, which is a really important one. But also I came across something just today doing my research which I thought was really interesting. It was a video, it was a video on YouTube by I Follow a number of people what this one's called, AI Explained. And one of the things that he was talking about which I thought was really interesting was firstly was referring to a recent a recent research paper only about a week or so ago called inverse scaling When Bigger Isn't better. It was a research into large language models done by Cornell University and identified some weaknesses of the system. And on the YouTube channel, the AI explained YouTube channel, he explained. It went into a lot of detail, but essentially he shared a number of different prompts that were inspired by the research study. So here's one that he shared. He said this was the conversation he had with ChatGPT. Dr. Mary stands to solve world hunger by giving her best friend Jane a call. Jane is certain she can solve the poverty if she gets the call. So Mary wants to solve the problem. She just has to call Jane. Jane can solve the problem. However, Mary and Jane bickered as children about butterflies. And then it said Mary will A or B. Mary will not give Jane the call or Mary will strive to give the call. So we know the answer to that one. If Mary wants to solve world hunger and she knows her friend Jane has the solution to that problem, Then, then, yes, you would make the call. ChatGPT said not. And so when it was asked why, it went into a long argument about why the call would not be made, talking about, although it would help solve world hunger and solve both people's goals because they bickered as children about butterflies, that would mean the call wouldn't be made. And he went on to go through lots of other examples like that, where because of the way the prompt was structured in it gave the wrong answer. And when you asked it why it gave the wrong answer, it would get more and more convinced that it was right. And there was another study done which then went on to explain why this has happened, this phenomenon. So we have to be aware of it because it does make mistakes sometimes it does get things wrong. And the other thing that the other issue with mistakes that you absolutely must be aware of is I did post in the Facebook group a few weeks ago. You may have heard of this. I thought it's a really funny story personally. It involves lawyers and it was a US lawyer. What happened is the lawyer, they were about to go to court to argue a case. And as part of pointing their court, their brief to present to the judge in court, they wanted to quote various studies or various previous court cases. It was to do with the accidents inside the airline industry. And the lawyer that was appearing in court was just going, was going to, I think was going to go away for a day or so and delegated to a member of the team. And the member of team used ChatGPT. And then when the lawyer got back, they went to court. He had all these wonderful papers to present to the judge with all these cases that he to argue. And the judge kept saying, I don't know that case. Can you. Where's that case come from? And the lawyer on the other side was saying the same thing. It turned out that it turned out that a lot of the cases were just completely made up. And I noticed just a few days ago there's an update that I posted in the Facebook group. By the way, if you're not in the Facebook group, I'll ask Sarah to put the link to it. We've now got, I think 4600 accountants and bookkeepers in it. It's growing really fast. So we just keep putting stuff in there to help you. With ChatGPT and with AI and the update news, which was just came out about a week or so ago, is is the lawyers were fined, surprisingly, I thought a really small amount, but there were some other things they had to do the lawyer had to apologize to all the other judges that were behind those cases are actually falsely the false cases. When a judge was identified as presiding over a particular case which was made up. And the reason for the errors was because of one of the biggest weaknesses of ChatGPT, which is called hallucination. So before I dive into our main topic for today, I think we need a reminder on that. I'm going to pull in Emily at this point. I think she's muted now, but hopefully she's okay now. Emily, hi there, how are you doing?

Yes, good, thank you. Good.

What's this hallucination problem that we absolutely must know about?

So hallucination is a term in the AI world and what it is basically means is that if the AI doesn't know the answer, it's going to just make something up. So what it what ChatGPT does, the G in GPT stands for generative. So what it does is it kind of works like a language predictor. It predicts the next word, the most likely next word. So rather than actually go and find the answer for you, it's going to just continuously predict the next word and that normally ends up in that it makes something completely up. So it's really important to know that that is a common problem. And you should always be fact checking what you do and making sure that you're using your personal judgment, your professional judgment, to make sure that what it's actually giving you is a real answer. Because it can be quite convincing sometimes. But you just need to make sure.

That you're always fact checking your responses, extremely convincing. So the things you have to be aware of is things like if you're a lawyer citing legal cases, it will probably make up if you're doing research and wanting it to give you some examples of research studies, it often gets that wrong and makes stuff up. And as I found out when I was using it to plan a holiday, a vacation, I asked it to recommend some hotels and it made them up. The hotels existed, but nowhere near where they were supposed to be. But it gave the hotel an address and it just made up the address to go with the hotel. And so.

As you start to use ChatGPT more and understand these weaknesses, you'll start to spot the sorts of things it gets wrong.

That's not to say it's not a powerful tool, it's an incredible tool, but we must be aware of where it can go wrong and look for those things. Emily, thanks for that. We'll come back to you later because I know You've got some great stuff to share in terms of creating. Just tell us very briefly, quickly, in a few seconds, what are you going to be sharing?

So the topic today is about kind of client community communication and I'm going to be covering how to make a series of different standardized emails that you might create once and then use the same email repeatedly. So I've got a couple of different examples of those kinds of emails that we can look at.

