Why People Fail at Personalizing ChatGPT for Emails, and How You Can Succeed!

Before we dive into the content.

I talk a lot about ChatGPT and AI in these sessions because.

It'S having a huge impact on our profession, on the accounting profession. It will have a big impact on our profession and also our lives generally. We are finding AI is becoming more prevalent in what we do. And there were some big news items that have taken place just very recently. There seems to be so much happening all the time. In fact, there's new stuff every single day. But let me pick out on what I think is the two biggest things that have happened recently. So just a few weeks back, and this is probably two or three weeks old now, perhaps even four weeks, I'm losing track of time. Three or four weeks ago, OpenAI who created Chat GPT, they released their latest and most powerful model, ChatGPT 440. The O stands for Omnimodal ChatGPT 440. It's an extraordinary model, does amazing things. But here's the most interesting thing about their announcement. It's is that a lot of the capabilities that they that are in that particular model were things that before were only available to people on the ChatGPT plus or Teams plan. In other words, only available if you paid for those things. When they brought out 4.0 a short while ago a few weeks back, they introduced a lot of the most powerful features into the free plan. So the great news is, is that anything I show you about what you can do with ChatGPT, you don't have to pay for it because all the great stu is in the free plan. And that then raises the question, is it still worth having a plus account? The answer is yes, because with a plus account or teams account, which we have, you do get much more usage. You can use it much more. And today, for example, I spent the whole morning creating prompts and doing some stuff with it. I've been on it pretty much for hours and it's not yet given me the warning message that I've reached my limit. So I think it's worth getting the plus account. But nevertheless, if you're on a free account, it can do some extraordinary things. Okay. Second big news is I did a live stream back in February. It was the first live stream of the year where I talked about what I see as being the future of the accounting profession, particularly in 2024, but actually going forward beyond that as well. And if you've not caught that, you'll definitely want to watch it, because in there I talked about why I think bookkeeping and other compliance work will disappear. In just a few years time. And I talked about the three things that you need to must do to future proof your firm. So if you've not, if you didn't watch that one, it's back in February, it's on my YouTube channel, just go to the tab that says live. It's one of the live sessions. But one of the things I said when I was giving my predictions back in February and I've said many times over the last six or seven months is that I predict that by the end of this year the biggest player in AI in, in AI will be Apple. Apple have been very, very quiet and we then saw this week they had their worldwide developer conference. I don't know if you caught that or not, but what's coming out this year in Apple is extraordinary. There's some extraordinary things it's going to do. And one of the things that was really interesting is throughout the whole of last year there was lots of.

Predictions about and rumors about Apple developing their own large language model. But then a couple of months ago there was a rumor emerged that actually what they might do is partner with somebody else, possibly ChatGPT. And as we found out this week that has been confirmed is that Apple are doing something they've never done before is they're taking a third party system, ChatGPT and they're integrating it into Apple, which is really interesting and it's really interesting because it's got Microsoft really worried. Interestingly, Microsoft are a major shareholder in OpenAI and as you probably know, if you're a Microsoft user, they have their copilot product which you can subscribe to and you get chatgpt inside copilot. But the interesting thing is if you're an Apple customer like I am, you're going to get chatgpt inside a whole bunch of Apple products and you won't have to pay any more for it. At least that's what I understand is the case. So I think this year is going to be really interesting. Watch Apple. If you are an Apple fan like I am, I think AI is going to get really, really fascinating.

In how it becomes much, much easier for us to use for so many tasks. One last quick thing that I just thought was interesting, I don't know if you know, I've talked several times before that one of the founders of OpenAI back in 2015 was Elon Musk. Elon left in 2018 and at the time citing that he wants to spend more time focusing on Tesla. That was having some challenges in 2018. Anyway, he's had regular fallouts with OpenAI. He's not been happy that OpenAI went from. OpenAI went from being a not for profit to a profit company. And back in February he launched a legal claim. There's been a huge legal battle going on between elon Musk and OpenAI and actually apparently this week, if I think it was today or yesterday, he announced he has suddenly dropped the legal claim. Why? I have no idea. But it's just interesting when you get really into the AI world, you realize there's a huge number of soap operas going on with all sorts of interesting stuff. Anyway, that's some of the latest news. But let's now get into what we really want to talk about today, which is of course how do we personalize ChatGPT for emails? Before I do that, let me just check to see if there's any more comments I should refer to. So Catherine's mentioned that it is QB Connect in in Toronto on the 25th. 25th of June. Yeah, that's a shame. Unfortunately there are conferences all of the time at the moment. It seems somewhere in the world I think the week before that we have scale new heights. We have ZeroCo in the UK right now. So whenever we do the business advisory masterclass, it's going to clash with something. It's a shame. Darlene is here. Hi there Darlene. Good to see you. From Alberta.

