Exercise 2, Task 4: Use Copilot Chat and Copilot in Outlook to create a Support Insights email

Tailwind Traders’ leadership team recently emphasized the need for better visibility into customer‑resolution trends across the dealer network. Each week, dozens of product inquiries, warranty submissions, troubleshooting requests, and quality concerns flow into the support department. These interactions contain valuable signals, such as recurring failure points, emerging quality trends, seasonal surges, and training gaps. However, much of the insight remains buried in individual tickets or conversations.

To support better decision‑making at the leadership level, your manager asked you to send a concise email summarizing what happened across support over the past three months. The email should include:

  • Trends in product issues and warranty claims
  • Notable escalations or dealer frustrations
  • Emerging patterns that might require investigation from Product or Engineering
  • Recommendations for next steps
  • Any training opportunities for support agents or dealer partners

You plan to use Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat to perform the initial analysis and create an email, which you then plan to polish using Copilot in Outlook. Copilot Chat can synthesize your uploaded summaries, call notes, or internal documentation into a structured report with a professional tone. From there, you can further refine the message using Copilot in Outlook before sending it to leadership.

By creating a consistent insights email, you can help Tailwind Traders move from reactive problem‑solving to proactive, data‑guided improvements. The company’s goal is for this transition to result in higher dealer satisfaction and stronger product feedback loops.

Using Copilot Chat

In Copilot Chat on the web, the response mode selector lets you control how much time and reasoning Copilot uses when answering your prompt. You can leave it set to Auto (the default option) so Copilot balances speed and depth for you, or choose a faster or more in‑depth response style depending on the task.

When Copilot Chat opens in Work mode, the response mode selector isn’t shown. In Work mode, Copilot is optimized for secure, work‑context queries, so it automatically manages response depth for you. When you switch to Web mode, the response mode selector appears, allowing you to choose between faster responses or deeper reasoning. Once the selector is enabled, it remains visible as you switch between Work and Web modes.

If you’ve used Copilot in Excel, you know that it also includes a response control selector. However, its options are different from the Chat selector. In Copilot Chat, the selector controls how deeply Copilot reasons about your request. In Excel, the selector controls which AI model performs the work. Although these selectors might look similar, they control different aspects of Copilot and aren’t the same setting.

Perform the following steps to complete this task:

  1. Select the following link to download the TailwindTraders_SupportCaseSummaries.docx file. Store the file in your OneDrive.

  2. In your Microsoft Edge browser, navigate to the Microsoft 365 home page.

  3. Since this task involves reviewing a file uploaded to OneDrive and generating insights from that internal document, select the Work option. The Web option doesn’t apply here, since it searches external sources like public websites and blogs. In the Copilot Chat window, attach the TailwindTraders_SupportCaseSummaries file in the prompt field.

  4. Then ask Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat to review the support case summaries in the attached file and draft an email in Outlook for Tailwind Traders’ executive leadership. Include top issue themes, customer sentiment, dealer escalation patterns, and recommended next actions. Don’t list specific case numbers.

  5. We experienced two scenarios during testing:

    • Copilot Chat sometimes created the email and notified us at the end of its response that the draft was loaded into Outlook as a new email. It then displayed either a button or link that would open the email in Outlook. If this is your experience, then select the button or link to open the email content in Outlook.

    • Other times, Copilot Chat created the contents for an email, but it didn’t load the contents into Outlook as a new email. If you experience this scenario, copy the email content that Copilot generated, then return to your Microsoft 365 home page, open Outlook in the Apps menu, add a new email, and then paste in the email content from the Copilot Chat response.

  6. At this point, you should now be in Outlook on the web. It should either be displaying the email that Copilot Chat generated, or the email that you manually added in Outlook and pasted in the email content from the Copilot Chat response.

[!IMPORTANT] In Copilot Chat created the email and opened it in Outlook, Copilot doesn’t open the email in draft mode. Instead, it displays its response directly within the body of the email. After that, you must highlight the specific text you want Copilot to modify, whether that’s a sentence, a paragraph, or the entire email.

  1. After reviewing the email, you feel the first paragraph could be improved upon. To do so, highlight the first paragraph of the email (drag your cursor so that the entire opening paragraph is highlighted). Notice the Open Copilot (pencil) icon that appears. Select the icon to open the Copilot window.

  2. The Copilot window includes a prompt field and a menu of editing options. Since you highlighted the opening paragraph, select the Auto Rewrite option. Notice how Copilot doesn’t insert the revision directly into the email. Instead, it displays a Copilot refinement window containing a draft of the revised content. Also notice the menu options that now appear below the refinement window. You can either:
    • Replace the highlighted text with the revised text
    • Insert the text below the highlighted text
    • Discard the rewritten text

    In this case, select the Replace option. Notice how the first paragraph that you highlighted is replaced with the revised text.

  3. Now let’s add a new section to the end of the email, after the Recommended Actions section. In the email, select the blank line that appears after the Recommended Actions section, since this location is where you want the new section to appear. Then select the Open Copilot icon that appears.

  4. In the prompt field, ask Copilot to add a section titled Risks and Dependencies. This section should include a short paragraph calling out what items could negatively affect support performance or customer satisfaction if they aren’t addressed.

  5. Review what happened. Copilot generated the new section and displayed it within the body of the email starting at the location that you placed your cursor. You’re satisfied with the new content, so in the Copilot window, select Keep it.

  6. Review the results. Instead of inserting the new section where it was shown in the Copilot window, the text was inserted at the start of the email. Why did this happen? Well, as of this writing, when you select Keep it, Copilot doesn’t insert the generated text exactly where your cursor is, or where you might have requested in your prompt (for example, if you asked it to add a new paragraph at the end of the email). Instead, Copilot uses an internal placeholder in Outlook’s email editor, and that placeholder is currently located at the top of the message body.

    So even though Copilot visually renders the generated paragraph where you requested it (to show you what it would look like), the actual insertion logic tied to the Keep it button doesn’t respect cursor position or prompt context. Rather, it appends the content to the default insertion point, which Outlook currently defines as the top of the message body.

    Until this feature is addressed, you must highlight the inserted text and then cut and paste it to your desired location.

  7. Finally, let’s see what happens when you ask it to change the tone of the email. Select in the body of the email to highlight the entire email, then select the Open Copilot icon. In the Copilot window, one of the menu choices is Change Tone, which provides four options: Direct, Casual, Formal, and Like a poem. In this case, instead of selecting one of these options, you want to submit a prompt request asking for something different. In the prompt field, ask Copilot to make the tone of the email more executive-friendly.

  8. Scroll through the contents of the Copilot refinement window to see how Copilot rewrote the email, giving it a more executive-friendly tone. If you don’t like this version, then select Discard in the Copilot window. For this email, select Replace to accept the changes.

  9. If you have time, feel free to play around with the various Copilot options when you select the Open Copilot icon.