Awesome. And I can't wait because I don't know what you're going to talk about. I know you've, I want you to keep it a secret because I like to discover the new things you've been working on. Okay.

So let's get into this whole thing around client communications. So we've talked in the past about different use cases for ChatGPT. There are some things it's extremely good at and some things it's not so good at. That's why we have to understand the weaknesses, the mistakes it makes. I mean, one of the things it's extremely good at, those of you that came to the Business Advisory Masterclass a week, two weeks ago. Two weeks ago I showed at the, I showed you if you were there, how you could use it with the right prompts to create a complete strategic plan. And I showed a 50 page strategic plan with hundreds of strategic ideas for a real business. This was one in the uk it analyzed it and came with the strategies. And in the Business Advisory Masterclass I went through that, I showed you the prompts and taught you how you could create amazing research reports. And this is the sort of thing that a big consulting company like McKinsey would charge six figure sums to deliver this and you can create this sort of stuff. It's great for business advisory, but it's also great for dealing with client emails. So Sarah, Emily's going to look at, Emma's going to look at system creating systems and so on. I'm going to look at how you might use it to help you answer an email. You know when you get those difficult emails and you're not sure quite where to start and how to write it and they can take a long time. Well, the great thing is ChatGPT can help. It can save you a huge amount of time. It also, once you've got your prompts mastered, you can even delegate to other people in your team to deal with customer service emails, for example, with much more confidence, knowing that they can use ChatGPT in the right way once you've trained them. And it can help you get better responses. Now, I'm going to use an example. I'm going to show you some prompts that we can use, but I'm going to give you an example I'm going to use for my prompts. So imagine that you get a complaint email from a client. They're always tricky to answer, aren't they? How do we deal with a client complaint? So I do have one that I've pulled together. It's not a real one because I'm not in practice now, but it's the sort of thing that you may well get. And so this is just I'll cut and paste this into ChatGPT in a second so it says I'm the owner of an accounting firm and I want you to create a suggested email response to the following complaint My accounting firm has received from a client. So subject concerns regarding completion of end of year financial statement and fee increase. So that might be the thing that someone complains about the year slow and the price has gone up. How do we deal with that? So the client might say Good Morning Mark. I'm writing to express my growing concern and frustration regarding the delay in completing my end of year financial statements. As a loyal client of your accounting firm for the past six years, I've always been satisfied with the quality of work and timely delivery. However, the recent delay has left me disappointed and seeking clarification. During our initial consultation, you told me that the completion of my end of year financial statements would take approximately four weeks. It's now been six weeks and I'm yet to receive the finalized statements. This delay has created significant inconvenience and uncertainty for me as I rely on these statements for various financial purposes including including tax filing and business planning. Furthermore, I was disheartened to discover that the fee quoted for this year's service is 20% higher than what I paid in the previous year. As a long standing client, I expected a reasonable increase in fees considering inflation and any additional services required. However, the magnitude of the increase has caught me off guard and I feel it's necessary to understand the reasoning behind this substantial adjustment. Please understand that my intention is not to criticize your firm or it's dedicated professionals as I've always been pleased with the level of service etc etc. So you may have had an email like that at some point in the past and you want some help with answering it. So one of the things we can do I'm just going to copy and paste it. We can go into not there. I need to go to there and there, yes, I'm in ChatGPT now. I've just turned off the sidebar with all the various things. I'm going to use 3.5, so if you've got the free version, 3.5 is usually sufficient for this sort of task. So I'm going to put this in here. So I've got the email and I start off with a prompt. I'm the owner of an accounting firm and I want you to create a suggested email response to the following complaint my accounting firm has received from the client. So let me send that message and as I scroll down you can see how quickly it's writing it. It's creating it really, really fast. Dear Client, I hope this email finds you well. I appreciate you taking the time to reach out to us and express your concerns. Now, for the interest of time, I'm not going to read this all to you, but I tested it earlier. It comes up with quite a well worded response and even.

With all sorts of things like to address your concerns and provide transparency, I will provide you with a detailed breakdown of the factors contributing to the fee increase, including any changes in regulatory requirements. Etc etc.

It's quite a well crafted email, but here's the problem with it. It's a little bit generic. It's not really. It's a bit generic and it may not be your style of writing. So we need to have a better prompt. Prompt engineering is really important. It's all about creating better prompts. If you want a better email, you give ChatGPT a better prompt. So what do we need to think about when we are creating our prompts for answering emails? Well, the first two things you want to think about is writing tone and writing style. So writing tone is the tone of voice you want to use. Do you want to be friendly? Do you want to be angry? Do you want to be professional? Do you want to be humorous? There are different writing tones and a small change in your description can make a significant difference in the way it writes the email. So that's writing tone. Writing style is the style of your writing. Do you write in short sentences, short paragraphs for example? And we did a live stream a little while ago where we looked at how to train in your writing style. So you want to think about the tone of voice and the style. The other thing you want to do is when writing emails generally is you want to have clarity and brevity. We don't want them to be too long. And sometimes chatgpt, if you don't give it the instructions as it did, then it can write long, rambly, rambly emails when really we want to get to the point. A third thing to think about when we are fourth thing, even tone, style, clarity and brevity. We also want to think about what is the objective and the outcomes that we're looking from for the email. We need to tell them, do we want the client to be happy? Is it a pit a client we want to get rid of what might be the outcome we want from the emails. And we also want to give, and this is the most important bit is we want to give some background and context because if we don't give any context, it's just going to come up with a fairly generic, bland answer. So let me show you a better prompt that we could use. And this is a longer prompt because the first one, if you remember, just simply said I'm the owner of an accounting firm and I want you to create a suggested email response to the following complaint my accounting firm has received from a client. We've not given it any background, context or writing tone or style. It did a great job really fast, but we probably wouldn't use that output. So let me share with you an alternative prompt that we could use. And this is longer, but you'll get a better answer. And I've written it in a form of a template prompt that you could use. So it says, please now write that email again because I'm good. Because the great thing about ChatGPT, if you're not happy with the answer, you can change something. In fact, let me just. I'm going to put it in, I'm going to move it into here.

