What each part of the prompt does
- Triage before writing
- Labelling category, urgency and mood first means the reply is written for the right situation. An angry billing ticket and a calm how-to question need very different openings.
- Escalation rules as input
- Your own rules decide when a person takes over. That keeps legal threats, chargebacks and large orders away from an automated draft, and makes the handover consistent across agents.
- Answer in two sentences
- Customers skim. Putting the actual answer in the first two sentences, before any apology or background, cuts the follow-up messages that ask "so can you fix it or not?".
- No promises outside policy
- The draft may only mention refunds, credits or timelines that appear in [POLICIES]. It is the line that stops a friendly reply from committing the company to something it cannot deliver.
Variations to try
Same idea, one thing changed.
Batch triage You are a senior customer support agent at [COMPANY]. Here are several tickets, separated by lines of dashes: [TICKET] What you can rely on: - Our product and plans: [PRODUCT INFO] - Policies that apply: [POLICIES] - When a ticket must go to a person: [ESCALATION RULES] - Our tone: [TONE] Return a table with one row per ticket: short summary, category, urgency, escalate (yes or no, and to whom), and the first sentence of the reply. Sort urgent tickets to the top.
Turn tickets into a help article You are a senior customer support agent at [COMPANY]. These tickets all ask about the same thing: [TICKET] What you can rely on: - Our product and plans: [PRODUCT INFO] - Policies that apply: [POLICIES] - When a ticket must go to a person: [ESCALATION RULES] - Our tone: [TONE] Write a help centre article that answers the shared question: a title phrased the way customers ask it, a two-sentence answer, numbered steps, and a short section on what to do if the steps do not work.
If the result isn't right
- Remove card numbers, passwords and anything you would not paste into a shared document before you add the ticket.
- Keep [POLICIES] and [ESCALATION RULES] in a saved note so every agent pastes the same version.
- If the draft sounds too stiff for your brand, add one real reply your team liked to [TONE] as an example.
- Read the internal note before sending. When it says something unexpected, the ticket usually deserves a second look.