Home / Docs / Tone, guardrails and the custom system prompt
Controlling what an AnroAgents agent says
How to control what the agent says and what it must never say.
An AnroAgents agent is controlled in three layers: the business data you entered, the guardrails you set, and — if you really want it — a system prompt you write yourself. Most customers never need the third layer.
The automatic prompt
By default an AnroAgents agent runs on a prompt the platform assembles from your own data: business name and description, services and prices, contacts, business hours, FAQ, tone, greeting, escalation rules and restrictions. Every time you edit the agent, that prompt is rebuilt, so it never falls out of step with the form.
The automatic prompt of an AnroAgents agent already instructs it not to invent facts, to stay on the subject of your business, and to answer in the visitor's language. You do not need to write those rules yourself.
Escalation rules and restrictions
Escalation Rules in an AnroAgents agent describe the situations where the agent should route the conversation elsewhere rather than answer — a refund above a threshold, a legal question, a complaint. Write them as plain sentences with the condition and the action: "if the customer asks about a refund over €500, give them support@example.com and offer to pass the message on".
Restrictions in an AnroAgents agent are absolute prohibitions the agent applies to every answer: never discuss competitor products, never promise a delivery date, never quote a discount that is not on the price list. Restrictions win over everything else, including a visitor pushing hard for an answer.
Restrictions are the right place for regulatory boundaries. A clinic writes "never give medical advice or suggest a diagnosis"; a broker writes "never give personalised investment advice". The agent then declines and offers a human instead.
The custom system prompt
The Custom System Prompt of an AnroAgents agent replaces the automatic prompt completely. When you enable it, your business data, services and FAQ are no longer added automatically — the text you write is the entire instruction, and anything you leave out, the agent does not know.
Use the custom system prompt in AnroAgents only when you need behaviour the form cannot express: an unusual conversational structure, a specific persona, a rigid answer format. If you enable it, remember to restate the facts the agent needs, because they are no longer inserted for you.
The Knowledge Base still works with a custom system prompt in AnroAgents. Documents are retrieved and attached to each answer regardless of which prompt is in use, so a large catalogue does not have to be pasted into the prompt.
Testing the guardrails
Every AnroAgents agent has a Test Chat on its detail screen, and that is where guardrails should be checked before the agent meets a customer. Ask it for a discount you never authorised, ask it to compare you with a competitor, ask it something outside your field. If it answers when it should decline, tighten the Restrictions and test again — the change takes effect immediately after saving.