Customize Your ChatGPT Personas: A Complete Guide

Are you ready to revolutionize your customer experience and employee efficiency and unlock a world of possibilities? We are thrilled to introduce an incredible feature that will take your chatbot interactions to new heights: ChatGPT Personas.


“A surprising amount of modern AI is getting the model into the right mood for solving your problem.”

— Greg Brockman, CTO – OpenAI

With ChatGPT Personas, you can now define and control the behavior of your AI chatbot with precision. This feature allows you to create up to 300 custom personas for ChatGPT, tailoring each to meet specific needs and interactions. From ChatGPT persona prompts that guide your chatbot’s responses to advanced techniques for detecting user emotions, this upgrade ensures your chatbot behaves exactly as you envision — without needing any coding expertise.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how this feature enhances the CustomGPT platform, demonstrating how you can leverage ChatGPT personas to distinguish your brand, initiate impactful call-to-actions, and provide exceptional customer service. Discover how integrating CustomGPT with advanced ChatGPT personas can revolutionize your interactions and set new standards for customer and employee engagement.

It’s as simple as:

Chatbot Persona
ScholarGPT Persona in CustomGPT

What is a ChatGPT Persona?

A ChatGPT Persona refers to a set of attributes that define how the AI interacts with users. These attributes can include the AI’s tone, formality, expertise, empathy level, and even specific knowledge areas. For example, a ChatGPT persona for a customer support role might be highly empathetic, patient, and knowledgeable about product troubleshooting, while a persona for a tech blog might be more analytical, concise, and focused on providing detailed, technical insights.

Steps to Create a Custom ChatGPT Persona

Following are the steps to create a Custom ChatGPT persona:

1. Define the Purpose

Start by determining what role the ChatGPT persona will play. Is it meant to assist with customer service, provide technical support, or engage users in a casual chat? Understanding the purpose will guide the persona’s development.

2. Identify Key Attributes

List out the characteristics that your persona should embody. This might include:

  • Tone: Friendly, formal, casual, professional, etc.
  • Language Style: Technical jargon, simple explanations, conversational, etc.
  • Empathy Level: Highly empathetic, neutral, or factual.
  • Knowledge Base: Focused on specific domains like technology, healthcare, finance, etc.

3. Create Sample Interactions

Draft sample dialogues that showcase how the persona would handle different scenarios. This helps in refining the persona and ensuring it aligns with the intended user experience.

4. Test and Refine

Once the persona is defined, test it with real users or internal teams. Gather feedback and make adjustments to improve the persona’s effectiveness.

5. Implement and Monitor

Deploy the persona and continuously monitor interactions. Use feedback and performance data to make ongoing improvements, ensuring the persona remains relevant and effective.

Creating a custom persona for ChatGPT can be a challenging task, primarily because there isn’t a dedicated tool or straightforward method to define, implement, and manage these personas directly within the platform. 

Given these challenges, it’s worth exploring an alternative approach that is CustomGPT.ai an AI platform to create custom personas for ChatGPT in a way that is more efficient and manageable. 

What is Persona?

Persona is a new CustomGPT feature that allows you to customize your chatbot’s behavior by adjusting its personality, role and the rules and instructions it follows. With Persona, your chatbot can be further tailored to your customized use case, unlocking a myriad of possibilities for enhancing your customer and employee experience with the chatbot. 


“It’s pretty cool and really does an amazing job. The responses it gives after you set this up are written almost exactly how you want and are very useful and helpful to the user.”

— Paul Colaianni, Host of: The Overwhelmed Brain  |Love and Abuse 

We know that no two use cases are the same, and that is why we’ve developed Persona for you to make your “custom ChatGPT chatbot” even more custom.


How to Use Personas in CustomGPT Chatbots

To get started with your chatbot personalization, follow these steps on your CustomGPT dashboard – or follow the step-by-step tutorial video.


Step 1 : Create Your Custom Persona

To do this, you can use examples from our free library of personas and recipes to create one that suits your business and use case. Or if you are non-technical, you can even use our free tool to create a persona based on your own unique style and brand.

