How to write and optimize Guidance for AI Agent

AI Agent uses the instructions you provide in Guidance to understand how it should respond to specific scenarios with shoppers.

Since AI Agent considers Guidance before any other knowledge source or action, it plays a big role in shaping the experience of shoppers.

Review this article to understand how you can optimize Guidance for AI. Well written Guidance helps AI Agent successfully handle inquiries in a way that’s consistent with your brand’s policies, procedures and expectations.

Identifying scenarios for Guidance

The first step to creating effective Guidance is knowing what to write.

You’ll want to create Guidance for AI Agent so that it can handle a variety of common scenarios and inquiries from shoppers. These might include topics like order tracking, returns, feedback, and cancellations.

Here are some tips to get you started:

Spot trends → Use the Optimize page to identify the top 3-5 reasons (ticket intents) shoppers contact you. What does AI Agent need to know to address these inquiries successfully? What are the relevant policies? What steps should an agent take?
Give ticket feedback → Regularly review and give feedback on closed AI Agent tickets. This type of exercise allows you to find tickets where the AI handed over the conversation to your team or did not answer correctly. Create new Guidance to address these topics
- In the ticket Feedback tab you can also see whether the AI used existing Guidance to form its response. Edit your Guidance as needed.
Audit old Guidance → from the main menu, go to AI Agent > Knowledge > Guidance. Use the “Last Updated” column to review older instructions. Is the Guidance still relevant? Have your store's policies or procedures changed since the Guidance was written?

Still not sure what to write? Use the following table for inspiration. While it’s not exhaustive, it covers broad categories of interactions that most brands have with their shoppers. You can also find inspiration on our blog.

Category	Scenario	Example customer inquiry
Order management	Returns Exchanges Cancellations	“Can I cancel my order?”
Order status	Order confirmations Order ETAs	“Where is my order?”
Subscriptions	Skipping an order Pausing a subscription Changing subscriptions	“I’m away next week and need to skip my veggie box”
Order issues	Damaged orders Missing orders Wrong orders	“The t-shirt I ordered arrived with a hole in it”
Shipping	Tracking number Shipping address changes Shipping costs Duties and international shipping	“Do you ship to Hawaii for free?”

Tips for writing effective Guidance

The more simple, straightforward and comprehensive you can be with your Guidance instructions, the more accurate and effective AI Agent will be. If your instructions are confusing for a person to read, the AI will likely find it confusing too.

Here are some general tips to help AI Agent use Guidance successfully:

Simplify your language → think about how your shoppers frame their questions or talk about your products. Make sure AI Agent understands their language and terminology. Rather than “yes” or “no” answers, use full sentences to disambiguate the topic and the steps AI Agent should follow.
Make your instructions scannable → AI benefits from well-formatted text. Avoid writing everything in a single paragraph. Instead use rich formatting like lists, numbered steps and bolded text to break out instructions visually.
Have a clear audience → if the scenario your Guidance describes refers to a specific customer, tell AI Agent clearly who you’re talking about (for example, “customers” versus “VIPs”)
- Use variables, like Shopify customer tags, to directly reference types of customers or orders
Explain key terms → Explain what special terms mean, spell out acronyms the first time you use them, and avoid ambiguity when giving instructions

Examples of Guidance best practices

The following best practices can significantly impact how successfully AI Agent uses Guidance, but are good practices for any knowledge source that AI uses.

Avoid ambiguity

Ambiguity increases the chances AI Agent will misinterpret your instructions or give an incorrect answer. If a person finds your instructions ambiguous or difficult to follow, so will the AI.

Make sure every scenario within Guidance has a specific resolution path. This ensures the AI has a predictable, repeatable outcome for each scenario and minimizes unintended behaviors.

✅ Good practice	When a shopper asks about delays in shipping time Respond to the customer with “XYZ” to indicate that we understand their concern If they respond with “ABC”, then escalate to a human agent
❌ Poor practice	“Complaints about shipping time should be handled by a human agent”

Focus on “do’s” rather than “dont’s”

Avoid using Guidance to tell AI Agent what it shouldn’t do. Instead, tell AI Agent exactly how it should proceed with step-by-step instructions. This creates consistency and reduces guesswork for the AI.

✅ Good practice	“when you receive a compliant message from a customer, do/respond with XYZ…”
❌ Poor practice	“don't reply to tickets about complaints…”

Format text to create clarity

AI performs better when long paragraphs are formatted using bullet points, number steps or bolded text.

We recommend using WHEN, IF and THEN statements to clearly format your instructions.

✅ Good practice

WHEN a shopper asks to return an order:

IF the order was placed less than or equal to 15 days ago, THEN…
- tell the shopper they are eligible for return.
- send them to our return portal.
- tell them they’ll get a prepaid return label via email once they fill out the required information in the portal.
IF the order was placed more than 15 days ago, THEN...

❌ Poor practice

When a shopper asks for a return, they are eligible if the order was placed less than or equal to 15 days ago. Send them to our return portal and say they will get a prepaid label via email. They are not eligible for a return if the order was placed more than 15 days ago

Unsupported actions in Guidance

There are a number of actions that AI Agent cannot perform through Guidance. You can accomplish most of these tasks through specific AI Agent settings, another Gorgias feature, or a different approach to working with the AI.

Ticket-related tasks → while you can ask AI Agent to “hand over” or “escalate” tickets in Guidance, you cannot ask it to make other changes to tickets. You should use Rules to automate tasks like:
- “Leave an internal note
- “Delay the response by X hours”
- “Send Macro XYZ”
- “Assign ticket to Agent X”
Tone of voice instructions → although you can tell AI Agent what to say in Guidance, any instructions about brand voice and tone should be set up in your AI Agent settings. AI Agent automatically takes tone of voice into account for all interactions based on these settings.
Edit external data or tools → you can use specific Shopify order and customer data as variables in your Guidance, but otherwise AI Agent cannot reference other external tools or data unless you use AI Support Actions.
Trigger AI Support Actions → you can connect AI Agent to third-party apps to fetch data or make changes on your behalf. However, at the moment, you cannot directly reference an Action in Guidance.
- If you want AI Agent to use an Action, give the Action a descriptive title and description so that the AI triggers the Action for matching scenarios
- Because Guidance takes precedence over Actions, you should remove instructions in Guidance that conflict with your description for an Action
Send Macros → at the moment, you cannot directly reference macros in Guidance. If your team uses an important macro to resolve shopper inquiries, you can either:
- give AI Agent access to the macro. The AI can then use the content from the macro as a knowledge source to answer questions.
- Copy and paste the relevant information from the macro to write your Guidance

How to write and optimize Guidance for AI AgentUpdated 3 days ago