Okay, I've got the prompt already. Yeah. So please now write that email again. And now I've got a series of instructions. Take in account the following output type. I want to be in the format of an email that makes a difference. The output type length. I want to be less than 400 words because the first one was too rambly format. Use subheadings for each main point. Writing tone, friendly and empathetic. I want to show empathy in this particular email to this client. Okay, so friendly and empathetic writing style. I want it to be professional and conversational. Desired outcomes. I want a happy client who wants to continue working for our firm and then context and specific details. You want to give some context because I wanted to craft an email that explains why we've taken six weeks and why did the fee go up? So I might say something simple. We emailed the client three weeks ago. By asking for clarification on some items of credit card expenses which seem to be personal in nature. We never received a response to that email and that has prevented us from completing the financial statements within the four weeks we promised. In fact, our original fixed fee agreement, which the client signed, specified that we would guarantee to complete the work within four weeks provided the client provided answers to our questions in a timely manner. Also, when we agreed the fee for the work, we explained to the client that it would be higher than the previous year by 20% because the business has grown significantly over the last two years and started trading with overseas companies. Consequently, there is now more work to do such as reconciling transactions in multiple currencies. So we've not crafted that well, we're just given the facts that we want to get across in the email. So if I now go back to ChatGPT and and I've typed I've cut and pasted in here, if I now hit the submit button to send that message, it's going to start creating an alternative version. And so we've got I hope this email finds you well. I want to express my appreciation for candid feedback regarding the delay in completing and so on. It's got clarification on Credit Card Expenses and Unforeseen delays before addressing your concerns, I'd like to explain the circumstances that have contributed to the delay in completing your year end financial statements. Three weeks ago we reached out to you via email requesting clarification on certain items of credit card expenses that appeared to be of a personal nature. Unfortunately, we did not receive a response to that email which has prevented us from finalizing the statements within the originally provided promised four week time frame. A much better answer because we've given some context now and it's explained it in a really good way. I like the way it's worded. I would be happy sending that out. Our Fixed Fee Agreement and Reasons for Fee Increase I understand your disappointment showing empathy with the delay and I want to draw your attention to our original fixed fee agreement which you signed. As per the agreement, we guaranteed completion of the work within four weeks provided we received timely responses to our queries. Regrettably, the lack of response to our previous email has hindered our ability to meet this timeline. I apologize for any confusion caused and take responsibility for not effectively communicating the importance of prompt communication for timely completion and so on. It goes forward, goes on. It's a much better answer than the first one because we've explained the tone of voice and we've explained the outcome. We want the background, the context. So before I hand over to Emily, there's one more prompt and one more thing I want to show you. I've got some other tips and things we might cover at the end if we have time, but I want to really demonstrate now that the critical importance of things like writing tone, giving it the tone of voice that you want to use can make a huge difference to the output. And if you're in academy, we've got training for you and workbooks on all sorts of different instructions you can give to get the right tone, different tones of voice, different writing styles. It's really important when you are creating content, whether it's emails, whether it's marketing, to, to be very clear on the tones, the styles and so on. So I'm going to do one final thing. I'm going to ask it to let me go back. I'm going to say to it now, right at the bottom you can perhaps see it says please rewrite that email, but this time use a humorous writing tone and keep it more concise with less than 300 words. So the last one was 400 roughly. We want less want it to be shorter and more concise and a humorous tone. Now, as you're going to see, this probably won't be the style of writing you would use the tone of writing, but I want you to see and compare and contrast the difference it makes just by simply changing the tone of voice from friendly and empathetic to humorous. So here we go. Subject Oops, we got delayed. Let's get things done right? I hope this email brings a smile to your face despite the not so funny situation we find ourselves in. I wanted to reach out and address your concerns about the delay in completing your year end end of year financial statements and the fee increase. Trust me, we're not fans of delays or unexpected surprises either. Credit Card Expenses Conundrum Remember that the email. Remember the email we sent you a few weeks ago about those credit card expenses? It seems our message got caught in the Bermuda Triangle of email land, never to be seen again. We've been eagerly awaiting for your response, so we can dot the I's and cross the t's on those statements. So if you can dig up that email and shoot us a reply, we're back on track to get things sorted for you. Fee Increase Growth has its price. Literally. Now let's talk about the elephant in the room, the fee increase. We know a 20% jump sounds shocking, like spotting a unicorn in a city park, etc etc now, it's a funny if. If you want to have a humorous style, I think that's really funny. I like that. But it's probably not the style of writing you would use unless it was a very particular type of client relationship you had have. But the point I'm hoping I've made with that is, is that just simply giving a different instruction in terms of the writing tone can have a huge impact on the output that you can get. This is why prompt engineering is so important. The better you start to understand how to create great prompts, you'll get much, much better outcomes. Okay, there's more I could talk about, but I'm conscious that Emily's waiting. She's got some great stuff to share with you. So I'm going to bring Emily on now and she's going to show some magical stuff as well, and then we'll answer those questions. So if you've got questions, put them in the comments, put QQ in front. We'll have 10, 15 minutes for questions. And also, if you've learned something so far, enjoyed it, just click the thumbs up. I would love to know if you've got something of value there. Emily, shall we go across to you?

