Agent Instructions

Write instructions that shape how your agent behaves, what it focuses on, and how it responds to your customers.

Instructions tell your agent who it is and how to behave: its role, its tone, what to focus on, and what to avoid. Your agent follows them in every conversation, on every channel.

Where to edit instructions

• In Settings, in the AI section, under Base instructions.
• In the Playground, under System prompt, where you can test changes right away.

Instructions can be up to 20,000 characters.

Start from a template

Select Use a template to start from an example, then edit it to fit your business:

The templates keep the agent focused on your knowledge: it stays in its role, politely redirects off-topic questions, and doesn’t mention that it was trained on data.

Writing good instructions

Instructions work best when they’re specific. A useful structure:

### Role
You are Ava, the support assistant for Acme, an online furniture store.
You help customers with orders, delivery, returns, and product questions.

### Tone
Friendly and concise. Use short paragraphs. Use the customer's name if you know it.

### Rules
- Only answer questions about Acme and its products.
- If you don't know the answer, say so and offer to connect the customer with our team.
- Never promise discounts or delivery dates that aren't in your knowledge.
- For order changes, ask for the order number first.

Do

• Describe your business and your customers.
• Say what to do when the agent doesn’t know the answer.
• Give examples of the tone you want.
• Test changes in the Playground before relying on them.

Avoid

• Pasting facts such as prices or policies into instructions. Put them in knowledge instead, so they’re easier to update.
• Contradictory rules, such as “be brief” and “explain everything in detail”.

Channel-specific instructions

Each deployment channel can add its own additional instructions on top of the main ones, for example to keep WhatsApp replies short. See Deployments.