When I was running an E-Com brand with approximately 90k monthly visitors, I'd spend about half my day answering the exact same emails, live chat questions, or phone calls. By the time I was done, I had absolutely no energy to work ON the brand to expand further. This lagged me behind some of my competition that had more staff on hand. I realised afterwards that all I needed to do was spend a couple weeks creating a system that would remove me from that equation, while keeping my customer service levels the same, if not improved. All of that without hiring someone. What I'm about to explain can take 1-2 weeks to set up initially, but once you do it, the amount of newfound time you'll have on your hands to actually grow your business will be remarkable, trust. Here’s how I approached it: 1. **Start with a spreadsheet.** I wrote down every question I got repeatedly. Then, I scattered the answers across my website: FAQ pages, product descriptions, confirmation emails. Most questions should be answered before the customer ever reaches you. 2. **Build a private AI knowledge base.** I documented my business in detail: processes, policies, tone of voice, lead times, FAQs, deep dive into what I offer, customer persona, etc. Then, I fed it into a *closed-loop* AI model (so that my data stays private). I connected that to my website chatbot so it can answer questions in your brand’s language. 3. **Add an inbound AI caller.** This AI agent can answer phone calls just like a human, handle basic queries, and pass anything urgent to you or a real team member. I stayed reachable without being constantly interrupted. It was especially helpful since I sold in other countries, which means different timezones. This is relatively simple, just link a Voice AI Agent to a Twillio phone number, and publish that phone number to be easily clicked on your website. Make sure its as mobile-friendly as possible. 4. **Automate your inbox.** Finally, I trained another AI model on my past email replies so it learns how I write. It then drafted my responses on my behalf to review and send — saving hours every week while keeping your tone consistent. Here's how it looked: in the mornings, I woke up, opened my email, and read all the responses. If I was happy with the reply, I would hit "send", or make minor wording changes if needed. Here's the toolstack you'll need to use to make it all happen: * OpenAI & Gemini APIs - These LLM APIs are needed to ensure that you have the reasoning behind every answer. Crucial, and extremely inexpensive. If you don't like those 2, you can also go with Claude, Grok, or whichever other LLM you like best. * N8N - used this to build out my chatbot, and imported my knowledge base into a workflow that was then activated and ran in the background anytime a live chat inquiry came in. Also created another workflow to scan my inbox every 5 minutes to see if any new emails came in to auto-answer. * Elevenlabs & Twilio - This was for the inbound caller, aka my "receptionist". There are better and more thorough systems for inbound callers, but I really liked 11labs' natural voices, low latency, and incredible AI tactics to get people engaged in the phone call. If you put all four steps in place properly, I promise you’ll see a massive difference. most e-commerce & digital marketing agency founders cut their customer support time spent by an absurd amount with a system half as robust as one like this. Hope this helps anyone currently in that growth stage and not too keen to keep spending half their day answering the same questions over and over again. If anyone has any follow-up questions, let me know in the comments, happy to answer anything. Hoping this can genuinely benefit someone and make their lives easier ✌️