AI Chat best practices and guidelines – Assembled

This guide explains how to configure AI chat for high resolution, good customer experience, and long-term reliability.

The most important thing to understand up front:

AI chat is not one big prompt.

Different settings are used at different moments to make different decisions.

Putting the right information in the right place matters more than adding more instructions.

1. The Right Mental Model

AI chat configuration answers four different questions:

1. Should this conversation be escalated to a human?
2. Is there a workflow that should handle this request?
3. If answering, how should the assistant respond?
4. How should the response sound?

Each section of the product maps to one of these questions.

2. Style Guide: How the Assistant Should Sound

Primary purpose: control tone and delivery

Applies everywhere: all responses, including workflow responses

Use the Style Guide for:

• Tone (warm, neutral, formal, concise)
• Verbosity (short vs detailed)
• Empathy framing
• Formatting preferences
• Language patterns to avoid or prefer

Examples

• “Be calm, direct, and reassuring.”
• “Avoid over-apologizing.”
• “Prefer short paragraphs and bullets.”

Do not use the Style Guide for:

• Escalation logic
• Business rules
• Process steps
• Decision logic

Rule of thumb

If two agents gave the same answer, the style guide controls how that answer feels.

3. Critical Instructions: How the Assistant Answers (When Answering)

Primary purpose: guide answering strategy when the assistant is responding conversationally

Critical instructions help the AI decide how to respond, not what action to take.

Use Critical Instructions for:

• Whether to attempt an answer vs. ask clarifying questions
• How to handle ambiguity
• How confident or cautious to be
• Cross-cutting conversational guardrails

Good examples

• “Attempt a best-effort answer when confidence is high.”
• “Ask clarifying questions if multiple interpretations are possible.”
• “Avoid speculation when information is incomplete.”

Do not use Critical Instructions for:

• Escalation conditions
• Workflow steps or logic
• Detailed policies
• Tone or verbosity (use the style guide)

How many is reasonable?

• Recommended: ~5–15 instructions
• More is not better — unclear or overlapping instructions reduce reliability

Clear instructions improve performance.

Conflicting or overly detailed instructions can make responses less consistent.

4. Handoff Rules: When to always Escalate

Primary purpose: define situations that should always go to a human

Think of these as hard stops.

Use Handoff Rules for:

• Legal threats
• Safety or emergency scenarios
• Highly regulated requests
• Customer segments that should always speak to an agent

When a handoff rule matches, escalation happens immediately.

Do not use Handoff Rules for:

• General confusion
• Long conversations
• Common support topics that workflows can handle

Every handoff rule trades automation for certainty. Use them sparingly.

5. Company-Specific Handoff Instructions: How to Decide When to Escalate

Primary purpose: guide judgment around escalation

These instructions influence decisions but do not force escalation.

Use these instructions for:

• Explaining what “urgent” means in your business
• When escalation should be delayed to allow automation to resolve the issue
• How to interpret emotional language in your domain
• Guidance such as:
  • “Prefer workflows when they can fully resolve the request.”
  • “Escalate only after multiple unsuccessful attempts.”

Do not use these instructions for:

• Step-by-step procedures
• Exact phrase matching
• Policy text copied from internal docs

Think of this section as:

“How a strong human agent would decide when to escalate.”

6. Workflows: When Something Should Happen

Primary purpose: handle structured, repeatable actions

Use Workflows for:

• Multi-step processes
• Data collection
• Verification
• Actions like returns, cancellations, updates, or lookups

If you notice the assistant frequently explaining instead of acting, that’s usually a signal that:

• A workflow is missing, or
• A workflow is too narrowly scoped

Do not use Workflows for:

• Simple explanations
• One-off questions
• Tone or style guidance

7. Practical Setup Guidance

When configuring AI chat:

• Start with fewer, clearer instructions
• Add handoff rules only where escalation is truly required
• Use workflows for consistency and repeatability
• Revisit and refine instructions rather than continually adding new ones

8. The High Level Summary to Remember

• The style guide controls how responses sound.
• Critical instructions guide how the assistant answers.
• Workflows control what the assistant does.
• Handoff rules control when automation stops.
• Clear structure beats more configuration every time.

If you're now ready to set up your AI Chat settings, check out the How to Configure Your Assembled AI Chat using an LLM guide to get started!