Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Support Professional or higher |
| Also required | Copilot |
| Access | Admin |
Instructions the agent carries out by hand, written inside a procedure. They are for the steps auto assist cannot take itself, in a system it cannot reach.
Write them
- In Knowledge, click Manage articles in the sidebar and select Procedures. Open the procedure, or create one.
- Write the step that leads into them, for instance "Present the instructions below to the agent:".
- Click the Insert agent instructions icon and write what the agent has to do.
- Publish the procedure, then watch what an agent does with it.
They behave differently from the rest of auto assist. A suggested reply or action waits for the agent to approve it; an instruction does not ask. It appears at the point in the conversation where the procedure says it should, the agent does the work by hand, and marks it complete.
What belongs here
- Anything in a system auto assist cannot reach. Checking stock, creating an account, updating a record somewhere else.
- Steps that need a person to look. Verifying identity against a document, judging whether a photo shows the damage described.
- The exact sequence where doing it in the wrong order causes a problem.
What does not
Anything the procedure can do itself. An instruction telling an agent to send a reply that auto assist could have suggested is work you moved from the machine to the person.
House style and standing rules do not belong here either: those are the same in every conversation, and repeating them in each procedure means updating them in each procedure. Communication guidelines are the place for those.
Write them for somebody doing it under pressure
Numbered, one action per line, with the name of the system and where to click. An instruction that reads like a policy statement gets skimmed and half-followed, and the agent is reading it with a customer waiting.
Prohibitions work better than aspirations
"Never state a refund amount" is followed. "Be careful with financial information" is interpreted, and the interpretation will be more helpful than you intended.
They are the part that goes stale
An instruction describes another system, and that system gets a new interface, a renamed field, an extra step. Nothing in Zendesk knows that happened, so the instruction keeps being presented, confidently, describing a screen nobody has.
Whoever owns the other system is the person to tell when a procedure depends on it. That is a conversation, not a setting, and it is what keeps these usable.
Review them when something goes wrong
Most instructions get added after an incident. That is reasonable, and it means they need pruning occasionally, because the incident is long past and the step remains.
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