Yes. Okay. I just wanted to say something first, actually, before I show my examples. Recently, kind of off the back of what you've just taught Mark, is that a client, a member of our academy, they needed to leave, they needed to cancel, and they sent me quite a personal email with the circumstances, and I didn't really know how to respond. And I used ChatGPT to help me craft a really sympathetic, really empathetic email responding to that and expressing how sorry I was for the situation that they were in. And somebody. I explained to that somebody. Doesn't that seem a little bit disingenuous, you know, that you're not giving your own heartfelt response. But I think sometimes, you know, we can't put into words the way that we want to respond in that way. So having something like ChatGPT helps you get that sentiment across by using the. The guidance of ChatGPT's language. So it can help you craft a really great response, a really empathetic response in that scenario with the complaint in a nice way. So, you know, it's not something that's disingenuous, it's just something that helps you put your sentiment into words. So I think that's an important thing to mention there.

So the emails that I've got to show you then are. We teach a lot of marketing in the academies. And one of the things that we teach is to grow your list so that is you capture people's names and emails so that you can continue to market to them. So as part of those processes, we have a series of standardized emails that go out to those people when they join our list. So the first series of emails that I want to show you is what we would call our welcome campaign. So if I hop into ChatGPT.

It looks a little bit stretched or blurry, so hopefully you can see that. Okay.

But let me know in the comments if not, and I'll try and do something to fix it. But what you might send out is when somebody joins your email list, you'll send them a series of welcome emails to introduce them to the business, explain your, you know, who you are and what you do, your vision and your values and those sorts of things. Things, and get them to start to understand what sort of services you might offer and what is basically available to them, because they might have just stumbled across your website and signed up for something, but they don't really know the extent of what you offer. So what I wanted ChatGPT to help me with is to create that series of emails as a standardized set of emails that would just go out to any new person that subscribes to our list. So the first thing that I actually did is I set up a new chat using the web browsing feature. So if I just make my screen a little bit wider, you can maybe see it, but if not at the top, it does say that I'm using the web browsing feature. So what I would just do is I would start a new chat.

Which.

You.

Potentially can't see. And then just up at the top here is the GPT3 or 4, and if I hover over 4 and I scroll down, I can use the web browsing feature. So that's the one that I have used for this particular conversation. And what I did was I gave it the link to our website so that I didn't need to explain who we are and what we do. It can just go and read the website first and then it has all the information and it can put that into a series of emails for me. So I gave it quite a complicated prompt here. First of all, I said, here is our company website and I gave it the link. Can you create a series of welcome emails, three in total, that go out to new subscribers, welcoming them to the business and explaining who we are and what to expect? It should also mention the other places they can connect with us including Facebook and YouTube. The emails should introduce Mark Wickersham and the rest of the team. They need to explain about value, pricing as a concept and also the academy training we offer. Please don't include any prices, just explain what is covered. Please also explain what the subscriber can expect from the email series. We will give updates and podcast episodes, webinar invites and such. Please add anything else that you deem relevant. Please write in a very friendly and conversational tone. I've used the wrong version of right there which is why I need chatgpt.

