Session Notes: Email Templates and Customer Service Response Workflow

2026-06-01 · Briana Riordan + Nate St. Pierre

Overview

This was a short, focused session — roughly five minutes — covering a specific opportunity Briana had flagged earlier in the day: their email template system. Briana described the current workflow, showed an example template, and outlined what she believed a better version of this process could look like. The conversation was more of a concept check than a deep dive, but it surfaced a clear picture of the problem and a well-formed idea for addressing it.

The Shared Inbox and Who Uses It

All customer correspondence — orders, artwork submissions, and general customer service questions — flows into a single shared Outlook mailbox. The mailbox is accessed by three different teams: inside sales, customer service, and artwork. Multiple people are in and out of it throughout the day, handling different types of requests based on their role.

The Template Library

To manage the volume of repetitive customer service questions, the team has built a 34-page template document stored in SharePoint. The document is organized into sections by topic or issue type, using headers and keywords so team members can look up the right response for a given situation.

These aren't brief form responses. Briana held one up during the session to illustrate: a full page of explanation covering what the customer is asking for, how the process works, and why — a thorough, professional response written once to handle a recurring situation consistently. The goal of building the library was twofold: reduce the mental fatigue of writing the same explanations repeatedly, and ensure that whoever answers a given email gives the same quality and consistency of response.

The library has grown over time as the team identified recurring situations and codified how they should be handled.

The Current Workflow and Its Friction

When a customer email arrives that might warrant a templated response, the current process is:

1. Someone reads the email and determines whether a template applies.
2. They search the 34-page SharePoint document to find the relevant section.
3. They copy the template text.
4. They paste it into an Outlook draft reply, add any order-specific context, and send.

The friction is in step two: finding the right template in a 34-page document while also managing an active inbox requires knowing the document well and adds time to every templated response. It's not a broken process, but it's slow and requires more mental overhead than it should.

What a Better Version Would Look Like

Briana described the improved workflow she's been thinking about: something that monitors the incoming email, determines whether a templated response is appropriate, identifies which template fits, and starts an Outlook draft reply with that template already in place. The human would then review the draft, make any adjustments needed for the specific situation, and send.

She was explicit that she wants a human in the loop — not full automation. The draft is a starting point, not a final answer. The person still reads the email, reviews what the AI pulled, and decides whether it's right.

She also identified Microsoft Copilot as the likely tool for this, given that the team is already using Outlook and SharePoint. Her read was that Copilot should be able to bridge those two systems to make this work — though she acknowledged uncertainty about the specifics.

Follow-Ups

• Confirm whether the team has Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, and whether Copilot supports creating draft replies in a shared mailbox (not just personal inboxes).
• Get a copy of the template document to understand its format and structure.
• Find out who owns and maintains the template library and how often it gets updated.