Dawn had a problem getting the ebooks but Sarah will probably have seen that. She will help you out.

Karen says. I thought you'd be excited about Apple AI and ChatGPT development. Yes, Karen is. I know Karen well. She always shows up to these sessions. Yes, I am very excited about.

What is happening in the world right now. Okay, let's get started. How to personalize ChatGPT for emails. And this is. I thought I'd cover this because it's one of the most common questions I get from accountants and bookkeepers is they spend. You spend hours of time dealing with emails. In fact, I was having an event in Portugal just recently and somebody said that they get hundreds if not thousands of emails in their inbox to deal with. It's a huge problem for many people with inbox overload. So how can we speed that process up? Well, one of the things we could do is use something like ChatGPT or other large language models. Much of what I'll talk about today will apply if you prefer Gemini or if you prefer Claude or different large language model. I'm going to focus on ChatGPT as I always do, simply because it is the best model. Every time they run tests, it is the best model. There was a brief moment a month or so ago when Claude, Claude's new product was or anthropic new product. Claude was performing better than ChatGPT4. But then within a week or so, ChatGPT released 4.0, which is back to number one. It's the best model, so I always focus on that. But if you prefer Gemini, if you prefer Claude, if you prefer a different one, much of what I'll teach you today will be equally applicable. So how can we use these large language models to save us time with answering emails? And what I'm going to talk about today is we're going to look at.

The biggest problem I think people have with things like answering emails is the reason why it's not giving us great results is it's not necessarily answering them in the way that we would write. It's not our writing style. And so I want to talk a little bit about why ChatGPT might not be echoing your tone accurately. And we'll talk about a process to run through that you can go through so you can start to get it to mirror your communication style better, which I think is critically important, because once you have trained ChatGPT in the way that you like to write, not only can we apply that to responding to emails, but actually so many more things, so many more things that you might use ChatGPT for, like writing reports for clients. There are so many written things that we do, so very important to train it in your writing style. And once you've done that, you only have to do it once. You can do that over and over again. I'm going to talk about the process to go through, how to train it in your writing style. We'll then look at a quick reminder or an overview of how then we can unlock the power of custom instructions. Now that is, I think, unique to ChatGPT. I'm not sure what the equivalent is in Gemini right now, but a really powerful came out last August, I think August 2023, and is a really, really powerful feature, one of my favorites. And then what we'll do is, having done that, we'll then look at how can we construct a prompt that can really help to answer emails, craft really good emails in our writing style, in the framework, the structure that we want. So that's what we've got to cover a lot of stuff in the session today. So let's start off first of all with let's think about how do we Train large language models in our writing style. And I guess we have to take a step backwards first and ask ourselves the question, well, what is writing style? What is writing style? And there are a number of elements or components that make up our unique individual style of writing.

So the main ones are, is our voice, Our voice is the unique way that we sound.

