Situations
Configure how the assistant behaves in specific scenarios — scheduling, sales, support, and more.
Situations
Situations is where you teach the assistant how to act in the most important scenarios for your business — how to book an appointment, respond to a price objection, handle a complaint, or hand off to a human agent.
Access it from the sidebar under Optimize → Situations.
Knowledge Base or Situations?
Before configuring, it's important to understand the difference between the two tools — because both teach the assistant, but in very different ways.
Think of a new salesperson you just hired. You give them two resources:
- A catalog — they look it up when the customer asks about price, a service, or availability.
- Training — rules they need to have in their head at all times: how to introduce themselves, what to do when the customer asks for a discount, how to act if someone wants to cancel.
TAU works the same way:
| Knowledge Base | Situations | |
|---|---|---|
| It's like... | The catalog | The training |
| The assistant... | Looks it up when the customer asks something specific | Applies it whenever that scenario occurs |
| Use for... | Services, prices, address, hours, FAQs | Scheduling, sales, objections, support |
How it works
Each situation defines three things:
- When to activate — what the customer needs to say or do for the assistant to act
- How to act — the steps and rules the assistant should follow in that scenario
- Limit — when to call a human or end the interaction
Situations are always active — the assistant doesn't need to look up any document; it simply acts the way you defined every time that scenario comes up.
Situation categories
Situations are organized into three categories:
📅 Scheduling
For businesses that book appointments — salons, clinics, offices, gyms, service providers.
The assistant can collect customer details, check availability, and confirm the booking directly in the conversation.
🛒 Sales
For any business that needs to qualify leads and guide the customer toward a purchase or contact with a salesperson.
Includes scenarios like presenting products, handling price objections, following up, and routing hot opportunities to the team.
🎧 Support
For resolving questions, logging complaints, and managing cancellations quickly — without needing a human for every interaction.
Creating a situation
The easiest way is to talk to Leo, TAU's configuration assistant. Describe what you want the assistant to know how to do and Leo configures the situation for you.
To create one manually, click Add Situation and fill in:
| Field | What to fill in |
|---|---|
| Situation name | A clear name to identify it (e.g. "Service Scheduling") |
| When to activate | The trigger — what the customer needs to say or do |
| If unable to complete | What to do if the flow gets stuck (default: transfer to human) |
| Mode | Automatic (activates on its own) or On Demand (activates by instruction) |
| Steps | The sequence of actions the assistant should execute |
| Rules | Special conditions — "IF the value is over $300, THEN offer installments" |
Start with just one situation, test it, adjust, and only then add more. It's better to have one well-configured situation than several half-finished ones.
Managing situations
On the Situations screen you can:
- Enable/disable any situation with the toggle — useful for testing without deleting
- Reorder by dragging — the order defines priority when more than one situation could be activated
- Edit by clicking the situation
- Delete via the options menu (⋮)
Each situation shows the number of steps configured, which helps understand the complexity of each one.
Best practices
Use your customers' own words. Configure triggers with real phrases you've already heard — "I'd like to book", "what's the price", "I have a problem". The more natural, the better the assistant recognizes them.
- Be specific in the steps — the more detail, the more consistent the assistant
- Always define the limit — what to do when unable to complete prevents the customer from going without a response
- Review periodically — as the business changes, situations need to keep up
- Test after each change — use test mode in the assistant to confirm the behavior