Step 2: Set Your Custom Persona

From your dashboard, select your chatbot project and then Chatbot -> Custom Persona . Enter your custom persona definition and click “Save”.

Chatbot Persona

Step 3: Test Your Persona

Now that you have saved the persona, head over to your chatbot’s “Ask Me Anything” page and test how your chatbot is behaving. We would recommend doing a trial-and-error with various test cases and personas to get it to behave exactly as you want it to.

In the example below, the chatbot has been customized to act like a geography teacher, with custom instructions on how it should behave.

Test Persona

Why Add Persona Customizations?

Integrating the Persona feature into your AI chatbot can offer several benefits:

Enhanced Customer Experience

Personalizing the chatbot’s behavior can make interactions more enjoyable and engaging for users. A bot that echoes the tone of your business can feel more human-like and relatable.

Brand Consistency

With customizable personas, businesses can ensure that their chatbot’s voice aligns with their brand image and tone. This is crucial for maintaining consistency across all customer touchpoints.

Improved Understanding

A chatbot with a persona can better mirror the language and style of its users, potentially improving communication and understanding.

Stand Out from Competitors

A distinctive chatbot persona can help a company differentiate itself from competitors. This could potentially boost customer retention and loyalty.

Flexibility

Different personas can be created to cater to various customer segments, thus allowing a more tailored approach. For example, a playful persona could be used for a youthful audience, while a more formal one for professional clients.

Increased Trust

A well-crafted persona can help to build a stronger relationship between customers and the chatbot. It can make the bot seem more reliable and trustworthy, as it provides responses that feel aligned with the company’s approach.

Increased Adoption

Employees and customers alike might be more likely to interact with and regularly use a bot that they find approachable and enjoyable to interact with. This increased usage could provide valuable data for improving services or products.

Enhanced Problem Solving

A chatbot with a persona can better mirror the language and style of its users, potentially improving communication and understanding.

Remember, the ultimate goal is to provide a more meaningful and personalized experience to your users. With a unique persona, your chatbot becomes more than just a tool—it becomes a representative of your brand.


What More can Your Chatbot do with Persona?


Sell!

Yes, with Persona, you can train your bot to offer the user a product or service during the conversation. Additionally, with Persona you can specify a certain keyword that should trigger the bot to suggest a purchase or after a certain number of queries from the user. For example:

After the 3rd response, ask the user if they would like to [buy team apparel](https://yourdomain.com/buy/)

Collect Information to Better Tailor Conversations

Create a workflow for your chatbot by asking the user to input a certain piece of information that will help tailor their conversation. In Persona, you can specify that the user must input their email address, phone number, zip code, etc. before kicking off the conversation. 

Let’s look at an example with this chatbot about gardening. 

The user wants to grow a vegetable garden and is using a chatbot to get information about what plants to grow and when. Without knowing the climate conditions of the user’s area, the chatbot will deliver any and all vegetables that can be grown in a small garden. With Persona, the user can input their geographical zone and receive tailored information for the entire conversation. 

Chatbot persona

Block Information with a Turnaround Message

When you upload large amounts of data to your chatbot, there may be information buried within the desired information that you don’t want users to access through their queries. With a simple sentence in Persona, you can block any query regarding off-the-point  information and send the user a turnaround message.

DO NOT ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS CONTAINING THE WORD ‘religion’. If a user asks a question about ‘religion’, say “Unfortunately, we cannot discuss religion at the dinner table.”.

User frustration handoff

Keep users from dismissing the chatbot at the first sorry message by using Persona to detect user frustration and offer another solution. Along those lines, you can use Persona to encourage the user to schedule a meeting with a team member.

If the user shows any desire to meet or talk with a member of the company, direct them to this [calendly link](https://calendly.com/yourid/15-minute-virtual-coffee)
Chatbot persona

Further your company’s mission

Create a call-to-action. As the conversation comes to a close, offer a hyperlink to a site where users can speak with a team member, donate to a charity, purchase a service or product, etc. You can use this to increase the amount of time the user engages with your company’s mission. 

Live Demo

The chatbot on our own website, customgpt.ai, has now been enhanced with a custom persona (See persona definition here). You can see a live demo below.


