Forget “Write me a message”: use AI to build better customer relationships

I recently realized that our approach to using AI with our customers is all wrong. Almost everyone in the industry starts with prompts that ask the AI ​​to write a message, an email, or perform some other task.

Why is this a problem? In fact, we are putting the cart before the horse. What we should do instead is start with our customers’ wants and needs and then use AI to tailor the output to those needs.

How can we start solving for x? In my book, this means good old-fashioned buyer and seller interviews to first determine what matters most to them. Here’s how to navigate the interview process and how I personally coach AI, using the data I collect to create better leads that foster deeper relationships with my clients.

Part 1: Start with yourself

Preparing for a great personal interview with your clients requires minimal preparation, but a thorough interview will yield maximum results for your business. Taking the time to talk to your customers shows that you value what they have to say and that personal information matters.

1. Listen before you list something

For sellers: Conduct a “listening consultation,” where you interview them about what matters most to them. If you are not yet using it, you can adjust the version here article.

2. Ask better questions

Ask buyers about their household, pets, any special needs, their motivation for selling, financial details and price range, and dive deep into their lifestyle at home and on the road.

3. Identify the customer type

Determine what type of customer it is: a starter, a right-sized boomer, a growing family, etc. Each type has different priorities and emotional triggers.

4. Check out their social media posts for yourself

This will give you additional clues about what matters most to them. While most AIs will tell you that they can read social media posts, you shouldn’t trust them to do so.

Even if they can read the messages, the way generative AI works is that it must first “recreate” the message it found on a social media site when it responds to you. The estimated error rate with AI varies.

Do this yourself, because you’ll notice nuances that AIs can’t find, and you’ll be less likely to make a mistake.

Part 2: Use AI to customize what you found

Using the information you’ve collected about your customers, build a prompt around their personal interests and preferences.

1. Create your main prompt

This process starts with writing a very detailed document “master prompt” for your company. This is a single ‘master document’ that gives the AI ​​a detailed profile of your business, which the AI ​​will use in all future work you do with it.

2. Add meta prompts for specific customers

Once your main prompt is there, write a meta prompt for your specific buyers or sellers describing each customer in detail (without names or confidential data). This allows you to tailor AI output to a specific customer. For example:

According to my master’s prompt, I am working with a single woman in her mid-forties who is in the high-tech industry. She is an avid runner and walker and enjoys being around great restaurants and a vibrant arts scene. She travels often for work and wants something that is low maintenance. She prefers a house to an apartment because of all the HOA insurance issues in her area. Clarify the pros and cons of buying a house versus a condo in (the zip code or general market area).

That one instruction gives AI everything it needs to tailor your response to your voice and approach, as well as your customer’s specific lifestyle.

You can use meta prompts like this in dozens of everyday situations:

• Write follow-up messages that sound personal, not templated
• Summarizing inspection reports in understandable language
• Create scripts for open house videos or community spotlights
• Creating customer intake forms or checklists tailored to your market

Each meta prompt helps you train the AI ​​to work in the specific way you do with your customers.

Part 3: Use AI to deepen your customer relationships

When you combine a detailed master prompt with specific meta prompts, you create a practical framework for running your business with AI support that feels natural and personal. Instead of producing generic marketing language, generate communications that resemble how you would speak in a one-on-one consultation.

This approach transforms AI from a generic tool into a way to deepen your customer relationships by making the AI’s answers about your customers. The better the information you provide to the AI, the deeper your understanding of your clients’ personalities, motivations, and lifestyle priorities will be. In other words, you stop sounding like every other agent online, and start sounding like you’re “their agent.”

To illustrate this point, an AI that understands that you are working primarily with technical professionals will naturally emphasize travel times, bandwidth reliability, and nearby innovation hubs.

Another agent’s AI, tailored to the right size of boomers, will emphasize privacy, ADU compliance, and access to medical care. Both agents use AI, but they each communicate through a lens of personal insight because you taught them to do so.

Part 4: Appeal to people first

Every successful prompt starts with empathy. Your personal emotional intelligence cannot be recreated with AI. Before you open a chat window, remind yourself that AI doesn’t know your customers, but it does know you. It can’t read a pause in their voice, feel uncertainty about timing, or recognize that “being closer to my grandchildren” shapes their movement.

Your role is to translate those human details into structured language that the AI ​​can use. That’s the real beauty of this approach: human insight that improves digital communication. When you approach AI this way, the technology does the heavy lifting on concepts and data, while you focus on interpretation, nuance, and connection, things that no algorithm can replicate.

Start teaching AI who you and your customers are

If you take the time to lay the human foundation first, every message, script, and marketing piece will feel custom-made rather than templated. This is exactly the type of connection that today’s customers want and need from us.

AI can help you work faster, but only you can make your business feel personal. In a world that is becoming more digital by the day, the agents who master the balance between empathy and technology will be the ones who own the future of real estate.

Bernice Ross is president and CEO of BrokerageUP And Real EstateCoach.comthe founder of Profit.Real estate and a national speaker, author and trainer with more than 1,500 published articles.