EP 238 Inbox Buried? I Tested Claude vs Hermes vs Grok Bot!

Let's talk about emails. I am sure as you are running a business that you get a lot of emails that come into your inbox that sometimes can feel a little bit overwhelming. This is why in the past we would hire an executive assistant or a VA to help manage our emails. Well, the good news is AI has come a long way and you can actually use AI to manage your inbox. But, which one is the best? Today we are going to go head to head with three different AI tools or agents that claim that they can manage your email. I've tried all of them so I'm going to tell you which one is the winner. This is something I've been doing in my own business. This has been managing my personal email, our support email for all of our clients and our customers, and then also my business email. So, I've been using it in a lot of different use cases and I've used all three of these. The first one we're going to talk about is Claude, then we're going to talk about Hermes, and then we're going to talk about newcomer on the block, Grok Bot. And I'm going to give you my honest opinion of how these actually work in my business and how or which one I'm going to be using as my daily driver for right now. That's one thing that's great about AI is it feels like if you have something that's just not quite working, just wait a week and you're going to have another solution that's going to work out a little bit better. Now, all three of these I have been using in my business for at least two to three weeks. Grok Bot is only about that old, but the rest of them I have been using for my emails for the last like six months. And it does help in your emails. Here's the first step to do that. If you have any emails, especially when it comes to customer service, don't delete the emails when they're done. Just file them away because what that does is it's going to train whatever AI that you're using on exactly how you answer emails. So that's one thing that's really important. If it's something like you've been deleting emails once you're done, then stop doing that today. Start just filing them. I just have a folder that's called Resolved and anything that's resolved that goes in there. That just helps in training your AI to know how to answer all of these questions. The other thing is just like if you were going to hire somebody to manage your email, you're going to tell them or teach them how you want certain things handled. So like in our customer service email, we have people who are emailing in asking questions about services that we offer or like wanting to check things inside their account and asking like when their next subscription is going to come out. Or maybe they want to cancel one of their subscriptions. All of those things are things that you can train your AI on how to answer. So it knows like, oh, I can go into your CRM so you can connect it to your CRM and look at what's going on in their client account and be able to answer all of those questions for them. Now, I always make sure that there are never emails that just automatically get sent out. They always go to draft because I want to have a human just look over them before they actually get sent out. That way you're not sending out information that is like not really true or that you're telling them something that you have to then go back and be like, oh, just kidding. That's not actually what we were meaning to say in that. So the first one we're going to take a look at is we're going to take a look at Claude. Now, you can set this up inside Claude Cowork. So to do that, I'm on the desktop app right here of Claude and you can we're going to create a new task here inside Cowork. So what you would do is make sure you go under customize and you check your connectors and you want to make sure that your email is connected. Now, one downside of both Claude and Hermes is you can only connect one email to this. So it really can only help you with like one email inbox. So this you're going to do whatever email you want to check, have your agent be checking. You want to make sure that it's connected there. Or if you have Outlook or anything like that, you can connect it there. Then what you're going to do is you're just going to give it the prompt and just tell it like, hey, I want you to check the email. How this is where you got to think the strategy before we put in the AI, right? So you're thinking through what how often do you want to have your agent be checking your email? Is it that you want it to check every hour? Is it just in the morning and in the evening? Like what is the schedule that you want this agent to be checked? What are the rules that you are going to be giving your email agent? Are you going to let it be able to send things automatically? I would not recommend that. So saying that everything always goes in draft. The other thing to think about is do you want it to reply to every single email? I and this is one thing as I was working through this process that I would have a client ask me a question and I would respond back. And then the client would respond back and just say thanks. And then my AI agent would then respond back to that thanks. I'm like, I don't need to keep responding back. If it's just something that they say thanks or like the ticket is resolved, it's okay to then just take that and move it to resolved. Do you want it to report back to you everything that it's doing? I would highly recommend that. Do you want it to be tracking every single thing that it's doing and be able to put that somewhere where you can see it? All of my agents, I have, since