Instruction prompt
How your AI behaves
How your AI behaves, as opposed to what it knows.
What it does
The knowledge base is facts. This is conduct: how it greets people, when it offers a transfer, what it should never say, how it handles somebody who is annoyed.
It applies to every call from the moment you save.
What it does not do
- It does not hold facts. Prices and hours belong in the knowledge base, where they are easy to change and easy to find.
- It does not override your settings. Hours, routing and languages are set elsewhere and win over anything written here.
- It does not guarantee behaviour. It is strong guidance, not a switch. A rule buried in a long prompt competes with everything around it.
Setting it up
Settings, then Advanced, then the Instruction prompt card.
If you have a callback agent, it has its own prompt on a separate tab. They do different jobs and do not share wording.
There is a Revert on each one that puts back the original.
The one thing that matters
Shorter works better than longer.
Every instruction competes with every other instruction, and a long prompt also makes the AI slower to reply. Past a certain length the pause before it speaks becomes noticeable, and callers hang up in it.
If you want to change one behaviour, change one paragraph. Do not add a new rule on top of the old one.
Common mistakes
Adding a rule instead of fixing the one that is wrong. Now there are two rules and the AI picks one.
Putting facts in here. They go stale where nobody thinks to look.
Writing for a reader. It is spoken. Instructions about formatting, lists and headings do not apply.