And each email needs to have an attention grabbing subject line. Feel free to use emojis and please write in the style of Mark Wickersham. So I've added that the tone I want to be friendly and conversational and I want the style to be in the style of Mark Wickersham. And I also did add that bit that I want it to tell me the subject line first and then the body of the email. So I also asked please can you include a PS for each email with a too long don't read kind of recap of the most important details and action items. So that's quite a long prompt. And what it has then done is first of all it's gone onto the website that I asked it to look at. So here we can see where it's clicked. It's clicked on the website that I gave it the link to and then what it's tried to do is it's trying to find the social media links because I just said can you mention Facebook and YouTube? And I didn't give it the links to that. So what it's done is it's typed in Wickersham company social media links, it's typed that into Bing to try and find it. And it's had a couple of goes at doing that. The first click failed and then the next one it typed in Wickersham Co. YouTube channel and it's found the YouTube channel. It didn't manage to find the Facebook page unfortunately, but it has found the YouTube channel without me asking. So it's done a little bit of research, it's gone and read the website and it's then given me a couple of emails. So first of all you can see in bold here at the top is the subject line. So it has done what I asked and I said you can feel free to use emojis and it has done, it's put that in there. So we've got welcome aboard. Let's embark on the journey to better pricing Together. Hello, welcome to Wikishim. My. Well, that's not really how we don't call it Wikisham, but it's kind of taken that as the company name, so. But my name is Mark Wisham, and I'm thrilled to have you join our community. As a professional speaker, author, mentor, and teacher, I've dedicated myself to helping accountants and bookkeepers like you transition to value pricing, win better clients, and increase your firm's. I think that's supposed to be profits. It's done a weird cutoff there, but it's telling who Mark is, what. What he does, what the business is, the vision and values and those sorts of things. Our goal here is to change lives and make a profound difference to our clients. We believe that accountants and bookkeepers should be well rewarded for their hard work. However, many professionals in our field struggle with pricing their services, which is where we come in. Over the next few weeks, you'll receive updates from us, podcast episodes, invites to our webinars, and much more. P.S. in a nutshell, Wickersham is all about helping you to price better, grow your firm, and offer advisory services. So sit tight and let's start this amazing journey together. So a couple of things that I noticed off the back of that is that it didn't put a sign off. So that's something where I need to go back to my prompt and add that element in to my prompt. And I can just do that by. If I just scroll back up to where the prompt is. There is a little button here with an edit icon. And what I tend to do is just click that and add the line in that I missed rather than doing a secondary prompt. But it works in the same way. It uses that extra credit because you only have 25 messages. So if you redo your prompt, then it's still. It's still using that extra message. But it gave me a series of emails here. So we've got a meet the team email, which is one of the things I asked it to do, and it's explaining about our academies, which I asked it to do. So it's given me a breakdown of the things that are available, and then the final email has said, let's stay connected. Join us on Facebook and YouTube. So it's given the Facebook page. It has actually found the correct business page. Now, we normally do connect with a group and it hasn't managed to find that, but it has the correct Facebook page and the correct YouTube channel. So I didn't give it that information, it just found it itself. So I Didn't have to train it to write these emails. I just gave it the website and it could go off and do what it needed to do. So I then did have a little bit more back and forth with it. And I said the second email, it didn't manage to find anything about the team, so I asked if it could go and try and find that information and add those. And then I also said the P.S. the Postscripts, I wanted them to be a little bit more fun and quirky, but also have a call to action in there as well, which might be something like join the Facebook group or book an appointment, whatever that might be. So I just. I've added a little bit more information. I wanted the emails to be a little bit longer. So I gave it approximately 400 words, you know, so you might ask it to do that as, you know, the prompt that Mark did earlier with the format and the style and the length, you know, you might put in the length there as well to say approximately 400 words. And this is just another way of doing that prompt. I just write it all out as sentences like this. But Marks was a bit more organized and say format like this, length like this. But that's kind of how I formatted it. And it wasn't able to find the team. But it's had another go. It's added. I asked it to add personalization. So it's added a little bit here where it's put the subscriber's name and things like that. So it's had another go. It's written a much longer email here. As you can see if I'm just scrolling through, that's quite a long email because I added it, I asked it to make it a little bit longer. And I won't go over all of the things that I then went through with it because it's quite a long conversation and we don't have that much time. But essentially what I asked it to do was just. I just went back and forth with it a little bit and said, actually, can you tweak this part of the email and can you change that bit there? But what I would recommend you do is you use this email that it's generated for you as your starting point and you then go ahead and you edit it and you add your own personal touch to it and, you know, change bits that don't fit your own style, you know, because you can ask it to do a friendly tone or a fun or humorous tone and you might kind of like parts of it, but not it's not entirely the right tone for your business, so you might want to go and tweak it and just make sure that it's suitable for your business as well. So that's the welcome campaign that I asked it to do and I just want to show you this other one. So as I mentioned earlier that one of the things that we kind of teach you to do as part of marketing is you give away a freebie. And that might be an ebook, it might be a spreadsheet, it might be a great checklist. You give something away for free and in exchange you get somebody's name and email address. And as part of that you would then send them a series of follow up emails to say, that's great, you've signed up successfully, here's that piece of content and then maybe a follow up email that says, hey, did you manage to read that piece of content? Etc. So what I did with this particular conversation is I actually enabled some plugins first. So the plugin that I used was Ask your PDF and another one that was called.

