Prompt Like a Pro - Main Prompt

Best practices when using the "main prompt" section of the Bot Settings. Improving the main prompt to get better bot responses.

Many people are chomping at the bit to use the new chatbot technology that has emerged since OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5 and 4, but these chatbots either come pre-built and don’t fit your needs exactly OR they require you to build prompts that guide that bot to behave the way you want in representing your brand and completing your goals. Agent Ai Chat Bot falls in the category of the latter. Unlike the competition, Agent Ai Chat Bot has many features that allow you to tune your bot to fit your exact needs, but for this post, we will focus on the main prompt.

What Should Make Up the Main Prompt?

The main prompt of Agent Ai Chat Bot is the area where you should tell your bot how to act. This includes telling the bot a bit about the:

• Identity – who the bot should behave as

• Setting – why the conversation is taking place

• Possible FAQ – guides to answer common questions

• Operating Box – fence around the types of conversations you want the bot to engage in

Take the following example of a bot built to work in real estate, responding to qualify prospects that are being contacted as part of a cold outbound text message campaign. @lead_name and @rep_name are variables that you should be using throughout the settings page that get auto-loaded with the correct data each time the bot is executed:

Example Main Prompt (good)

Identity

When you give your Agent Ai Chat Bot an identity, it’s important to really think about how the identity you give it may alter how it responds. For example look at the following examples. Bot use the prompt above, but one uses a different identity:

Act as a friendly, but sales savvy investor partner named @rep_name at a cash home buying company called Best Offer Depot…

Act an assistant named @rep_name at a cash home buying company called Best Offer Depot…

Notice how the first example, where Agent Ai Chat Bot is acting as a friendly, but sales savvy investor partner the responses are more certain. The bot is acting with confidence because it’s an authority role at the company. It’s not going to be overly formal with its responses or divulge details that weren’t requested. In the second example Agent Ai Chat Bot is acting as an assistant. In this example we see the bot is quick to apologize, but the bot will also do other things like using the contact’s name too often or sounding too formal in responses. I tend to prefer the first example. Responses are more to the point, sound more authoritative and don’t talk about things unless necessary.

Setting

It’s important to let your bot know why the conversation is taking place. If you were dropped into a dark room with no instructions other than, “you’d better perform well” and then a person over the intercom said “Who are you?”, you would have no idea how to respond. Tell the bot why the conversation is taking place, how the bot and the contact arrived at this conversation, how the contact is likely feeling at this point in time, etc. Below are some examples of different settings you may want to use in different scenarios:

Inbound Lead – …@lead_name filled out a form online that forwarded them to you. The form was part of an advertisement from your company saying you can get @lead_name an offer on their property within 1 hour…

Cold Text – …@lead_name received an unprompted cold text message from you asking whether they own property. We aren’t even certain yet whether or not they actually own the property. @lead_name probably gets texts like this all the time so they may be hesitant to answer or even frustrated that you are reaching out.

Possible FAQ

You’ve been talking to leads in your industry long enough you know the most common questions they ask. This main prompt is a great catchall space to tell the bot the information it needs to know to answer these questions. Here are some examples of things you may want to tell your bot about in case a lead asks:

• Business name

• Operating hours

• Cost of your product or service

• How they can contact you (email, website, etc.)

• Business value proposition

• Business vision/ mission

Operating Box

If you don’t have any experience with AI (or limited experience), bots will rarely say “I don’t know” or deny their ability to answer. They will come up with a response to the best of their ability. See the example below where we leave out the part of the prompt that says “If @lead_name asks about anything not pertaining to real estate, tell @lead_name that you do not work in that industry, but can refer them elsewhere.''

This kind of response could blow your cover… because I doubt The Hungry Bear is a real restaurant!

Separating Sections

Just like humans prefer reading things that are broken down and organized (chapters, headings, etc.), bots prefer the same. If you organize your main prompt into sections using something called markdown, your bot will have a much easier time following instructions. More about markdown can be studied here, but for now you just need to know “#” signifies a main heading. Let’s apply markdown to the example used above.

Example Main Prompt (better)

Doesn’t that look nicer? Agent Ai Chat Bot thinks so too 👍

Doesn’t have to make repairs.

#Response Extra Tips

– If @lead_name asks about anything not pertaining to real estate, tell @lead_name that you do not work in that industry, but can refer them elsewhere

– If @lead_name asks you a personal question, come up with a sincere response

– Do not tell @lead_name you are a bot

– Keep your response less than 160 characters in length

Doesn’t that look nicer? Agent Ai Chat Bot thinks so too 👍

But There’s More…

Not only does your bot learn from the words you tell it, but it also learns from the tone of how you write it. If you didn’t know this already, these AI tools are really just great text predictors. They take in all the information you give it and then predict the best response. So if you write in the most boring tone, but tell the bot to use a funny and friendly voice, your boring tone is likely going to drown out its instruction to be funny and friendly. We can make the prompt above even more powerful by improving our wording to make it less… boring.

Example Main Prompt (best)

Now let’s compare… Here’s what we got from our older version of the main prompt that was the same overall message, but more boring to read:

And here’s what we got when we made our main prompt less formal sounding and more fun!

Summary

You wouldn’t believe how many people come to Agent Ai Chat Bot from other competitors who build the main prompt for them and don’t allow edits. In the beginning it can seem daunting, but once you get your bot settings dialled in, there’s no stopping the new lead machine you’ve created!