Understanding Guidance

You will learn

What Guidance is, how it differs from Content and skills, and the 4 settings you can use to shape how Customer Agent behaves.

What Guidance is

Guidance is how you control the way Customer Agent communicates and decides what to escalate. It applies to every conversation, across every channel, and across every skill.

Guidance changes how Customer Agent acts globally — the voice it speaks in, the writing rules it follows, and the situations it hands off to a human.

Content supplies the information Customer Agent uses to answer questions, such as your shipping and return policies. Guidance shapes how it communicates that information and when it starts a handoff.

Guidance vs. skills

It’s easy to confuse these two when you’re configuring Customer Agent:

• Skills are what Customer Agent handles — specific request types, often involving tools or multi-step workflows. Examples: Returns & exchanges, Order tracking, a custom Warranty Claim skill.
• Guidance is how Customer Agent communicates across everything it handles — tone, writing rules, escalation triggers.

A good test:

• If you want Customer Agent to handle a specific kind of request differently (call a different API, render a specific link, run a multi-step workflow) → that’s a skill.
• If you want to change how Customer Agent writes across every conversation, or trigger a handoff in specific situations → that’s Guidance.

For example, deciding when to start a return is the Returns & exchanges skill. Deciding that Customer Agent should sound friendly across every response is Guidance.

The 4 Guidance settings

These 4 settings shape different aspects of how Customer Agent behaves.

Brand summary

A short description of your brand — what you sell, who you sell to, and what makes you different. Customer Agent uses this to understand your business when identifying spam and messages it can respond to.

See How to write your brand summary.

Tone of voice

The overall personality and voice Customer Agent uses. Choose a preset (Neutral, Professional, Friendly, or Playful), or write a custom tone for a more distinctive voice.

See How to set your tone of voice.

Communication style rules

Specific writing guidelines that apply to every response — things like “use emojis sparingly,” “keep responses under 3 sentences,” or “never apologize for things outside your control.”

See How to configure communication style rules.

Escalation rules

Triggers for starting a handoff to a human. For example, “escalate when a shopper reports a defective product” or “escalate any legal threats.” Enabled escalation rules are evaluated before Customer Agent generates a response. When a rule matches, Customer Agent starts the handoff according to your handoff settings.

See How to configure escalation rules.

How Guidance applies

Guidance applies globally. Every skill inherits your Guidance settings. You don’t need to configure Guidance per skill.

To edit Guidance, you’ll need an Owner, Admin, or Manager role.

Next steps

Select Customer Agent > Guidance. A good order to set up Guidance:

1. Brand summary first — helps Customer Agent understand your business when identifying spam.
2. Tone of voice — pick a preset or write your own.
3. Communication style rules — add 3-5 specific writing rules.
4. Escalation rules — set the triggers that hand off to a human.
5. Enable the communication style and escalation rules you want Customer Agent to use, then click Save to apply your Guidance changes. New rules start disabled.

Then test in the playground to see how your Guidance shapes responses.