Guidance cards
Break a customer agent's rules into small, reusable cards you can scope to a channel and toggle on or off—without rewriting the persona.
A guidance card is one rule the agent should follow, written as a small, self-contained card instead of buried in the persona. Cards keep the persona short and make each rule something you can scope to a channel, reorder, and switch off on its own.
A card is built from two parts:
- Condition (optional) — when the rule applies: "a customer sounds upset", "someone asks for a price".
- Instruction (required) — what to do: "reply gently and use their first name", "point them to the pricing page instead of quoting a number".
Together they read as "If condition, instruction"—or just the instruction, when there's no condition.
Two kinds of card
Each card shapes one of two things, set by its surface:
- Conventions (reply surface) — shape how the agent replies. Tone, formatting, what to say or avoid, where to send people.
- Scoped rules (classifier surface) — shape whether the agent replies at all. These feed the reply classifier: "don't reply to thanks-only messages", "always reply when someone mentions a refund".
The editor's surface toggle switches between the two.
Categories
Conventions are grouped into a fixed set of categories. The grouping organizes the editor and the order the rules reach the agent—framing first, catch-all last:
| Category | For rules about… |
|---|---|
| Voice & tone | How the agent sounds. |
| Clarification | When and how to ask the customer for more. |
| Content & sources | What to cite, link, or refuse to answer. |
| Safety | Hard limits and sensitive topics. |
| Policies & other | Anything else. |
Scoped rules (classifier cards) aren't categorized—they're a flat list.
The Voice & tone category is for tone rules the agent applies as it writes. It's separate from the agent's standalone Voice & tone rewrite, which rewords the finished reply in a separate pass. Use cards for targeted, channel-scoped tone tweaks; use the rewrite when you want one brand voice applied to every reply.
Scope a card to a channel
By default a card applies on every channel. Give it a channel scope to narrow it—for example, a "never quote prices" rule only on LINE, or a warmer greeting only on Instagram. A card with no channel scope applies everywhere; a scoped card applies only on the channels you pick.
Channel scope is the only targeting available today. A card is either global or limited to specific channels—there's no per-customer targeting yet.
Order and on/off
- Reorder cards within a category to control the order the agent reads them.
- Toggle any card off to retire a rule without deleting it—useful while you tune behavior.
How cards reach the agent
At reply time the agent collects every enabled card whose scope matches the live conversation, then:
- Conventions are grouped by category and added to the agent's instructions as a
Conventionssection, right after the persona. - Scoped rules are added to the classifier's reply-or-stay-quiet decision.
Because cards are scoped and ordered deterministically, the same conversation always assembles the same instructions—so they stay cheap to run.
When to use a card vs. the persona
| Put it in… | When it's… |
|---|---|
| The persona | Identity and voice—who the agent is, the through-line of how it speaks. |
| A guidance card | A specific, repeatable rule, especially one that only applies on some channels or that you'll want to toggle. |
Keeping rules in cards means the persona stays a short, readable brief instead of a wall of edge cases.