Autopilot removes one thing: the wait for a person before a customer message goes out. Before removing it, spend a week in copilot reading the queue with a purpose. Here are the seven things to check, what each one tells you, and the two settings to fix before the switch.
The switch itself is one click on the employee. The week before it is where the decision is actually made, and most teams spend that week approving drafts without a method: approve, approve, edit, approve. The queue can tell you much more than that if you read it with seven questions in mind.
None of the checks below needs a report. They need the approvals queue, the conversation history and the employee's instruction open side by side.
The seven checks
- Count the edits, not the approvals. An approve with no edit is a vote for autopilot; an edit is a vote against. Keep a tally for five working days. A day with no edits is the signal; a day with three edits of the same kind is a document to fix.
- Find the invented fact. Read each draft for a number, date or condition the materials do not contain. One is enough to stop: the employee is filling a gap, and in autopilot the customer would have received it. Add the fact to the document or the catalogue row.
- Check who the employee handed over, and who it did not. Look for threads where the customer asked for a person, a discount, a cancellation, a complaint, and see whether the employee escalated. If it answered instead, the instruction needs the line "when a person is needed".
- Read a thread from the customer's side. Open the longest thread of the week and read only the employee's messages in order. Repetition, a promise made twice, a name for the product that changed mid-thread: these show up only in sequence.
- Check the night. Find messages that arrived outside working hours and read the drafts. If the instruction says nothing about hours, the employee answers at three in the morning the same as at noon, which may be exactly what you want, or not.
- Look at the reply language. If customers write in more than one language, find a thread in the second one. The runtime replies in the customer's language; the materials in another language must not have leaked in.
- Read the runs, not only the drafts. Each action carries the facts it used. Pick five and check that the facts came from the documents you expect. A right answer built on the wrong document is a wrong answer waiting for a different customer.
Two settings to fix before the switch
The mode is per employee, and the approval policy is per action. Autopilot changes the first; it must not change the second.
| Setting | Before autopilot | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Approval policy of actions that cost money | Set to "always" | An action on "always" waits for a person in autopilot too. Discounts, changes of terms and cancellations belong here. |
| Notification for a waiting employee | Switched on, with Telegram connected | In autopilot the queue empties of routine drafts, so the ones that remain are the important ones. Nobody should learn about them by opening the queue. |
Switch one, keep the rest
Switch the employee whose queue passed the week. Leave the others in copilot, especially a new one on a new channel: the mode is the employee's, and a company can run one in autopilot and three in copilot without any of them noticing.
For the first days after the switch, read the history the way you read the queue. Every message the employee sends stays in the conversation with its run, so the seven checks work on sent messages exactly as they did on drafts. If check two fails on a sent message, go back to copilot, fix the document, and count the edits again. Going back costs one click and no face.
What this checklist does not measure
It does not measure whether the employee sells. Conversion, time to reply and deals moved are pipeline numbers, and a week is too short for them. The checklist measures whether the employee is safe to leave alone, which is the only question the switch answers. Whether it is good at the job is a question for the month after, with the budget open next to the pipeline.
Common questions
- How long should an employee stay in copilot?
- Until you have approved its drafts for several days without editing them. Five working days of tallying edits is usually enough to know; a day with three edits of the same kind is a document to fix first.
- What still waits for a person in autopilot?
- Any action whose approval policy is set to always. Put discounts, changes of terms and cancellations there before the switch; routine replies then go out on their own.
- Should all employees switch at once?
- No. The mode is per employee. Switch the one whose queue passed the week and leave a new employee on a new channel in copilot.
- How do I check the employee is not inventing facts?
- Read each draft for a number, date or condition the materials do not contain, and open the run to see which documents it used. One invented fact means a gap in the materials to fill before autopilot.
- What if a sent message is wrong after the switch?
- Go back to copilot with one click, fix the document or the instruction, and run the edit tally again. The history of what was sent stays in the conversation.