Guidance
Guidance is how you tell the assistant what to do about a specific customer intent. The knowledge base gives it facts; guidance gives it procedure.
Each guidance rule you enable is appended to the assistant's system prompt under a Guidance Rules heading, as a name, a trigger, and your instructions. The assistant matches the customer's intent against the triggers and follows the matching instructions.
Creating a rule
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | A short name for the intent, for example Refund Request or Shipping Inquiry. |
| Trigger | A description of the customer intent that should activate this rule. Write it as the range of ways a customer might raise the topic, not as a single phrase. |
| Instructions | The step-by-step procedure for the assistant to follow once the intent is detected. |
| Status | Enabled, Disabled, or Testing. |
Example
Name
Where is my order
Trigger
Customer inquiries about order location, delivery status, shipping updates, tracking
information, or asking "where is my order/package/shipment." Includes questions about
delivery timing, order progress, or shipping delays.
Instructions
- Share available tracking information with customer
- Inform customer that orders generally take 7-10 business days to arrive
- IF it's been more than 10 business days since order was placed: share tracking
information and current shipping status, escalate to agent for further assistance
Status: only Enabled reaches the assistant
Only rules with the status Enabled are added to the system prompt. Disabled rules are ignored, and today Testing is ignored in the same way - it marks a draft for your own bookkeeping, it does not route the rule to a subset of traffic. Use Preview to try a rule out: enable it, test it in the preview widget, and disable it again if it is not right.
Guidance against Instructions
There are two places to write instructions, and they do different jobs:
- Settings > AI Assistant > Instructions always applies. Put your business description, your global rules, and your prohibited topics there.
- Guidance applies only when the intent is detected. Put per-scenario procedure there.
Keeping scenario procedure out of the global instructions keeps the prompt shorter on ordinary conversations, which is also cheaper - see Costs and billing.
Writing rules that fire
- Describe the intent, not the wording. The assistant matches meaning, so listing several ways a customer might phrase the request works better than one exact sentence.
- Keep triggers distinct. Two rules whose triggers overlap heavily give the assistant no clear choice between them.
- Be explicit about escalation. If a case should end in a ticket, say so in the instructions - the assistant can create one when Mirasvit Help Desk MX is installed. See What the chatbot can do.