Customer-specific Skills
Override or extend firm-wide behavior for one customer.
Most of your Skills should apply across every customer you support, but not every customer runs the same way. Dunder Mifflin Scranton might require sign-off from Michael Scott before you provision a new Microsoft 365 license for a new hire. Another customer might need a VIP contact looped in by name any time someone's added to a distribution group. A customer-specific Skill lets you capture that without bending your firm-wide procedures around one account.
When to use one
Reach for a customer-specific Skill when the exception is about this customer, not about the type of request. A few signs it belongs here rather than in a firm-wide Skill:
- A procedure only makes sense because of a tool this customer uses that others don't.
- An approval or contact chain that's unique to their contract: a named approver, an after-hours escalation path, a change freeze window.
- A tone or communication style this customer has specifically asked for.
If the exception would make sense for any customer in similar circumstances, it's a firm-wide Skill. Keep it there so every account benefits from it.
How it applies alongside firm-wide Skills
Customer-specific Skills layer on top of firm-wide ones rather than replacing the whole set.
They only take effect on tickets and conversations tied to that customer. Where a customer-specific Skill and a firm-wide Skill would both apply to the same situation, the customer-specific one wins. That's the whole point of scoping it to a customer in the first place: a blanket procedure applied to every account is exactly the case a customer-specific Skill exists to override.
Creating one
Confirm it's customer-specific
Check that the exception is tied to the customer's contract or setup, not the ticket type. See the signs above.
Scope it to the customer
Attach the Skill to the specific customer or company record so it only fires on their tickets.
Write the whole procedure for this customer
Write the complete Skill, not just what's different from your standard version. Fold in the approver's name, the extra step, the tool substitution, and everything else the AI needs, so the full procedure lives in one place instead of being split between a firm-wide Skill and a partial override.
Test on one of their tickets
Same as any Skill: run it against a real or recent ticket for that customer and confirm the override actually takes effect. See Creating good Skills for the general testing approach.
Keeping them from piling up
Customer-specific Skills are easy to accumulate and easy to forget about. Review them when a customer's contract, tooling, or contacts change, and retire any that no longer reflect how the customer actually operates.