Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Also required | AI agents - Advanced |
| Access | Admin |
A procedure tells the agent how to handle a case, in sentences. It replaces the flow chart, and it fails in different ways.
Write one
- Open the AI agent's procedures.
- Add one and name it for the case it covers.
- Write the steps as instructions in plain language.
- Say what to do when a step cannot be completed.
- Test it, including the paths where something is missing.
Write it for a new colleague
Everything you would tell somebody on their first day, including the things that seem obvious. The agent has no context beyond what you write, and the obvious step is the one that gets omitted.
Be explicit about order and conditions
"Check the order status first. If it has shipped, give the tracking link. If it has not, tell them the expected date." Sequence and conditions carry the logic, and vagueness here is what produces confident wrong behaviour.
Say what not to do
No promises about delivery dates you cannot verify, no refunds, no exceptions. Prohibitions matter more here than in most writing, because a generative system will otherwise find a helpful-sounding way to say yes.
Handle the missing case
What happens when the order number is not found, when the customer will not give one, when the answer is not covered. Every procedure needs those, and they are where the real failures happen.
One case per procedure
Long procedures covering several situations are hard for the agent to follow and hard for you to debug. When a transcript goes wrong, you want to be able to point at one procedure.
Test the ugly paths
Not the happy one. Give it a wrong number, an unrelated question mid-way, and a refusal to answer. That is where you learn what you actually wrote.
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