Writing good guidelines

Guidelines shape how Dialog’s assistant talks to your customers. They impact the content of responses (not the product recommendations or suggested questions). The best use of guidelines is to define tone and style.

How to write good guidelines

• Write in English. Even if your store is in another language, English guidelines work best for the AI.
• Keep them short and clear. Avoid contradictions.
• Don’t stack too many. Ten to fifteen is plenty. Past that they start competing with each other and hurt response quality.

Example: redirect to support

You want Dialog to route order-related questions to a support email? Use a guideline like:

Ensure that all customer support inquiries related to order issues, refunds, shipping, or account assistance receive this predefined response: “For order help, please email us at support@yourstore.com and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours.”

That’s it. One clear instruction, one clear outcome.

When a guideline isn’t the right tool

• If you need to fix product-specific answers → improve the product data (description, tags, or dialog-data metafield).
• If Dialog is missing general info → upload a document.
• If the structure of an answer is off → adjust the guideline’s wording, not add a new one.