• Use AIMIE Like an In-House MRAA Teammate, Not Just a Search Engine: Share Context, Goal(s) and Audience
In all honestly, I’m writing this to help our MRAA Members find greater success when using AIMIE our AI-powered Chatbot. Currently, members ask AIMIE basic questions that lack the proper depth. I’m not saying this to critique anyone. Instead, the following copy and PDF were created to help you improve your AI repertoire. Afterall, better questions (and better “prompt directions”) get better answers.
Let me put it this way: Imagine if you walked into your Service Department and hollered out a question that lacked any sort of context. You just blurt out something like, “Hey, can you help me fix the wake boat?” and walk out. Hearing you, there’s no doubt a savvy service team would make every attempt to figure out which boat you’re talking about and some might even deliver regardless of your vague instructions. However, lacking the necessary details and specific information, your team is left to guess, hoping they can appease you and meet the needs of the customer.
A good approach would be to provide them with more context up front so they know who is responsible, what boat is involved and whose it is, what’s the desired outcome and how to go about it. If you came through the door with that information — never mind not following proper process here — they have a greater chance of satisfying your needs and that of your customer.
Prompt & Circumstance
I hope by the end of this helpful article, you feel as though you can flip your tassel from the right to the left of your cap and hear a faint bit of Sir Edward Elgar’s “graduation song” playing in the background.
AIMIE (AI for Marine Industry Education) can respond to simple prompts, but she can truly deliver when she has more context, more details about your needs and desired outcome. If you ask AIMIE to “write me a job description for a gas dock attendant,” chances are she will do it (Note: She has also been trained on MRAA’s Gas Dock Attendant job description). However, if you include more details about the position, your dealership, its location, size and ideal roles and responsibilities for this position, AIMIE will know more about your dealership’s needs, this specific role and produce a more customized result.
Exploratory Prompt to AIMIE:
To help you understand how your prompting can lead to stronger results and more success for your team, I pulled a recent real-use question from a dealer member and asked AIMIE to improve it.
Interview Questions Prompt
Original prompt: “What are 5 interview questions to ask a service advisor?”
AIMIE’s Revised Prompt
“Give me 8 interview questions for hiring a marine dealership Service Advisor/Service Writer, focused on: customer communication, estimating and approvals, handling upset customers, upselling service ethically, technician coordination and follow-up. For each question, include: what a strong answer includes, red flags and a simple 1–5 scoring rubric.”
Why this works: AIMIE’s revision transitions the inquiry that will produce service-level interview questions to helping a dealership evaluate real dealership behaviors. Adding context improved the prompt and gave AIMIE a better idea of success. You go beyond generating a list of questions by creating support for your decision-making needs. Adding details and structure to your questions leads to stronger results.
Grab A PDF with More Prompts for AIMIE
Since AIMIE officially launched in January of 2024, she has helped 1,422 users and had more than 6,500 conversations. We’ve created a PDF with some revised prompts for you to use, complete with AIMIE’s guidance for building a more structured prompt. You can always add more context to your prompts but these sample offer you a better place to start.
You’re Not Late, When You Prompt Better
By using AIMIE, you’ve taken action to integrate AI into your workspace. You don’t have to be a prompt engineer to get better results with AIMIE (or any AI LLM for that matter), but by providing more context and a structured prompt, you’re training her and offering more clarity so she can help you by supplying you with a better outcome. In the long run, she can help you become more efficient and allow you to focus on customer follow-up and other critical human-led initiatives.
Never tried AIMIE? Today’s the day to meet my AI coworker.
Note: This blog used AIMIE and Copilot to brainstorm, outline and edit the content.