In writing. Just like we are unique when we speak, it's the same when we write. And so you'll have a particular style. It might be, for example, a very professional style of writing, very common for accountants, bookkeepers. It might be more of an educational style of writing. So you'll have a style that's yours. Now don't worry, don't worry if you don't know what your style is because what you'll find is that AI will tell you what it is and I'll tell you how to that in a second. So hang on, so there's your writing style or your voice. Then you have the tone. And the tone, the tone is extremely important. That really is, that impacts on the clarity of your message, how people receive it. It's the emotional side of things. And the tone could be, you might have for example, a very formal tone of writing. It may be, I know some old fashioned accountants are very formal in the way they write their letters and their emails. Or it might be that you have a more a fun tone, perhaps a humorous tone. You will have a tone of voice that you use. And so you want to make sure that that is reflected in the writing. Similar to tone is the mood, the emotional atmosphere. You'll also have a sentence structure and a transition style. What I mean by that is. Well, some people write long paragraphs, I write extremely short paragraphs. Sometimes I have paragraphs that are just a single sentence. That's my sentence structure. And we also have linked to sentence structure is a transition style. So that's the style of writing and the words and the phrases that we use when we transition in a piece of writing from one idea to another idea. So I tend to use phrases, words like let me explain, I might make a statement, for example, and then I'll have a single paragraph with a single, let me explain. And then I'll go into explaining what I mean. And so that's one of the ways that I in my writing will transition from one idea to another. Then we have our rhythm and our pacing. So just like verbal communication, some people speak, some people speak with a monotone and they don't change whatsoever. And some people have a rhythm, their tone goes up, down, their volume changes. And we have that in our writing style as well. And what I mean by that is it may be that your rhythm and pacing is lots of short sentences, short points. It may be slower with longer sentences, longer paragraphs. It may be that you have a mix of that and have variation in the way that you write. Then we have something called diction. Diction is the word choice. What sort of words do you use and what words do you avoid? And one of the interesting things about ChatGPT is very often when somebody does use ChatGPT to create something, and I see this all the time. I see people putting posts on social media, I see blog posts and things, and I can tell when something's written by ChatGPT because there is a certain word choice that is used a lot. For example, ChatGPT will often use words like this is a game changer or this is going to revolutionize your business. There are certain words that keep coming up over and over again that ChatGPT likes, which I don't like. I think they're overused words. I would choose different words. So we all have our word choice. The words that we use, you might have high technical words or you might speak in plain English, simple words when you're explaining things like tax concepts. And then we have our signature styles. These are the things that are unique to each of us. There are certain little things that we, little quirks that we might have when we write. I guess if we think about the younger generations now with, with social posts and direct messaging, they often use abbreviations like lol, perhaps WTF and stuff like that. And perhaps that's part of your writing style. Perhaps you use that kind of text language as part of your signature style. Okay, so that's the first thing we have to do. We have to understand what do we mean by writing style. That's the first thing. And if that sounds all very complicated, please do not worry because it's actually really simple to use ChatGPT or any large language model to analyze your writing. So this is the process that you go through. This is what you want to do. If you haven't done this so far, you want to first of all find some samples of your writing. Find some samples. It might be an email that is typical of your writing style. It might be that you've written a blog post that's very typical of your writing style. It could be that you've written an e book, you'll have written something. It could be a report to a client and so find Some examples of your writing style and I strongly recommend you find three. It could be more, but three, not one. Go for three. I'll tell you why in a second. Find three things that represent your writing style. But also then when you choose those three things, I would recommend you aim to find something that's somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 words. So that could be a report you've written for a client, if you've written a blog post, if you have written an ebook, if you've written a long email, I would aim to have something that's a longer word limit. Now it doesn't want to be more than 4,000 because you will find that large language models have what's called a context window that if you give it too much stuff, if you, if I was to feed it, for example, the text of one of my books, then because of the context window, it won't read it all. It probably won't give you as good a result as feeding it a chapter. So you don't want to be too long, that's why 4,000 words, perhaps maximum, but don't be too short either. If you feed it one of your favorite text messages, it's probably not really going to be has got enough information in it. So look for something ideally 2, 3, 4,000 words. If you haven't got anything that long, if you've just got emails that are 500 words, blog posts that are 500 words, that's fine, start with that. But if you can find some things that are longer, then that's better. So why three? Why three? Because when we write yes, we will have, there will be things in the way that we write something like a report to a client that will be representative of a type of our writing style. But if we also looked at something else, perhaps a long email that you sent to a client, there may be elements in there that are not reflected in the report you wrote. And so.

If you feed ChatGPT or Large Language Model 3, it's going to then give you a better representation of what your writing style is. So what you want to do is you want to find three examples and then what you want to use is a prompt that will analyze the samples. It's a really simple prompt that you can give ChatGPT that basically is this is an example of my writing style. Please analyze it and it will analyze it and it will give you a response and then you do a follow up one. Here's another example. Analyze this one now and give me and explain the writing style and you do that three times. That's the first step in the process. And at this point, let me just see if I can find an example of when I did this myself. I should have had this to hand already, but I should be able to find it. Okay, so is this the one? Looks like it. Let me just.

Let me pull this up. I know some people listen to this on the podcast, so if you are a visual person, go and check out my live stream and you will find it there. So very quickly I have a simple prompt. You have expertise in linguistics, natural language processing, and prompt engineering. Your task is to convert the provided text into an elaborate style guide. This guide will serve as a blueprint for creating fresh content on a distinct topic while maintaining the original style and demonstrated in the text. Pay special attention to aspects like. And these are the things we've talked about, the voice, the tone, the mood, the sentence structure, the transition style, the rhythm and pacing, the diction, descriptive detail, and signature styles. We've talked about those already, and I'm particularly interested in the stylistic nuances that set this author's writing apart. Identify those elements that could serve as indicators of this author's distinctive writing style. Let me know when you're ready for the text. Now, that last sentence, just so you know, is I like to, in a long prompt like that, ask it to let me know when it's ready because then I know it's understood it. And then the second one I just dragged across in my case, a book extract. And it analyzed, analyzed it, looking at all those things we've talked about, voice tone, and so on. Then I just added uploaded something else into Chat GPT. And by the way, if you're using. If. If you're on the free accounts and you are using chat GPT4O do make sure that you're using 4.0.

