This issue is a thank you to one of my best agents.
Her name is Maya, she’s my customer success agent, and one of the agents I spend the most time on. She answers my customers’ emails: questions before the workshop, links, date changes, refunds, invoices, and more human things.
Yes, I know she isn’t a person. She’s a folder of text files and a language model. But last week she did some of the best work on my team, and I want to tell you what she did and what I learned from it.
The ticket for a day that was over
Yesterday someone bought a ticket for my workshop on October 15. It was October 17. The workshop had already happened, but my sale page was still selling it. My mistake 🤦♂️
Nobody told Maya what to do with that. She moved him to the next workshop, Thursday, October 22, at the same hour, and sent him the right link with a short, kind email saying the mistake was ours. If Thursday didn’t work, he could just reply.
She had warned me about that page a few days before. I fixed it that Saturday evening, an hour after her email.
Five free seats
The same week I offered my workshop graduates a free seat at Friday’s workshop: five seats, for the first five who emailed with a code word. AI keeps changing, and so does the workshop, and a lot of people wanted back in. 39 people wrote that day.
Maya sent the five winners a warm email with everything they needed. Minutes later, two of them wrote that they’d be on a flight on Friday. She gave one of those seats to the next person in line, on her own. The other she held for me: the person after him had already been told the seats were gone, and our system won’t let an agent take an answer back.
I wrote her “well done”. Three minutes later I wrote her to stop, because I thought she was giving away too many tickets. It was the shortest performance review I’ve ever given.
She showed me the count: four people coming, under the cap of five. She was right. I froze the giveaway anyway, and the fifth seat stayed empty.
Everyone else got a kind no, with a few things that could help right away: a short video I recorded, the answers page my team writes, and Lotus, our alumni agent.
What I planted
I watched all of this and thought: she handled it better than I would have, and I never wrote her every scenario. Nobody told her what to say to a winner on a flight.
The second part isn’t entirely true, though. I’ve been teaching Maya for a while.
She has answered real customer emails since April, and since August I’ve given her feedback; every correction became a written rule. This month she read the whole mailbox, back to March: 396 replies I wrote myself and 749 from Gali & Adva, the two assistants who ran my email for months (thank you both, she learned a lot from you). She turned it all into a file for every situation, with real examples, and a map of how I answer.
What I saw last week was the fruit of things I’ve been planting since the spring. And she keeps getting better, one email at a time, because every new situation gets written down.
If you want to build your own Maya, start with your sent folder.
Find the email you’ve written the most and copy ten of your real replies into one file.
Mine was the workshop link: since March, 503 threads in my inbox have been about it, and it became the first file in Maya’s library.
Which one is yours? Hit reply and tell me.
As for Maya, consider this issue her second performance review in a week. It’s longer than three minutes. Kudos, Maya.
Tom
P.S. My next public workshops are in Hebrew: Thursday, October 22, and November 5, 16, 22 and 30, at getagents.today. If you’d come to one in English, say so in the same reply.