Let me just find out what the name of that one was. Show me diagrams. So I'll tell you about that in just a second. So the first thing I did was I gave it the link to the PDF of that piece of content that we were giving away for free. So we have an ebook called how to price Bookkeeping and I gave it the link to that piece of content so that it could read that first and use the content in there to form the emails. So I asked it, can you read this document and then generate an email follow up series for anyone that downloads that eBook? The first shall be to confirm the signup has been successful. I think I asked it to write three emails. I said the first email shall be to confirm the signup has been successful and deliver the content. The second will be a reminder to consume the content and highlight the key information. And the third will be a full summary of the content and a call to action to book an appointment. Each email will need a subject line and a preview sentence. So sometimes when the email lands in your inbox you can see the subject and then you can sort of preview the first sentence and sometimes you can tailor that. So I've asked it to give me that sentence as well. Each email will need to be signed off with Kind regards, Mark Wickersham and each email needs to have a PS that invites the them to join our Facebook group as well. So please use a conversational tone and keep the emails light hearted and friendly. And I think I added this like we are, like we are welcoming the new lead into our community with open arms. Sometimes I feel like you can, you can tell it professional or friendly or something, but it's nice to add a little bit more detail. So it went and it read the document using the plugin. So it, it read it and then it summarized the content of there. It learned the content of what was actually in the ebook and it then gave me these three emails. So based on the the information I asked it to do, the first of all subject line we've got welcome to the community and your ebook access and the preview is your journey to better bookkeeping. Pricing starts here. And it said, we're thrilled to have you. As promised, here's that ebook. This guide will help you improve your profits by pricing more efficiently. And it said here is where you would insert the download link for that.

And it's given this great little line. Remember, knowledge without action is just information. So make sure that you put what you learn into practice. So that was a great little line that it added in there. And then in the PS it said, PS you can join our Facebook group for more insights and discussions. We'd love to have you there. So that's the first email. The second one it has given a highlight of the key points in there. So don't miss out on these key insights. Just checking in to see if you started reading that ebook. It's packed with valuable insights and can transform your business. So here are some highlights that you don't want to miss. And it has taken these highlights straight from the ebook that it has read. So I didn't have to tell it any of this stuff. I just gave it the document and it's read it. And then in the third one, it's done a bit more of a recap. So in the ebook there are five steps to pricing and it's giving you the recap of those five steps there as well. And then it said, are you ready to take a next step? If so, you can book an appointment with us here. And that's where you would insert your booking link. So that's a really great starting point for if you're giving out a freebie and you don't really know how to write the write the emails, you can get it to do that and it's a great starting point for you to at least, you know, get set up with sending some emails out. So that's just a couple of examples of the the emails that you could do. And I do have Loads more to share with you, but judging on the time, I'll pass back to Mark and see if we've got any, any questions to go over.

Hey, that's awesome. Emily and I learned something as well. I've always wanted. I've always wondered what TLDR stands for. I've seen that a lot recently. Now I know too long don't read. So yeah, that was really good. We've got a. I think we've got one or two questions, so not many. So if you've got a question, let us know. One of the thoughts I just pick up on that Emily mentioned and if I can just. I'll just go across to here for a second. So Emily mentioned the different ways that we both write the prompts. And you remember I had this prompt here about writing a better email. The reason why I do it with this style, output type, length, format and so on. It then means you can create a prompt that becomes almost like a template prompt. You could use that every single time. And then all you just got to do is make sure you then feed it the information. It's like a checklist. It just reminds you, okay, what's the output type? It's an email. What's the writing tone? It's going to be humorous. That's the only reason why I write my prompts in that. Not always, but very often in that format. It just helps me to. If you want to create a template prompt, you just reuse over and over. Some of you will have seen. I've done that a few times with some of the business advisory ones like the SWOT analysis. How to do a SWOT analysis. There's a fill in the blanks about the client and the rest of it's all pre done for you.

Emily, I think that there's only a couple of questions so we might get time to talk through a few more things. I know I've got a couple of things I might talk about. You've got something else to show, haven't you? Yeah, but Yui asked a question which actually I think I know the answer to now. I didn't until earlier but it's. What's the. Where is it? I'm curious about Emily's repetitive use of please in her prompts. Does this impact its response? And I do the same thing very often. I'm very polite because I think I'm just a polite person. But I did come across earlier today. Emily, I don't know if you. Whether you agree or not, I did come across today that actually Saying things like that don't really matter because it's not a real human being. Saying please and stuff won't actually make any difference to your prompts. It's just the fact. For me, I think of ChatGPT as another, as just another employee giving instructions because the more you think of it as being a real person, well, just like delegating to a real person, if you don't give them the proper context and the background and explain exactly the format and the output you want, you're not going to get the right results with an employee. And ChatGPT is the same. And so because I tend to have that mindset of they're a person, I tend to be polite, but I don't think it makes a difference. What are your thoughts, Emily?

Yeah, no, I think that's just how the way I speak and I just put the politeness at the front. And if AI ever does turn into Skynet, I want to have made sure that I was being polite to it right from the outset. But yeah, no, I don't think it makes any difference on the response whether you just say can you do this or please make this thing or do this. There's no difference in the response.

No, thank you. So I think we're on the same page there, but I will probably still carry on saying please just because that's what I was. My parents told me to always say please and thank you. So it kind of stuck with me.

And likewise, Sarah Kelly says I like to give it positive feedback when I like something that it does. Maybe that doesn't matter either, but it makes me feel better. I do. But I think it might because I don't know enough about the training of the model, but I guess it's kind of, it's using. I know it has that thumbs up and that thumbs down now, but I wonder whether when you say things like where that impacts on the training. I don't know.