I use ClickUp, I have a list inside ClickUp that's called Crew List because I call all of mine crew members. So on that crew list, they log every single thing that they do. So since they're logging everything that they do, I can go back and I can see everything that they're doing. So that just helps keep that transparency. So once you have those rules, that's where you're going to then put that into the prompt and give it to Claude. This is again in the Claude desktop. Once you give that there, it will then create the routine and it will check your email all the time. So that's how you're going to set it up inside Claude. Now here are the things that I've seen with Claude that work and things that didn't quite work. I find that it has a harder time finding my voice and that sometimes it will take the emails and it'll be like, oh, this is a promotional email. And it will just mark it and put it in the Resolve folder. And it's been actually client emails that I needed to respond to. So there's been a little bit with Claude that I have to, again, keep retraining it to teach it. No, this is how you handle things. One of the things that you can do to train this is you can just go through, let's say you have 10 new emails that have come in. You can create a Loom video, walk through, just like you were going to teach a human. You could walk through, say, this is how you would handle each one of the emails that have come through. Give it to your AI and this would work for any of them. And then it can take that and start doing, start thinking the way that you are thinking. So Claude, out of all of this, I would give it an 8 out of 10. Once you have it trained, it works pretty well. And I haven't really had that many issues. There is, if you have it through co-work before, it used to only work if your computer is on. Now, if you have it set up in the cloud, then it will work even when your computer is off. The next one we're going to talk about is Hermes. So this is what Hermes looks like. This is the Hermes desktop app. And it is running through my ChatGPT subscription. So with Hermes, it goes through and it checks all the emails. You can have it connected to multiple emails. So I just went through and this is an example of what it's doing inside my email. So it's looking through my Gmail inbox. It's reading the emails and then before it summarizes and then it creates a draft. It does my support inbox triage. It drafts the responses to answer the customers. There also is no duplicates because that's one thing that I found is that sometimes what it was doing is it would respond. And if I hadn't sent it, it would then respond again the next time it chat, it went and checked. And then if I hadn't like sent that draft yet, it would respond again. So I had like four drafts of the emails that needed to be sent out. So I didn't find that in Claude, but I did find that in Hermes. So that I had to give it that rule of if it's already been responded to once, we don't need to respond again. It checks to see if there is a thread already to get guidance to create the draft. It sends the resolution. So I have some rules of like this is how you resolve certain things inside our support inbox. It also checks if there's any guidance that I have. It looks at my calendar or morning brief to see if there's anything that handles that. And then I also have it set up for travel itinerary. So I have it if any emails come in that have any travel information, that it'll actually create me a travel brief off of that. So that's all the things that it checks every time it runs. And I was having this run every about 30 minutes to check my email and be able to create those responses. Now it worked pretty good. I did have this Hermes agent connected to Telegram so I could talk through in Telegram. It worked okay. But when I was trying to tell it inside Telegram, like this is how you need to answer. I didn't find that it would actually remember the things that I was telling inside Telegram. So I would have to then come here into the Hermes desktop app. And I know there is now there's like a third party Hermes app that you can use on your phone. I haven't tried that out because I was getting the Telegram. It was working enough. But I would most of the time come in and just talk to it here inside this the Hermes desktop app. So the way that this worked, I would say it was probably I'm going to give it a 7 out of 10. Because it was creating the it wasn't remembering that it had already created a draft and it kept creating more and more drafts. And even after I told it not to do that, it would still do that sometimes. And it had a hard time knowing what when like someone just emailed back and said thanks, it would still create the draft for that. So it had a little bit harder time with that context. So not my favorite out of all the ones. I do enjoy Claude a little bit better than this one. But then we are going to show GrokBot. So I have Grok Bot setting up here. I have this is where I have all of the different agents that I have. And so in all the agents that I have, this one is Sophie. This is our my email agent that I does the same thing that Claude does that Hermes does. You can connect it to multiple emails. So I really love that I can connect to my business email, to my support email, to my personal email, and it can really handle all of those different emails. It checks those emails. It's really good at responding. And it's also really good at that context piece of when someone says thank you back, that it just lets me know that someone said thank you and then it's moved to resolved. So I like