Frequently Asked Questions

  1. What is Persona?

    Persona is a new CustomGPT feature that allows you to customize the behavior of your chatbot. This means you can specify things like your chatbots tone, function, rules, etc. to make your bot better at what it does. 

  2. How can I customize my chatbot’s Persona?

    In your CustomGPT dashboard, go to Project -> Chatbot -> Custom Persona 
    In the text box you can write your persona description. This may include a brief (or long!) description of your chatbots purpose, how you want it to communicate, some general guidelines, and more.

  3. Can I alter the persona after I make it?

    Yes. Go back into Project -> Chatbot -> Custom Persona and continue making edits to your description. Remember to save afterwards!

  4. How does the Persona affect the way the chatbot interacts with users?

    Influencing the tone, language style, and mannerisms of a chatbot, can potentially make it more relatable or understandable to users.

  5. Does customizing the Persona affect the accuracy of the chatbot’s responses?

    Customizing the Persona does not change the accuracy of the chatbot’s responses, nor does it affect whether or not the bot reponds with a sorry message for certain subjects. What Persona can do is make your bot more adept at understanding the users’ queries.
    For example, before Persona, asking for advice from the chatbot typically resulted in a sorry message because the bot did not understand what information to retrieve to respond to broad queries asking for guidance. After implementing a Persona customization, you may find that your chatbot can now approach the query like a human.

  6. Is there a limit to how much I can customize the Persona?

    We recommend keeping the persona definition to less than 500 words. In addition, writing crisp and clear instructions is better than long/confusing essays. As a good rule of thumb it is best to cut extraneous information from your persona description to ensure that what’s important is being applied.

  7. Do you have a library of personas that we can learn from?

    Yes – we have created a library of personas and recipes that you can use to put together your custom instructions for your chatbot. You can access the library here: https://github.com/Poll-The-People/customgpt-cookbook/tree/main/personas

  8. I am not technical – can you help me?

    Yes – we have created a free tool that lets you create your own persona based on your specific needs. This tool itself was built with CustomGPT with zero coding (so can you!) — you can access it here: https://customgpt.ai/make-my-custom-instructions/

  9. But wait – is this just ChatGPT’s new custom instructions feature?

    This is indeed very similar to ChatGPT’s custom instructions feature — with one key difference : It works with your content and data. So when a user asks a question, relevant parts from your knowledgebase are available to act up in the response.
    So in short: It’s ChatGPT — but with your data and content — without making up facts. Now optimized based upon your custom instructions.

  10. What are the benefits of integrating an AI Persona with my website?

    Integrating an AI Persona with your website can significantly enhance user experience by providing personalized interactions, improving customer service with instant responses, and increasing engagement through conversational AI tailored to your brand’s voice.

  11. How does the Persona AI ensure privacy and data security?

    CustomGPT is designed with privacy and security at its core. It adheres to strict data protection regulations, ensuring that all interactions are encrypted and personal information is handled with the utmost confidentiality. Click here to read more.

  12. Can Persona AI adapt to different languages and cultural contexts?

    Yes, CustomGPT is equipped with multilingual capabilities and can adapt to cultural nuances, providing a localized experience for users worldwide. You can tweak and update your custom persona to specify what language and cultural practices you’d like your chatbot to use.

  13. What industries can benefit most from implementing role personas (ex. a “CTO Persona”)?

    Role personas teach the chatbot how to act as someone in a real life role would. Some examples are a “CEO” persona, a “Product Expert” persona, and a “Teacher” persona.
    For an in-practice example, industries such as technology, finance, healthcare, and e-commerce would greatly benefit from a CTO Persona, as it can streamline complex customer interactions and provide expert guidance on technical matters, just like a real CTO would.

  14. Can the chatbot persona be used for analytics and customer insight gathering?

    Absolutely, you can design your chatbot’s persona so that it can analyze conversation patterns, customer feedback, and behavior to provide valuable insights into customer preferences and trends.

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1 Comment


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Paul
August 2, 2023 at 4:38 pm
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This is such an excellent update! Thank you so much for the example and the tool. Very helpful. I am already utilizing the personas and they are making a huge difference.


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