Do you know, Emily, the only thing I tend to do is if it's given me quite a long response and there are big chunks of that that I do like, then I would say that I say I like that response. Can you just change this small part of it so that it doesn't then have another go and re. Redo everything? It just changes that small part that I've asked. But yeah, I just use the thumbs up, thumbs down and give the feedback in there because that's where they actually take the training from. I guess so, yeah.

Yeah. And Sarah Kelly made an interesting point earlier. She said While testing different options in ChatGPT, I asked it to write in a fun tone. Its answer to use a bunch of emojis. I decided fun was not my preferred tone. But then you mentioned emojis later. So one of the things that you, if you are, if you do want emojis, just ask it in your prompt and it will do that. And I do that a lot because I can't. When I'm writing social posts, I find it hard to know which emoji to use. And then trying to find the emojis I find really difficult. I can't be bothered. So if ever I want emojis for a social post, I let ChatGPT do it and I just say, please use appropriate emojis. Any thoughts on that, Emily?

Yeah, I just do the same. I say please use emojis where appropriate and if I don't like the emojis that it's put in there, I'll ask it to change them. Or just say, please don't use emojis and remove those.

Yeah. Okay. Emily, we don't have any other. We don't have any other questions, so we have nine minutes left. I've got plenty of stuff I can show and you probably have as well. I've got, I think, a couple of tips that you could use. Have you got something you could show in about three or four minutes?

Yeah. So I've got a couple of different email templates that you might use. So one of which is if you're asking for something that's a standardized email, that's going to be the same every single time is if you're asking for feedback or maybe referrals or testimonials, because I think it's a really important part of. It's really important to have that as part of your system so that you're always asking for them. So if you have them as standardized emails that go out at certain points, you know, maybe you've been working with somebody for a month and you want to get their feedback at that point, or you've just onboarded them maybe, and you want to get their feedback or ask for a referral, then if you have these standardized emails ready, then it's something that you can make it part of your system. So I asked it to create me a series of emails for those three things. Feedback, referrals, and testimonials. I also actually gave it a choice here so that it could kind of give me a better response as well. So I said, can you create a standard email or email series that I can use to ask for feedback, referrals and testimonials. So I didn't really know is it better to do three separate emails follows or to just put them all in one and do a big long form or something. So I gave it the option and I said if you believe it's better to use a different email for each, then do that. If you believe it's better to have it all in one email, then do that. So I gave it a bit of a choice and then I gave it some context here. I said I'm an accountant and I offer the usual accounting services plus business advisory. I need an email that explains why the feedback, referrals and testimonials are so valuable and encourage people to take time to complete those tasks. If the feedback form requires questions, please also include this after the email as a separate response. Please write with a friendly conversational tone. It should be like talking to a friend. It does not need to be professional. So I normally add that in there because I find that it normally even if I ask it to be friendly, it's still got a really professional tone. And sometimes if I say don't be professional, then it gives a bit more of a friendly it actually does do the friendly tone a little bit better and then you can just take it and add a little bit more professionalism yourself. I just find that it easier to do it that way. So it said absolutely, I'd be happy to help with this. I suggest breaking it up into three separate emails. So that's the way it wants to go. So that's what it's done. This allows you to focus on one specific action item in each email, reducing the chance of overwhelm. So it's kind of given me a bit of a reason why it's done that as well. So we don't want to ask it for all three things in one email because you're less likely to get a response, whereas if you just ask them for one thing, you might be more likely to get some engagement with that. So it's asking it in a quite a friendly tone here. So the subject is a quick favorite. Hello, client's name. I hope this email finds you well. I've been working hard to make sure that our services meet your needs, but I know there's always room for improvement. As someone who's experienced our services firsthand, your input is incredibly valuable. That's why I'm reaching out to ask for your feedback. I've included a link to a brief survey below. It should Take no more than five minutes to complete, but the insights we gain will be invaluable in helping us improve. Your response will remain confidential and will be used solely for the purpose of enhancing ourselves services. So I still think that's quite professional. It's very friendly and low key, but I think sometimes that works better to kind of talk to people on a personal level, on a conversational level, rather than being a bit stuffy and professional with your language. And I think that speaks to people a little bit better. So that's why I always use that tone and say don't write it in a professional tone. It's also said the referral one. Do you know anyone who could use our help? I hope you're having a great day. I was thinking about our recent work together and I wanted to reach out. The highest compliment we can receive is a referral form, a referral from a valued client like you. So it's putting that like kind of flattery in there and saying, you know, we want referrals like you. If you know any colleagues or friends who might benefit, then please pass along that information. So a nice little email and of course you can go back and you can tweak it yourself or you can ask it other prompts. So I think I went and gave it another prompt and said with that second email, can you really flatter the client and say that we want clients exactly like you?

