Best practices: Concierge docs

A Concierge agent is a digital employee. It does its best work the same way a new hire does: with a clear brief, the facts it needs, the right tools, and feedback in its first weeks. The time you put into the brief comes back as answers your customers and team can rely on.

Start with one job

Pick one job and one channel to begin with, such as order questions in website chat, or daily numbers for your team in Slack. Get that working well, then add the next. An agent with a focused job is easier to brief, test and trust, and you can add more agents for other jobs later.

Write the brief like you would for a new hire

The agent's Instructions (on its Configure Agent page) are its job description. Write them in plain words, the way you'd brief a capable new teammate on day one. Cover who you are, what the job is, how you talk, what it can do alone, what needs a person, and when to hand off.

A starting brief to adapt

Who we are
We sell [what] to [who]. Our customers usually write about [top 3 topics].

Your job
You answer [channel] for [team]. A great day is [what success looks like].

How we talk
[Friendly and short / formal / playful]. Sign off as [name]. Never use [words to avoid].

What you can do on your own
- Look up orders, tracking and subscriptions
- Skip or swap a subscription when the customer asks

Check with a person first
- Anything about refunds, damaged items or legal threats
- Orders over [amount]

Hand off to the team when
- The customer asks for a person
- You aren't sure, or the answer isn't in our policies

What makes a good brief

Say what good looks like, not only what to avoid.
Use your real words: the policy names, product names and phrases your team uses.
Give the reason behind a rule ("we don't promise ship dates because carriers change them"). The agent handles new cases better when it knows why.
Keep it to what matters. Facts that change, like prices and policies, belong in your knowledge, not the brief.

Give it the facts

A new hire reads the handbook. Your agent reads what you put under Build and Context sources: your Brand Card, Knowledge, FAQs, Instant Answers and Policy Rules. Put your return policy, shipping times and other rules there once, and every agent answers the same way on every channel.

Give it the right tools, and no more

Under Capabilities, tick what the job needs. A support agent needs order lookup and tracking; it probably doesn't need to publish store settings. Fewer tools mean fewer ways to go wrong. Consequential actions always ask first (see Approvals).

Teach repeatable methods with playbooks

When there's a right way to do a recurring job, such as a weekly report or a damaged-item process, write it once as a playbook and choose which agents follow it. It's the written process you'd hand a new hire, so you don't have to explain it again in every request.

Do a test run before it meets customers

Try it in Playground

Open Operate > Playground and ask what real customers ask: the easy questions, the angry ones, and the odd ones.

Fix the brief, not the answer

When a reply is off, change the instructions, knowledge or capabilities that caused it, then ask again.

Go live on one channel

Set the agent to Active on the channel you picked and watch the first conversations in Operate > Inbox.

Coach it in the first weeks

Read the first conversations. Review them in Operate > Inbox and Operate > History.
Step in when needed. Reply in a conversation and the agent steps back; click Return to Agent when you're done.
Turn corrections into memories. When your team handles a handoff, agents suggest what they learned. Review them in Build > Memory under Suggested.
Find the gaps. Check Optimize for questions your knowledge doesn't answer yet, and add the answers.

How your team should ask

Teammates get better results from an agent the same way they'd get them from a colleague: say the outcome, the time frame and the format.

From vague to clear

Instead of "How are sales?", ask "Compare last week's sales with the week before, by product, as a table."
Instead of "Check the inbox", ask "Which customers wrote in the last 48 hours and still haven't had a reply?"
Instead of "Sort out Jane's subscription", ask "Skip Jane's next subscription order and tell me the new date."

Treat it like a teammate

If an answer surprises you, ask the agent why. It explains what it looked at and what it did, and every step is in the record.

Guides

On the product page

Learn more

What is a digital employee?

Best practices