Governance and control
The controls your team holds
Every control your organisation holds over its agents, who in your organisation typically holds each one, and how a change reaches your customers.
On this page
Telonic builds your agents with you. Your organisation decides how they behave. The controls on this page are the ones your team holds in the console (the Telonic web application your team uses): what the agents discuss, what they can do, when they hand a conversation to a person, what waits for approval, how long records are kept and who can see them. Each control is set with you during implementation, and every change afterwards is tested and approved before it reaches a customer.
What Telonic builds, and what your team adjusts
Telonic does the build work: the industry model for your sector, the workflows, the connections to your systems, the conversation design and the tests that check every change. Your team does not need to build or maintain an agent, and the console is not a tool for building one from scratch.
Your team holds the controls that govern the agents once they are built: limits, topics, escalation and handover rules, approvals and retention. This division is deliberate. It keeps the build work with the people who specialise in it, and the decisions about your customers with your organisation.
The controls
| Control | What it decides | Example | How it is changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope and topics | The topics the agent handles, and the topics it never discusses | Investment advice and legal advice are out of scope | Your team, in the console |
| Limits | The actions the agent can take and the values it can offer, taken from your rules | Room upgrades offered only on flexible rates; vouchers up to your policy limit | Your team, in the console, within the rules in your systems |
| Escalation rules | When a conversation goes to a person | Any mention of an injury goes to a senior claims handler | Your team, in the console |
| Approval gates | Which actions wait for a person on your team to approve them | Cancelling a reservation that carries a fee | Your team, in the console |
| Handover destinations | Who receives each handover, and where | Complaints to the complaints team; out of hours to the duty manager | Your team, in the console |
| Knowledge sources | Which documents and systems the agent answers from | The approved policy wordings library; each project's FAQs | Your team chooses; a new system is connected with Telonic |
| Approved responses | Answers the agent gives word for word, configured during implementation | The exact wording of a regulatory disclosure | Your team writes or approves the wording |
| Tone | How formal, warm or brief the agent is | Formal and unhurried for a luxury developer | Set with Telonic as part of the build; your team approves |
| Retention | How long each kind of content is kept, and whether it is stored at all | Call recordings kept for the period your claims policy requires | Your team, in the console |
| Access by role | Who in your organisation can see and change what | The collections team sees payment conversations, not claims | Your administrators, in the console |
| Provider choice | Approval of any change of model or provider, and of any provider outside your region | A newer language model in your region | Telonic proposes and tests; your team approves |
| Outbound hours | When the agent may place outbound calls and send outbound messages | Payment reminders only on working days, within the hours you set | Your team, in the console |
Each of these is described in more detail elsewhere. See Decision boundaries, Escalation rules, Policies as limits and Storage, retention and deletion.
Who can change what
Every control is assigned to roles in your organisation, set with you during implementation to match how you work. Each person sees and changes only what their role allows, and every change is logged with who made it and who approved it.
A typical arrangement looks like this. Your own may differ.
| Role in your organisation | Typically holds |
|---|---|
| Operations or customer experience lead | Scope, escalation rules, handover destinations, outbound hours |
| Compliance or risk | Approved responses, and approval of changes to scope and limits |
| Team supervisors | Approving individual actions that wait at an approval gate |
| IT or security administrator | Access by role, sign-in through your identity provider, and approval of provider choices |
| Data protection officer | Retention |
You can require a second person to approve changes to particular controls. An insurer might require compliance to approve any change to scope or approved responses, whoever proposes it. Sign-in to the console is through your own identity provider (the system that manages your staff's logins), with multi-factor authentication (a second check beyond a password). See Access control and single sign-on.
How a change reaches your customers
A change to any control follows the same path as every other change to your agents. It is made in the test environment, tested against conversations from your industry and against your own scenarios, approved by the people you have named, and then released. Every change is recorded, and can be reversed.
Your team never needs to make a change directly on live conversations to see its effect. See Testing before every release and How changes go live.
What holds in every deployment
Some protections apply whatever your controls say.
- The agent identifies itself as an AI agent acting for your organisation.
- A customer who asks for a person is handed to one.
- Decisions that stay with your team, such as a claims decision, are not available to the agent, and none moves to the agent without your agreement.
- Every action the agent takes is logged with its source and reason.
In practice
Wadi Assurance, a UAE insurer, runs a Telonic agent on its motor claims line.
- The claims operations lead notices that policyholders calling about water damage from a neighbouring property are being asked the standard motor questions first. She proposes a new escalation rule in the console: any mention of damage to a home goes to the property claims team.
- The change is made in the test environment. Telonic runs the motor claims test set and a set of simulated calls that mention home damage in Arabic and English.
- The tests show the new rule fires correctly and the existing rules are unaffected.
- The insurer requires compliance to approve changes to escalation rules. The compliance manager reviews the test results and approves.
- The change is released. The change history shows the new version, who proposed it, who approved it, and when it went live.
What your team controls
This page lists them all. In summary:
- What the agents discuss, what they can do, and what waits for approval.
- When a conversation goes to a person, and to whom.
- What the agents answer from, and the exact wording of approved responses.
- How long records are kept, and who can see them.
- Approval of every change, including changes of model or provider.