1) We have an onboarding Google Doc for everyone at the company. It is grouped into headings. One heading might be, e.g., "Common Customer Support Questions" followed by "Query: A customer complains they can't log into the software. Common phrasings for this: X, Y, Z." Research: "Go to page X in the dashboard [detailed in Internal Tools]. Search for... . If you find the customer, use the password reset tool, then copy/paste the following response to the customer, adding in their first name if you can reasonably guess it. If the tool reports no results, forward email to foo@bar.com and send no response."
2) Every time the proprietor gets tired of a genre of emails, they improve either the internal tools or the business rules to optimize themselves out of that workflow.
3) There is frequently a catch-all rule saying something like "If you have a novel situation and think you can handle it for under $100, do so [see: Getting Access To A Company Card], and fill in why the situation was novel, how you handled it, and what you spent on your weekly report Google doc. Don't worry, we trust you to use your judgement." (This is probably among the best pieces of actionable advice Tim Ferris ever gave.)
4) Capturing this state machine as a Google doc means the business has a memory longer than the individual workers, which is particularly important in a virtual-company sort of situation where you're dealing with VAs/freelancers who a) will often not pan out and b) when they do pan out have an expected lifetime tenure with the company of 6 ~ 24 months only.