I've noticed the 3.5. Yeah, 3.5, which was what you used to have to use if you're on the free account, did not support attachments. But when they brought out 4o in May 2024, which is on the free plan as well, it means that you can upload attachments. Really powerful. You just drag your piece of writing in there. So all I did was then say, here's a different piece by the same author, I want you to perform the same evaluation. And it did a similar style response. And then I did it a third time. I think this might have been a research report. And I did the same prompt. So I did it three times. I got it to create three different summaries of my writing style. So then what I did is having done that, and I said, ideally three, if you've got only one or two, that's fine, but three is better because each one will be subtly different. They should be similar, but there'll be some small differences. So what I then did is I then cut and pasted each of those into a Word document, into one Word document. And then I just had one final.

Prompt where I said, let me just pull it up. Where I said.

Let me just check the right one.

You're an expert in linguistics, natural language processing, and nonfiction writing and prompt engineering. Your task is to convert the following analysis of an author's writing into an elaborate, detailed style guide. The guide will serve as a blueprint and so on. I just uploaded that and it combined everything into a much more detailed style guide. And that's what you need to create. You want to create a writing style guide, you only have to do it once, and then you can use that forever going forwards. So I put in a Word document, I tied it up. It's a two page writing style guide for my style of writing. It's on my desktop. It's on my desktop right now somewhere. And you can then use that whenever you do a brand new chat. If you want to create a research report, an email to a client, you can drag that in now. And part of the prompt you can say the writing style should reflect the attached writing style guide. And it will go and read the writing style guide every time you do a brand new prompt. And it will take that into account when it creates the response, your email, your report, whatever it might well be. So that's step one of what I want to teach you today is firstly, you want to make sure you have a writing style guide. Now the next thing we can then do is we want to use that. And one of the ways that we can use it with ChatGPT is I mentioned earlier, we had this amazing feature came out in August of 2023, which is custom instructions. And custom instructions is essentially the.

Systems prompt that you can create. There are, whenever you use a large language model, there is a systems prompt. The systems prompt is the prompt that has been given that everything you do is behind the scenes. It's hidden. In the case of ChatGPT, there is a systems prompt which it uses to guide the way that it answers your questions. And then you can create your own systems prompt which you design, which will be used for every single chat, because each chat is independent. So let me show you that all you have to do with.

All you have to do is they always move this about, but at the moment they've moved to the top. Right. Your settings. And if you go into your settings in ChatGPT, and this is the same on the free account you want to look for, customize ChatGPT. I think it used to say custom instructions. It now says Customize ChatGPT. And when you click on that, you will see custom instructions. And there are two boxes here of up to 1500 characters. The first box is what would you like ChatGPT to know about you to provide better responses? Now, I'm not going to talk about that box in today's session. I did do a session on custom instructions before you can go and check that out. It's the second box that I want to refer to. The second box is how would you like ChatGPT to respond? And so this is where you can give it, tell it how you want it to. The style of writing, for example. And so one of the things that you could do is you could take that writing style guide that you've created and you can put it into box two. Now, the only thing you have to be aware of is at the moment in ChatGPT, each of those two boxes is limited to 1,500 characters. So if you've created a writing style guide and it's much greater than that, you'll need to create a 1500 character version of that to put into this box. And when you put that into the box, what happens is every time you start a brand new chat, it will apply your custom instructions. It will apply, it will know how you would like ChatGPT to respond. Okay, I'm going to turn this off for a second for a reason that will become apparent later because I'm going to demonstrate something. I'm turning my, my custom instructions off, which means it'll ignore all of that.

Okay.

