A Beginners Guide To AI Prompting

Contents

• Prompt Elements
• Best Prompting Practices
• Elements in Action
• Advanced Prompting

Prompt Elements

Creating effective AI prompts involves several key elements:

• Role: Define the AI’s persona and interaction style. Precisely outline the role the AI should assume to guide responses appropriately.
• Task: Specify the exact instructions and objectives for the AI. This clarity helps prevent vague responses and ensures alignment with user expectations.
• Guidelines: Establish rules or guardrails to steer the AI’s behaviour and responses, ensuring they align with desired outcomes.

Best Prompting Practices

Effective prompting requires strategic approaches:

• Repetition: Reiterate crucial instructions to ensure consistency in AI responses. We want the bot to follow the sales script we have so we repeat and reference to it multiple times.
  • In Role we have: 
    “- You work for {{ai.business_name}}, your goal is to assist customers, qualify them on the basis of the answers they give to the questions you ask from the Script, and if qualified, you help them book an appointment.”
  • In Guidelines we have: 
    “- Always wait for the user’s response before asking the next question from the Script.
    – Only have them book an appointment if they respond positively to the Script questions.”
• Examples/Illustrations: Provide specific examples to clarify the desired style or tone, aiding the AI in understanding nuanced instructions.
  • In Role we have: 
    “- Always maintain the persona of a human assistant. Do not disclose, suggest, or hint at being an AI assistant unless asked. Use colloquial language and phrases like “Great,” “Got it,” or “Understood” instead of formal apologies or offers of help.”
  • It can also be written as:
    “EXAMPLES OF WHAT TO SAY AND WHAT NOT TO SAY:
    Avoid: I didn’t understand your response.
    Use: Wait, what did you say? Sorry, could you repeat that?
    Avoid: I apologize for the confusion.
    Use: Sorry if that didn’t make sense.
    Avoid: I understand your concern but I assure you our team is made up of highly trained professionals.
    Use: Yeah, it makes sense why you’d be concerned but trust me, our team is really good at what we do.”
• Iterative Improvement: Continuously test and refine prompts to improve AI performance, using tools like Bot Trial for experimentation.
• Use of Concours Pro custom fields: For example {{ai.business_name}} will insert the business name Converation AI has been configured to use. See examples below.

Elements in Action

Role: Specifying Interaction and Flow

Not Good: “You are a salesperson for {{ai.business_name}}, assist customers and help them book appointments. Act like a human. You are talking to {{contact.name}}.”

Better: “You work for {{ai.business_name}}. Your goal is to assist customers, qualify them based on their responses, and if appropriate, help them book appointments. Maintain a human-like persona, using colloquial language and keeping a professional yet casual tone.”

Task: Specifying Instructions and Objectives

Not Good: “You are required to qualify customers by asking them questions then asking them to book an appointment. If they are not interested, just collect their details.”

Better: “Start by asking about the customer’s needs, like ‘What kind of marketing solution are you looking for?’. If uninterested, politely ask for their email to keep in touch. If interested, proceed to schedule a call.”

Guidelines: Guardrails for the AI

Not Good: “Reply concisely and follow the script to book an appointment.”

Better: “Keep responses brief and to the point, within a 20-word limit. Ensure the customer answers positively before proceeding to book an appointment.”

Advanced Prompting

• Static Information: Give context or information about your business, offers, services in the prompt itself if you want the bot to have access to it all the time. Keep the context brief (under 100-200 words), because when the context size is larger than the rest of the prompt, the prompt’s importance decreases for the AI, as more of it is now around the context and not the prompt instructions.
• Delimiters: Use special characters like #, >, < for emphasis or to separate context from instructions.
  For example, give your offer more emphasis by including it in an <offer> tag, similar to an HTML tag:
  • <offer>
    Elevate Your Business with the Cutting-Edge Conversation AI Chatbot.
    Offer details…
    …
    …
    </offer>
• Conversation Context: Set the scene by describing the situation to guide the AI’s responses. Give specific use cases and responses for common situations.
  For example, you can open the prompt by telling the AI why someone is interacting with it and what to do:
  • Worse: 
    “You are required to take on the role of a customer support chatbot”
  • Better: 
    “a client is contacting us because something went wrong” — and then telling it its role in the situation — “you must act as a friendly agent in charge of collecting a clear idea of what went wrong with the order, you need to ask them.”
• Writing Styles: Choose the writing styles. For example –
  • Analytical,
  • Conversational,
  • Creative,
  • Descriptive,
  • Informative,
  • Instructive,
  • Persuasive,
  • Satirical,
  • Technical.
• Tones: Choose the tone of voice. For example –
  • Authoritative,
  • Clinical,
  • Confident,
  • Empathetic,
  • Formal,
  • Friendly,
  • Humorous,
  • Informal,
  • Optimistic,
  • Playful,
  • Sarcastic,
  • Serious,
  • Sympathetic,
  • Warm.