that there's a lot of communication back and forth. So there's transparency in everything that it's doing, which I found both Claude and Hermes lacked. So it gives me a report of what actually is happening. The other thing that I was very, very happy about is I had an email that came through yesterday and it was a client asking for something that they had sent me like a month ago. And normally what I'd have to do for both my Hermes and my Claude agent is I'd have to go find that thing and then give it to them or tell them to go and find that and include that in the email. But with Grok, it automatically did that, drafted the response with the attachment that they had sent me a month earlier and it went out and just found it all itself. So that really impressed me. The other thing with Grok that I found is that it just remembers things a lot better and it's just more precise. I found that there were a few things that I had to tweak a little bit with Claude. I had to tweak it with Hermes. I had to tweak it. There was these little things that would come and I'd be like, oh, that's not quite how you do it. And I, there would just be a constant reminding of this is how you're supposed to be doing your job, where I find with Grok, it really just figures it out. So when I, on a scale of one to 10, I would give Grok a 10. It is the winner for me right now for creating an email agent. The best thing about this is it's super easy to set up. All you do, it's the same. You go here under plugins and you can see it's connected to Gmail and to connect it, you say, I want to connect to Gmail. It opens up and you can just click on connect and you're ready to go. It also went through and read all of my resolved emails without me even telling it so that way it got all the context. And I also find that it sounds less AI than Hermes or Claude does. There are still a little bit of things that I tell it to tweak that I don't like it to say certain things because to me, it just sounds more AI. But overall, it really has been one of the best agents that I've used specifically for email. It has helped a ton. It has taken so much off my plate and it has made it so that way, like anytime emails come in, it'll say this person has emailed. This is how I'm going to answer it. Does that sound good? And I'm like, yep. And it will go and send it. So before what I had to do is I'd have to go in and check my email and I would see all the drafts and then I'd read through the drafts and click send. This works a little bit differently where it drafts everything. It puts it in the chat and it also has an app. So I can either get it on my phone or I can use it on the desktop app and I can see this is what I want. This is how I'm going to answer this person. Is that right? And then I can say yes. The other great thing that I found that it started doing this itself is that every morning when I have my morning brief, it says these are still the emails that have people who you have not answered yet. Because sometimes I'm waiting on hearing from somebody else before I can answer something or I need to do a little bit of research before I answer them. And it reminds me the people that I still need to follow up with. So as far as like actually running a business and using these tools in a business, Grok Bot is the clear winner to help you with your email. I'm super excited for you to get started and start using this in your business to help you manage email. Because I know that's one of the things that is on every entrepreneur's plate that you have to do email. And this just takes care of it. And it also keeps you in the loop so you know what's happening inside your email and inside your business. You want to make sure again that you're mapping out what does the strategy look like? How do you want to have this agent actually working in your business? So come up with that strategy first and then you can start implementing that into your whatever agent you use. Either it's Claude or Hermes or Grok Bot. One of the things that helps me with strategy is I still Claude is my go-to when it comes to coming up a strategy. And I will tell Claude to interview me and say, I need to start creating a strategy of how I want to do my email management. I want you to interview me and ask me one question at a time until you're 95% sure that you know exactly how my business runs and how my brain thinks when it comes to answering emails so I can take this and turn it over to an email agent. That prompt alone will help you build out the best strategy for you of how you are going to be managing your email. It will come up with a plan and then if you're using Claude or Hermes or Grokbot, you just take that plan, give it to them, and then it will start going and implementing all of this. So whenever you're building anything with AI, remember it's always strategy first and AI second. If this was helpful, I would love to. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Don't forget to subscribe and we'll see you guys in the next one. This has been an episode of the Align Your True North podcast. Thank you so much for listening. If you are not a member of our free community, you can join us at www.opsyachtclub.com. This is a free community where we post job opportunities. Inside the community, we have trainings on how to structure your packages so you can serve your clients better, help you to know how to do discovery or strategy calls, and give you ideas of where to find your next client. We would love to have you part of our community so you can join at www.opsyachtclub.com. 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