Sendbird’s standard operation procedures for AI agents (AI SOPs)
Customer service expectations are evolving fast. Businesses can no longer rely on rigid, linear systems built for predictable interactions. Historically, organizations have tried to scale customer support by constructing intricate decision trees to capture every potential customer question or action. However, such inflexible structures collapse when encountering real-world conversations, where interactions are unpredictable and often impossible to pre-map.
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): The foundation of agentic customer service
What are Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)?
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are detailed, written instructions outlining the specific steps and best practices required by a human to perform a task or process consistently and correctly. In customer service, SOPs ensure that operations are predictable, efficient, safe, and compliant—regardless of who executes them.
What are AI Standard Operating Procedures (AI SOPs) in customer service?
AI SOPs bring the operational discipline of human customer service processes into the AI world. Just as human agents rely on SOPs to handle dynamic customer scenarios consistently and accurately, AI agents need a dynamic framework to deliver reliable service at scale. AI SOPs provide this foundation — offering clear, adaptable guidelines that define how an AI support agent should act, respond, and escalate across diverse customer journeys without relying on rigid scripts or static decision trees.
At Sendbird, we built Actionbooks, a new system that transforms SOPs into a framework for AI agents. It enables natural language control without rigid coding or endless development cycles.
Breaking free from decision trees with AI agent Actionbooks
What are decision trees in customer service?
Decision trees in customer service are structured, branching graph models that guide how an agent or system responds to customer inquiries. Each decision point (or "node") leads to a next step based on predefined options. Decision trees are extensively used in chatbot automation.
What are the problems with decision trees?
While decision trees help standardize responses, their scenarios are inherently limited and hard to maintain as complexity grows. Customer conversations rarely follow a neat, predictable path. As a result, rigid workflows often cause dead ends, frustrating loops, or robotic interactions, falling short of modern CX expectations.
The solution: Actionbooks for AI agents
Instead of hardcoding every possible path, Actionbooks articulate business logic in ways AI can understand and adapt dynamically. This shift makes AI agents for customer service more resilient and capable of handling the unexpected without losing structure or quality.
Actionbooks natural language-based logic accelerates development
Actionbooks enable CX teams to define the AI support agent behavior directly in natural language, with no coding required. Meanwhile, technical teams can focus on tooling up the AI agent by connecting it to digital services and data. This allows businesses to iterate and adapt faster while keeping customer experience logic in the hands of the CX teams that are closest to customers.
Actionbooks version control reduces risks
Actionbooks include built-in version control, allowing teams to track every change to the AI agent logic as it evolves. Every update is fully traceable, testable, and reversible, so teams can innovate, experiment, and confidently select the best version before pushing updates to production.
Actionbooks: AI SOP for CX teams
As customer expectations continue to evolve, businesses need adaptive AI customer service that grows with them. Actionbooks create a living, scalable foundation for modern CX, giving teams greater control and flexibility over the CX strategy while freeing engineers to focus on providing AI agent integrations.
CX can’t be static — it must be dynamic and continuously improving. Actionbooks are a core AI agent capability of the Sendbird platform that helps CX leaders deliver on this promise. 👉 Read the Actionbooks feature release