Advanced Agent Configuration & Troubleshooting

System Prompt Structure

A well-structured System Prompt leads to more consistent and natural AI behavior. We recommend organizing your prompt into the following six sections:

Background — The AI’s identity, including its name, personality, company, and reason for calling. The AI will know this information but won’t mention it unless asked.
Goals — What the AI needs to accomplish on the call, e.g. booking a meeting or collecting contact details.
Behaviour — How the AI should speak and conduct itself, including tone, pacing, and the use of filler words to sound more natural.
General Guidelines — A walkthrough of the call flow covering the opening, pitch, and ask. Treat these as guidelines, not a rigid script — give the AI room to adapt naturally.
Objection Handling — How to handle common pushbacks, such as the decision maker being unavailable or the gatekeeper refusing to transfer the call.
Guardrails — Behaviors to avoid, such as hanging up immediately when reaching voicemail, or not discussing pricing.

Core principle: Less is more. The simpler and more concise your prompt, the more naturally the AI will behave. Overloading the prompt with highly specific responses will degrade performance. Give the AI direction, not a word-for-word script.

Variable Usage

Variables allow you to dynamically insert lead information into the System Prompt, making each call feel more personalized. Keep the following in mind:

Only variables listed in the tooltip can be used. Currently supported variables are {{name}}, {{company_name}}, {{job_role}}, {{job_portal}}, and {{job_description}}.
Variable names must match exactly as shown — including capitalization and underscores. For example, {{job_portal}} is correct while {{jobPortal}} will not
Use Configure Template Variables to set default test values for each variable so you can verify they work correctly during test conversations.

Improving Conversation Naturalness

How natural your AI sounds depends largely on how the prompt is written. A common mistake is over-scripting:

Listing out five different variations of the same line and instructing the AI to rotate between them.

This creates dependency on the script and makes the AI sound more robotic. A better approach is:

Give a single, concise directional instruction such as “Invite the prospect to learn more via WhatsApp in a natural, friendly tone” and let the AI decide the best phrasing.

Additionally, when a caller pauses to think and says “Hmm” or “Uh…”, the AI tends to cut in too early. To prevent this, enable the Skip Turn tool in Settings and add the following to your System Prompt:

If the user appears to be thinking, e.g. they say "Hmm" or "Uh", use skip_turn to allow them time to finish their thought.

Advanced Tool Usage

Skip Turn

Skip Turn forces the AI to stay silent for one turn, allowing the caller to finish speaking before the AI responds. It is off by default. Enable it in the following scenarios:

When collecting an email address, add to System Prompt:

When the user is giving their email address, patiently wait for them to say the full email. Use skip_turn in these cases. When the user ends the email address with .com or .sg, stop using skip_turn and confirm the email address with them. Never say 'skip_turn' in your response.

When collecting a phone number, add to System Prompt:

When the user is giving their phone number, patiently wait for them to say the full number. Use skip_turn in these cases. A standard phone number is 8 digits long — once the user has said 8 digits, you may respond. Never say 'skip_turn' in your response.

Play Keypad Touch Tone

When a call connects to an automated phone menu, this tool simulates key presses to navigate to the right department. It is off by default. Enable it in Settings and add specific navigation instructions to your System Prompt, for example:

If you encounter an automated call centre menu, use the play_keypad_touch_tone tool to navigate. If prompted: "For vendors, press 2" → Press 2, then wait patiently to be connected.

Turn Settings Guide

Turn Timeout (Default: 7 seconds) — How long the AI waits for a response before speaking again. If you expect the call to go through a gatekeeper or automated phone system, increase this to 15–20 seconds to prevent the AI from speaking too soon.

Silence End Call Timeout (Default: -1) — How many seconds of silence before the system automatically ends the call. Setting it to -1 disables this feature. If you want to save on call minutes, set this to 15 seconds so the call ends automatically after 15 seconds of silence.

Troubleshooting

AI is not ending the call when it should

Add an explicit instruction at each point in the call flow where the call should end:

After thanking the prospect, use end_call immediately and say nothing else.

AI repeats sentences when interrupted

Add the following to your System Prompt and keep sentences short to reduce the chance of interruptions occurring in the first place:

DO NOT REPEAT THE SENTENCE WHEN INTERRUPTED — if interrupted, continue directly with the next part of the script.

AI continues the script despite no response

Add the following to the Guardrails section of your System Prompt:

If you do not get a response from the user after 2 attempts,end the call immediately.

Also consider setting Silence End Call Timeout to 15 seconds as an additional safeguard.

Goals are being marked as successful incorrectly

This is usually caused by a goal description that is too broad. Make your goals more specific — for example, instead of “Book a meeting”, write “The prospect explicitly agreed to a callback from a consultant. It must be a phone call, not any other form of communication.”

Words are being transcribed incorrectly due to accents

The AI’s transcription layer may not accurately recognize certain accents or local pronunciations. Add correction rules to the Guardrails section of your System Prompt, for example:

If the user says "Ken", interpret this as them saying "Can". If the user says "Vicky", interpret this as them saying "Speaking".

AI cannot collect emails or phone numbers properly

Enable the Skip Turn tool in the Settings tab and add the relevant prompt instructions from the Advanced Tool Usage section above. This forces the AI to wait silently while the caller spells out their full email address or phone number before responding.

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