Customer service takes patience and a lot of planning. It can also cost you hours of your day looking up customer info, figuring out what a customer paid and when, or even just understanding what they're actually asking.
For small business owners and solo founders, those hours are brutal. You're not running a support team — you're the product person, the marketer, and the customer service rep all at once.
How Craig Set It Up
Craig Campbell runs a site called Pastmaps, where users can purchase historical maps or subscribe to access all the historical maps he has on file. Recently, I chatted with Craig because he said he was spending a few hours a week just handling customer service for refunds or Stripe issues.
Before this, Craig was doing all of it manually — looking up the customer in Stripe, piecing together what they'd paid and when, then writing the reply from scratch. For a small business where customer emails trickle in throughout the week, that overhead adds up fast.
Craig let me know that he's been using Claude Cowork to handle a lot of the process. He has Claude check his email every hour. If there is a refund request or a Stripe-related issue, Claude uses the Stripe MCP with the user's email address to retrieve their details and surface any relevant data to help resolve the issue. Claude then drafts an email outlining tasks for Craig to complete if any human interaction is needed. He also gives Claude a few example emails showing the output format he wants.
Now he opens Gmail and finds drafts already waiting, with Stripe data pulled and any required actions clearly listed at the top. What used to take a couple of hours a week now takes about 20 minutes for review and approval.
If you want to travel back in time and see what your city looked like before you were born and how much it’s changed since then, give Pastmaps a try.
What You'll Need
To set it up yourself, you'll need to connect two MCP servers and schedule Claude to run on a cadence.
Gmail
In Claude Desktop, go to Settings → Integrations and enable the Gmail integration. It uses OAuth, so you'll connect your Google account and grant Claude permission to read and draft emails. No API keys needed — it's a few clicks.
Stripe
The Stripe MCP requires a Stripe API key. Go to your Stripe Dashboard → Developers → API Keys and create a restricted key. Since Claude should only be reading data (never issuing refunds or cancellations), limit the key to read permissions only. Once you have the key, add the Stripe MCP server in Claude Desktop under Settings → Integrations → Stripe MCP and paste it in.
Scheduling
Craig has Claude check his inbox every hour. The easiest way to do this in Claude Cowork is to create a new scheduled task, which lets you set up a cron-style trigger. You write your prompt once, set the interval, and Claude Cowork runs it on a schedule without you having to do anything. You can also use a cron job on your machine to kick off a Claude Code session if you prefer more control.
Why This Design Works
A few things are worth calling out about Craig's structure before you start writing your own prompt.
Claude never sends or writes — it only reads.
This is deliberate. The goal isn't to fully automate customer service; it's to automate the research and drafting so Craig can spend his time reviewing and approving rather than starting from scratch. Keeping Claude in a read-only role means nothing goes out without human eyes on it. That matters a lot when you're dealing with billing complaints and refund requests — the last thing you want is an AI sending a half-baked response to an already frustrated customer.
The TODO block pattern keeps everything in one place.
Instead of flagging required actions in a separate doc or a Slack message to yourself, any Stripe tasks live right at the top of the draft email — in red, copy-pasteable, with specific IDs and amounts already filled in. Craig reads the TODO, opens a separate Claude session to handle the Stripe action, and then hits send. The draft becomes the single source of truth for both the reply and the work that needs to happen before it goes out.
The voice guidelines do a lot of heavy lifting.
It's easy to underestimate how much prompting the tone requires. Craig's prompt includes specific language patterns, openers, sign-offs, and even examples of how he handles angry emails versus routine cancellations. Without that, you get something that sounds like a support ticket system wrote it. With it, the drafts sound like Craig.
If you're adapting this for your own business, the structure carries over cleanly — swap in your business name, email addresses, and your voice. The Stripe steps and Gmail search logic stay the same regardless of what you're selling.
Here is Craig’s prompt for Claude Cowork: