Agent Roles and Instructions

Agent Roles help you reach a useful starting point faster by preparing behavior for a common job, while instructions adapt that job to your business. For example, a sales role can focus on qualification and next steps, while a support role can prioritize diagnosis and human handover. Your saved instructions and business knowledge remain the final source of how an agent should behave.

Navigation: Open a Voice, Email, or Messaging Agent, then select its General tab.

Choose Agent Roles

Choose roles to combine compatible responsibilities without writing every behavior from scratch. Use only roles that belong in the same customer experience; an agent with a focused job is easier to test and improve.

Open Agent Roles and review each role’s description. Select the role that best matches the agent’s main responsibility. When the selector permits several roles, Versafy prepares one combined set of defaults for you to review.

Custom is for an agent whose behavior you want to write from scratch. It cannot be combined with the other roles. You can give a Custom role a team-friendly name.

Change roles on an existing agent

When you change roles, the confirmation dialog gives you a safe choice:

change only the role labels and keep your current instructions; or
apply the selected role defaults and replace the settings listed in the warning.

Keep current instructions when they have been carefully customized and still match the new role. Apply defaults when you intentionally want to rebuild from the selected role.

If several roles are selected, review the prepared instructions before saving. Close the preview without saving when the combination does not reflect the job.

Protect Email Agent setup

A role change can change email classification categories. If you choose to apply new role defaults, Email Auto-Reply and CRM category mappings may be turned off or cleared so old category rules are not used accidentally.

After applying a role to an Email Agent:

review classification categories;
review Auto-Reply mode for every category;
rebuild CRM category mappings;
test classification and replies;
re-enable automatic behavior only when safe.

Reset instructions to role defaults

Use Reset to role default when you want to replace the current section with the selected role’s starting content. The replacement is shown in the form first; it is not final until you save.

Copy any custom wording you need to preserve before resetting. Then review tone, boundaries, escalation rules, and channel-specific behavior.

Write effective instructions

Instructions translate your service process into clear behavior: what the agent should achieve, what it must ask, what it may do, and when a person should take over.

Role defaults become more reliable when you add explicit business boundaries:

what the agent is responsible for;
what information it must confirm;
actions it can take;
situations that require a human;
promises or topics it must avoid;
the desired tone and response length.

Keep changeable facts in the Knowledge Base. Keep instructions focused on behavior and decision-making.