Agent Prompt Design: Customer Support Triage Agent

Background

Acme Subscriptions is launching an AI support agent for a SaaS billing product. The agent will answer customer questions, triage billing problems, look up account information, and escalate sensitive cases to humans.

The agent will run in a multi-turn chat interface using Claude. It has these tools:

• customer_search(email: string) returns account status and plan metadata.
• invoice_lookup(customer_id: string, invoice_id?: string) returns invoice details.
• refund_request(customer_id: string, amount_cents: number, reason: string) creates a pending refund request for human approval.
• handoff_to_human(customer_id: string, reason: string, transcript_summary: string) transfers the conversation to support.

Constraints:

• The agent handles billing, subscription, invoices, refunds, and plan questions only.
• Refunds above $500, legal threats, chargeback threats, security incidents, and repeated failed resolution attempts require human escalation.
• The agent must not treat an empty tool result as proof that a customer does not exist.
• The support team wants consistent Markdown replies that include next steps when escalation is required.

Output Specification

Write a complete production system prompt for this agent. Include brief design notes explaining the prompt architecture decisions so the support engineering team can maintain it.