What is a prompt?

For a receptionist the prompt is the job description. Who you are, what the business does, how to greet people, when to hand over.

Specific beats polished. Naming the three questions callers ask most does more than a paragraph about being helpful and professional.

Length has diminishing returns and then negative ones. A very long instruction dilutes the important parts among the decorative ones.

Negative instructions are weaker than positive ones. Telling it what to do instead works better than telling it what to avoid.

Examples carry more weight than rules. One sample exchange showing how to handle a price question teaches more than three sentences describing the policy behind it.

It is also a living document rather than configuration. A business that changes its hours and forgets the prompt now has an assistant confidently giving the old ones.

Say your physical therapy clinic's first brief reads: "You are a friendly, professional receptionist for Lakeside PT. Help callers with their needs and book appointments." That's 17 words, and every one describes something an assistant would have done anyway. After a week of transcripts you notice the same few calls going wrong, and you rewrite it.

Version four says: "New patients need a 60-minute evaluation. Ask if they have a doctor's referral, and book them either way. We don't discuss insurance coverage on the phone. Say the billing team will call back within one business day, and take the insurer's name. If someone describes sudden numbness, tell them to seek emergency care and offer to transfer them to the clinic now." Every sentence there came from a real call that went badly, and you'll notice that none of it is about tone.

These three terms get used as if they were one. Your knowledge base holds facts, such as hours and prices. The script holds exact wording you want said, like the greeting. Judgment lives in the prompt: what to do first, what never to do, and when to stop and hand over. Knowing which one failed tells you where to edit. A wrong price is a knowledge problem, and a clumsy sentence is a script problem. Booking a new patient into a 30-minute slot is a prompt problem.

To check yours, pull five calls that ended in a handover or a hang-up. For each one, find the sentence in your brief that should have handled it. If there isn't one, write it. When there is one and it was ignored, it's probably buried, so move it to the top and shorten it.

One vendor question is worth asking early: can you see and edit the full instructions, or only fill in a form?

You write what GreetKeeper says and what it covers, in plain language rather than in any special syntax.

Transcripts are the feedback loop. Read the calls that went sideways, change the wording, and listen again.

Short lines work better out loud than written ones do. Say them aloud before you save them.