That's how you can create custom instructions. So once you've done your writing style guide, you can use it in one of two ways. One is you can build it into your custom instructions. And therefore, your writing style is always going to be used for every future prompt. And you can also use it as a document that you can give to very specific chats. So, and that might be particularly useful if your writing style guide is much more than the 1500 characters. Okay. And there is a third use of it. There is a third use which is really powerful. And I'm not going to go into it today. I touched on it in my Last livestream. One of the things I particularly love about ChatGPT, and it's unique to ChatGPT, is they have GPTs. They brought GPTs out in November of 2023. It's my favorite feature of ChatGPT. GPTs are if you like a standard prompt that you can build, that you can use over and over again. And the great thing about GPTs is you can give them, feed them a knowledge base of up to 20 documents at the moment. And so that might be your writing style guide. So I have a GPT in my business called Email Responder and my email responder GPT has a prompt of how to respond to emails and it already has preloaded my writing style guide guide. So when I respond to an email, I just go into the GPT and I give it a copy of the email that I've received and I press a button and it pretty much answers it straight away. I have to give it a couple of little bits of information and it answers the emails. It's amazing. It saves so much time. We're not going to go to GPTs today. Check out my last live stream where we looked at GPTs. But what I want to talk about now and by the way, if you've got questions, remember to ask questions. But what I want to talk about now is let's now, having got our writing style sorted, how do we now use ChatGPT to answer our emails? And I'm going to go into a prompt fairly soon. We're going to look at a prompt that you can use for answering emails. And what I'm going to particularly focus on today is how do we reply to customer emails? And we're going to look at an example of how you might respond to a customer email. But there are all sorts of other types of emails that you could create standard prompts for. You could create standard prompts for how you deal with inquiries from prospects you could create. You might have a different system for creating brand new emails or perhaps creating email templates as part of your standard operating procedures. Or perhaps you could create a system for dealing with emails to arrange meetings, or perhaps marketing emails. There are so many types of emails that we deal with and we could create different standard prompts for different types of emails. What I'm going to focus on today is a standard prompt that you can use for replying to customers, for replying to customer questions. So what are some of the things that we need to do when we are creating a prompt to answer emails? What we want to do is provide it with a template or even examples. When you create prompts, giving it a template will give you a much, much better result because we need to be able to explain to ChatGPT things. Things like how do we write our subject lines? So in addition to your style of writing, how do you create subject lines? What is the subject line? Do you have a process for that? How do you greet people? Do you say hi Bob, hello Bob, good morning Bob, good afternoon or even perhaps the old fashioned Dear Bob. So we need to make sure we train ChatGPT on how we greet people. The opening, the opening and then how do we open our emails? Do you get straight to the point? Do you have a friendly kind of how are you start to it? How do you normally start your emails? And also how do you structure them? Do you tend to have for example headings in your emails for the main points? Do you tend to like books points? How do you sign off your emails? What do you tend to have as your final sentence? Do you have a call to action? Do you often. Do you say give me a call if you want any help? How might you round off an email? What might be the close? Do you say best regards, best wishes, yours sincerely? What is your sign off? Do you have a PS in your emails? And if you have a ps, what does that look like? So what you want to do is think about those things and create a template. Because when you give ChatGPT a template to follow, you will get a much better result. What's a template look like? A template could look something like this. Here's a template and you'll see how I've applied this in a prompt in just a few minutes. So this one says subject and it then says insert a suitable subject line for the email or insert a captivating subject line that reflects the content of the email. Then it's hello, first name. That's how I tend to use hello, you might be good morning, good afternoon, hi, whatever it might well be. And then you might say for example, I want a friendly and empathetic opening sentence. Or perhaps you might want to start with a brief introduction to mention the purpose of the email. Or perhaps you begin with a polite and professional greeting, addressing the client's name if possible. Or, or perhaps you introduce yourself and your role in the accounting firm to establish credibility and context. There are different ways that you could introduce yourself or start off the email and so explain that. Also things like use headings for each main point. Do you use headings? And you'll notice the toodle hashtags that's what's called, that's called markdown language. That's two hashtags means heading style2. And chatgpt understands that. You'll see that in a practical demonstration. In a second.

End the email with a call to action and a friendly and positive close that leaves a positive impression that might be what you have in your template. Or perhaps it's express gratitude for the client's patience, understanding and continued trust in your firm. Perhaps that's how you close your emails. Or perhaps it's to reiterate your commitment to providing exceptional service and satisfaction. Or perhaps you offer contact information or, or an invitation to reach out for further clarification or assistance. And then I tend to use best wishes, but you might have best regards. What's your sign off? So that's what a template can look like. And so in a little while I am going to, I'm going to show you that in practice, we're going to go into ChatGPT and I'm going to show you a standard prompt that you can use to answer emails in your writing style and we'll build the template into the prompt that'll pull everything together so this all makes sense. Before I do that.

I'm fairly sure that because you're here you are interested in ChatGPT. I love ChatGPT, so I just want to have a quick break to tell you about something that I am particularly excited about.