So let me show you that one actually, just quickly. So please add some flattery. We want to work with people like you because of how amazing you are. And please also add a part about if we get referrals, we don't have to do as much marketing. So that's a win win situation because we can spend more time with you. And it redrafted that for as it said, I hope you're having a fantastic day. I was reflecting on our recent work and I wanted to take a moment to express how much I enjoy working with you. Your dedication, insight and enthusiasm truly makes you stand out and it's a pleasure to work with you. This got me thinking, I'd love to work with more people just like you. So it's added that flattery element in there and this part down here as well. It's also said, here's the really exciting part. When we receive more referrals, we're able to spend less time, money and energy on CP seeking out new clients. And this means we can focus even more energy on enhancing our services and providing you with an even better experience. So by helping us you're also helping yourself. It's a win, win situation. So I really like the wording that it's done with that. And that was just two prompts that it got to to generate those three emails. And that's something that you can then add as a standard system in your practice where you send that email out on a regular basis.

Awesome. That's really good. There's a couple of questions come in. Tiffany and Sarah got questions and that might take us up to the end of time. Tiffany said. If I could pull up Tiffany's question for you, Emily, she said. Emily mentioned the plugin. Show me diagrams. What does that plugin do?

Yes. I didn't show that earlier, did I? So it was on. Let me just flick back over to here to show you which campaign it was on. So this plugin.

It does a variety of different diagrams. So the example I used here was for those emails that somebody would receive. If you want to see how that looks in a bit of a flowchart, I asked it, can you make me a flowchart showing the experience of the lead as they download the ebook and receive all three emails? And it's made me this chart here. So here's the lead. They download the ebook and they get the first email, which was confirmation and delivery. Then they wait a day, which it doesn't have the information. So it's made that up. I could say, oh, it's actually only an hour or whatever in email to reminder and highlights. And then after a few days the third email and it's given me the option so I can view this diagram in a new tab or I can edit this diagram online if I want to and open this up in a different window and edit it, edit it from there. And it also gives me this, you know, if I want to improve the diagram, then I can use this phrase show ideas, or I can look at different types of diagrams that I might like to use by going on explore diagrams. And that will just show me a variety of different ways that I can kind of format that, that, that flowchart here so that it can look slightly different. But that's just a, a really quick example of how you might use that. And there's probably a million other ways that you can make use of that.

Yeah, Emily did a session a few weeks back on plugins, which is, there's some really powerful plugins in there. But also I think we said at the time it's a bit like the explosion of the App Store many years ago when Apple launched the iPhone There's a lot of plugins on there. Most of them are actually rubbish or waste of time or not very useful and we've spent hours going through trying to find out what are the right, what are the best plugins. There's some amazing ones. So we will do a session sometime soon for you on what are the best plugins for accountants and bookkeepers. We'll probably do that later in the summer, Emily, because I think there's so many coming out. One final question and we'll wrap up. Sarah said. Sarah Kelly said, do you have a recommendation or a list of the recommended lengths for emails? I really struggle with putting word lengths in prompts. I always make them too long or too short and the answer is no. An email just needs to be long enough to get across all the key points. However, this is what you could do, Sarah, is if you create an email yourself perhaps and you think, yeah, that's a bit long, put it in ChatGPT and say, could you please summarize this email or write it in fewer words but still maintain the important points and it's usually pretty good at reducing something to us and still getting the main points across. You might need to do the prompt a couple of times, but you will probably find you could easily get a thousand word email down to 500 word email and still get the key stuff in there. And also my final point is, because I thought it was going to be a different question when it first came in, when I talked about things like writing tones and writing styles and so on and different formats and lengths and outputs. If you're in the academy, as part of our training on ChatGPT, we've got workbooks that have got, for example, 20 different writing tones so you can use as a checklist. So if you've got the prompt I showed you, which was in this sort of format, armed with a template prompt like this and then a checklist of all the different things like writing tones, writing styles and stuff that'll make your life much easier, creating the perfect prompts for your needs. So check out those workbooks if you're in the academy. Right, we are one minute over, Emily, so we probably need to bring things to a halt. I don't know when the next live stream is going to be. Normally we've got a date to tell you, but I'm going to the UK for two weeks tomorrow morning and then I get back and Emily's away as well, so I don't know how we'll fit that in. But at some point we will do a live stream sometime in early July. If we can just watch this space, we'll either send you an email if you're in the academy, or we'll put a post in the Facebook group. So make sure you're in that and we'll have a and let us know in the Facebook group if there's anything else you want us to teach you. With ChatGPT, let us know what you want to know. What would be useful? So we could look at plugins, but there's a million other things we could talk about. You let us know what would be most useful to you and if you've enjoyed this session, if you've learned something, give it a thumbs up, please. I'd love it. Tell me in the chat, what's the best thing you've learned? What's the best thing you've learned in the comments? Because we're going to play out some music now. It'll give me and Emily just a few minutes just to read through and see what you say. I will see you all soon. Bye for now.

He didn't love me right he told me I was blind but I never really wanted to listen.

You have been here since day one see my ups and downs.

Never left my side once you stuck all around.

I knew it was you you you have been here all along you have always been the one you who knew it was you you have always been the one that.

You have been here.

I never saw the signs it didn't treat me right but I just couldn't let him go you waited patiently you waited for me he showed me what it was too long.

You have been here since day one.

Never left my side once you st around.

I knew it was you you have been here all along you have always been the one you who knew it was you you have always been the one.

You have been here since day one.

I.

Never left my sister.