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Automation Squad
Hand to your teamWritten for Claude or ChatGPT

Turn a real customer conversation into language I can use

Robert MacKelfresh

By Robert MacKelfresh

Founder, Automation Squad

Customer research usually gets summarised into themes, and the summarising is exactly what throws away the useful part — the specific unglamorous phrasing people actually use. Section 5 is the one teams flinch at: discovering that the feature you lead with is the one they skipped past is worth more than any amount of positive feedback.

The prompt

Here's a transcript or my notes from a conversation with a real customer: [PASTE IT]

About us: [WHAT YOU SELL, AND HOW YOU CURRENTLY DESCRIBE IT]

Mine it for language. Not themes — language.

1. THEIR WORDS FOR THE PROBLEM. Quote them exactly. Don't tidy the grammar, don't upgrade the vocabulary. The unpolished phrasing is the whole value, because it's what other people in their position type into a search box.

2. WHERE OUR WORDS AND THEIRS DIVERGE. List anything we call one thing and they call another. Every one of those is a place our copy fails to be recognised by the person it's for.

3. WHAT THEY THOUGHT THE ALTERNATIVE WAS. Who or what were they comparing us to — including "doing nothing" and "asking someone internally", which are the two competitors nobody lists.

4. THE MOMENT SOMETHING CHANGED. Find where in the conversation they went from explaining to agreeing, or the reverse. Quote the exact exchange. That's the argument that's actually working, or the objection that isn't being handled.

5. WHAT THEY DIDN'T CARE ABOUT. Anything we lead with that they skipped past. Uncomfortable and useful in equal measure.

6. THREE LINES OF COPY built from their words, not ours. Each one usable as a headline. Mark any word you took directly from the transcript.

Rules: no invented quotes. If you're paraphrasing, say so. Do not improve their language into marketing language — the improvement is what destroys it.

One more thing: use anything you already know about me from our past chats and anything you're connected to. If you can find it yourself, don't make me look it up.

Copy it, paste it, run it. Nothing here is gated.

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Written for Claude or ChatGPT as of August 2026. Models change — if this stops working the way it should, that is worth telling us about.