And I did press the wrong button there. I want to take a very quick break from this live stream just to tell you about something that I think is particularly important right now. I am Mark Wickersham, fca. I'm the founder of the Value Pricing Academy, but also I'm the creator of a course called ChatGPT for accountants and Bookkeepers. And this is a course that allows you to get much, much more out of ChatGPT and save you hours of time every week. It's a two hour course so you can get through it quickly. And in those two hours I'm going to go deep into how you can use it for time efficiency, how you can use it to save hours of time. I share with you practical examples throughout the course. I give you practical use cases, ways that you can use it, and also we talk about this important topic of prompt engineering. I show you how to do things like research and analysis using ChatGPT, how we can use it for text and data analysis, how we can use it for creating our systems, our standard operating procedures, our templates, how we can use it if you're the owner of an accounting firm for content marketing and SEO optimization, ways to use it for growing your accounting firm. It's two hours of video training and it also comes with 80 pages, four workbooks. It's in four videos of 30 minutes. Each one comes with a workbook totaling 80 pages with explanations, ideas, all the prompts that I share, all the use cases are in the workbook so that you can start using it straight away to save hours of time. Now you may believe, of course, that a system like this is going to cost you a lot of money. But I decided I want to keep this really, really affordable for you because I want to help you save hours of time. It should probably be $500 and that is definitely the value that you will get from it. But the great news is it's just a one time payment of just 50 bucks, that's all. And your total investment in that includes the two hours of training by me over four 30 minute videos, plus the 80 page workbook for just $50. So I'm going to put the link into the description or the chat. Somewhere on this page you'll see that link. When you click on the link, you'll go to a page that looks like what you can see on the screen. You go and browse through it and see more information about what you'll get. And when you click on the yellow button, then you will be able to get, you will be able to get access to it straight away. And when you do, I strongly recommend that you go straight to page 14 of the second workbook where I go into a prompt engineering formula, a little framework that you can use to help you to create better prompts. Anyway, go into that now while the price is still just 50 bucks. And now let's go back to the live stream. Okay, so let's now get really practical with this and pull it all together. And I've got, I've got a fictional email that we'll use that is a client complaint, which is perhaps a common thing that we sometimes struggle with. When a client writes to us, perhaps they've got a complaint, a customer, a complaint. Sometimes we can spend a lot of time thinking about how we're going to craft that response and how we're going to use just the right words for it. So let me first of all pull up an email, we'll look at the email and then we'll go into ChatGPT. I'll show you the prompt that we can use. So let's imagine that we get an email from somebody. It's a complaint and perhaps you've had some of these in the past. It's. It says Subject Concerns Regarding Completion of NDVA Financial Statements and Fee Increase 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 tax filing and business planning. Furthermore, I was disheartened to discover that the fee quoted for this year's services 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 is necessary to understand the reasoning behind the substantial adjustment, et cetera, et cetera. There's some more stuff there, and you've perhaps seen emails like that from clients before and you're thinking, how do I answer that? And you could probably easily find an hour, even perhaps an hour and a half goes by trying to craft just the right response for that email. So how can we use Chat GPT to speed up the process? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just go into ChatGPT and I'm going to start a brand new prompt. Let me just pull it up. So the prompt is actually, let's do it. Let's do a bad prompt. First I'm going to give you a bad prompt and then I'm going to show you a much, much better prompt. Because prompt engineering is so important, the way that we craft our responses, our prompts. So we could simply go with and I'm going to cut and paste in here. I am 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 and then what I will do is I will grab that email that I've had and what we can do is we can take the email and we can add that in control paste. There we go. And the owner of an accounting firm I wanted to create a suggested email response, the following complaint my accounting firm has received from a client and then I just pasted in the email and let's see how what it comes up with. So here we go. You can see 4o is so, so crazy fast.

And so if we look at this, I'm not going to read it all, but let's just read the first bit. Good morning Richard. Thank you for your email and for bringing your concerns to my attention. I truly value your loyalty and the trust you have placed in our firm over the past six years. I sincerely apologize for the delay and any inconvenience it's caused you. Now that's not a bad start. ChatGPT is pretty good. Even with a relatively poor prompt, we can get a fairly good answer. But where the problem really comes here is, well firstly it might not be your style of writing which we talked about, but also when it then comes up with suggested responses, it will be fairly generic because it doesn't really know the full circumstances. So it says, firstly, regarding the delay in completing your end of year financial statements, I understand how important these documents are for your financial planning and tax filing. The delay is due to unforeseen complexities that arose during the preparation process. Our team is diligently working to ensure the accuracy and thoroughness of your statements and we are prioritizing their completion. That's not something I would say, and it's not really saying anything, is it? It's not really giving a reason for why. It's very bland, very generic. It's not badly written, but I wouldn't write that. And it's not really saying anything useful to the client. Secondly, regarding the increase in fees, I understand your surprise and concern. The 20% increase reflects several factors including adjustments for inflation, increased regulatory requirements and enhancements to the service we provide. Again, very, very bland. It's not really explaining what's going on. So we'd probably have to end up doing quite a lot of editing to this particular email to make it a use words that we would use because I would not say our team is diligently working and also just to make it really more appropriate to the reasons. So it's okay that it's not bad, but we'd have to spend a lot of time editing and we don't want to spend time editing. So let's redo that. I'm going to hit the I'm going to do a brand new chat and I'm going to post a different prompt and as you are about to see it's longer. Control C. Here we go. It's longer. But one of the things I'm a big fan of is systemizing things, automating things, having templates. So one of the things you want to start developing is when you, when there's certain things that you do over and over again of which answering client emails is probably one of them, you want to figure out the right prompt and make it a template so you can use it repeatedly. So here's the prompt. It says you are a client service manager skilled in writing email responses to clients. Your task is to write an email response to an email context. Here is some background information and points to be made in your response. So you should always give it context. And so you would certainly want to insert something there. I'm going to do that in a second. I'll tell you what the context is in a bit for this in this case. But then you also want to have and tell ChatGPT the email format. So I talked about having a template and we looked at this earlier. A subject hello, first name friend in empathetic sentence, opening sentence. So I've given it a template to use and then for writing style, I said I have attached a writing style guide. Read it so you understand my writing style. Use this to guide you in my preferred writing style. Let me know when you're ready by saying, I'm ready to answer the email. Let me have it now. And I will give the email that requires response. So all I will do now is very simple. I will just drag across from my desktop my writing style guide. I talked about how important it is to create a writing style guide. And what this prompt is doing is essentially saying to the client, to ChatGPT, you're a client services manager, but before you answer the email, make sure you understand my writing style guide. So when I hit that, it's going to, well, it's Reddit, it knows my writing style. I'm ready to answer the email. Let me have it now. So now we just get the email that we've got from our client. Let me just grab that quickly. Control C, Control V. I'm just pasting that in. So now I've put the email in here.

See what it does. Oh, hang on, I forgot something. I missed something out really important. So I'm just going to abandon that and go into a brand new chat very quickly. Let's go back to that prompt. I forgot to put the context in. Okay, so it's not going to give a very good response there. Let me just put that back in that first prompt, I said to you, you need to give it context. You have to give it some guidance as to how to answer it. And so.

Let me put in the context for this one. So what I'm telling it is we emailed the client three weeks ago 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, provide the client provide the answers to our questions in a timely manner. Also, it goes on to say, we put that the price. The client agreed to a 20% price rise because. And we said that was because they've started trading with overseas companies and so there's now more work to do, such as reconciling transactions in multiple currencies. So I've just given it some quick context for that. Let me now put in the writing style guide as well and then let me hit the button here. So it's going to say, yep, I'm now ready to answer the email. So now I'll grab the email.

And copy that into here. And so it's now going to answer that email, having got A my writing style guide, B, it's got the framework of how I do emails and it's also got some context. So I'm not going to read all of this because we have only nine minutes left and we have a couple of questions, but here we go. Hello, Richard. That's how I'd start my emails. Thank you for reaching out and expressing your concerns. I truly understand your frustration and disappointment regarding delay and fee increase. We value your loyalty and appreciate your patience. That's similar to before. That's fine. It shows empathy. Then we've got headings now. Delay in completing the financial statements. Firstly, I want to sincerely apologise for the delay in delivering your financial statements. Our initial promise was based on the assumption that all necessary information would be provided promptly. Three weeks ago, we reached out to request clarification on some credit card expenses that appeared to be personal in nature. Unfortunately, we did not receive a response which has prevented us from completing your financial statements within the agreed time frame.

I would happily write that that's my writing style. That makes sense to me. Fee increase Explanation regarding the fee increase, it's indeed higher than last year by 20%. This adjustment reflects the significant growth in your business over the past two years, including new transactions with overseas companies. The additional work required to reconcile transactions in multiple currencies and adhere to new requirements has contributed to the increase. Next steps to expedite the completion of your financial statements, could you please provide the requested clarification at your earliest convenience? Once we receive this information, we can finalize your statement swiftly. That's a much better email response and much more specific than the previous one. It's nicely laid out. It's better writing style it uses. I probably would not need to edit that much at all. Whereas the first one would require a lot of editing. It was too bland, too generic. Okay. That's how you can build a standard prompt for answering emails. And once you've mastered that at the next level, you could then even build a GPT to do it, which will then make that even quicker still. Okay, let's wrap up. We only have seven minutes left. I said there's a lot of stuff to cover today. I did see, I did see earlier. At least one question coming in. I'm going to answer questions in a second. Just a couple of things before we do. If you found something valuable in that, can you do two things? Could you click the like button? Please hit the thumbs up the like, whatever button it is, wherever you are, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube. Also, I'm going to play it with some music in about seven minutes after the questions. And if you could just let me know in the chat, what's the best thing you've learned today? What was, what was what we talked about today? What's the thing that stood out for you? What are you going to do as a result of today? Are you going to create your writing style guide? Is it creating a Starting to use ChatGPT more? Let me know what you've learned, what you're going to do different. Also, let's just let me remind you as well very quickly before we answer questions. Remember, if you want to come along to Business Advisory Masterclass in two weeks, we are giving away completely free tickets today. Sarah put the link in the chat earlier. She might repeat it. So if you want a free ticket, grab that link that takes place June 25th, 26th, 27th and okay, let's look at some questions. There was Ayanna, I think was the first question which is how do you get the writing style guide? You need to create that yourself. I have my writing style guide. I can't give you mind because that's my style of writing. You need to create it based on what we talked about earlier. So you find three sets of three samples of your writing. You feed it to ChatGPT with a prompt and ask it to analyze the style of writing. And then once you've got that, you combine the three and ask it to create a writing style guide. If you missed that, was it Ayanna, if you missed that.

You can go back after we finished and re watch the live stream. I did go through that and hopefully that will make sense. It may be you missed the early bit. Jaz says, will Copilot do this as well please? I don't know. I would need to ask my colleague Emily who did a. She did a recent live stream where she analyzed the different models Gemini and so on. We don't use Copilot. I've not heard great things about Copilot. I am not a Microsoft fan and now I've heard that Apple are going to build ChatGPT into Apple products and I won't have to pay for Copilot. I'm going to stick with Apple. So I don't know about Copilot, but I have heard that it doesn't always do great stuff. And anyway, Copilot Jaz Copilot is powered by Chat GPT. My recommendation would be for things like answering client emails, just create a prompt that works for you. I showed you a prompt just now. Create a prompt, save it somewhere and use that inside Chat GPT. There is no need to go off to use Copilot to do that.

Jaz says, what is Chat Gemini I am hearing about. Okay, great question Jaz.

ChatGPT came out to the it was publicly released in November 2022. ChatGPT is a large language model. A large language model is a form of AI. It's the most, it's. It's the one that's probably most relevant to us in the profession. Large language models use natural language. We can have conversations with them. And so ChatGPT was the first one that came out, the first main one that came out and it's the leading one. Gemini is Google's Google. When Microsoft invested, I think it was $10 billion back in January of 2023 in they invested $10 billion in OpenAI in ChatGPT. It caused a bit of a panic with Google and Google released their version back in late February, I think it was of last year of 2023. It was called Bard back then and it was a little bit embarrassing. They released it too early. It made lots of mistakes. But they then got better. Google got better and I think it was About September of 2023 they first launched Gemini. Gemini is Google's version of ChatGPT. So you've got Google with Gemini, you've got OpenAI with ChatGPT, you have anthropic with their Claude product. There are many, many more. There are now dozens of large language models, but in all the tests of them, ChatGPT consistently outperforms the others. And so for that reason, I'm always, I'm going to stick with ChatGPT.

But you might use Gemini. If, for example, you are a big fan of Google's ecosystem because it integrates with things like Gmail, you can use Gemini as part of your Gmail. So there are reasons why you might prefer to use Gemini. I prefer chatgpt. Okay. And Jaz says brilliant. So thank you. Thank you for that. Okay, we have, I think two minutes left. I think I've answered all the questions, so the only thing I've got left to say is the next live stream that we're doing is on July 2nd. July 2nd, same time as this one. Why so far away? Well, simply because in two weeks time we're running the business advisory masterclass. So we're going to be Fairly busy in two weeks on the 25th, 26th, 27th, you can come along for free, get your free tickets. The session on July 2 is going to be run by my colleague, Emily Cross. She's me running that particular live stream. And if you want to learn more about ChatGPT, check out my YouTube channel very soon because I've just done hot off the press, two brand new videos with example prompts that you can can use in your accounting firm. And they're going to be getting released into my YouTube channel sometime in the next few days. So watch out for that. Okay, thank you so much for coming along. We are pretty much on the hour. I'm going to play out with some music as I normally do. Please hit the like button if you enjoyed today, if you got something valuable and please tell me in the chat chat, what was the most valuable part of today and what are you going to do different going forward? I will see you all soon. Bye for now.