Routing rules are used to describe situations you wish Hugo to detect. When he encounters these situations, he can then trigger the action of your choice, giving you flexibility in all kind of scenarios.

Hugo is a next-generation AI support agent, fully integrated with Crisp.

While conversational at its core, Hugo goes beyond answering questions. He understands customer intent and context to proactively guide users toward resolution — just like a human support agent.

Built to autonomously handle a large share of incoming conversations, Hugo can also perform real actions through your integrations, such as fetching account details, tracking orders, or issuing refunds, always within the rules you define.

By engaging proactively and providing concrete guidance, Hugo helps resolve issues faster and frees up your team to focus on complex cases.

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What are Hugo routing rules

Routing rules allow you to describe situations Hugo should detect during a conversation.

When Hugo encounters these situations, he can then trigger the action of your choice. They essentially answer the question “When this happens, what should Hugo do?”

With routing rules, you can for instance detect:

• ✔ User intent → sales inquiries, partnership requests, cancellation intent...
• ✔ Topics → billing issues, delivery problems, account access...
• ✔ Emotions → frustration, urgency, dissatisfaction...

Once detected, Hugo can then execute the action you choose, such as escalating the conversation, triggering a workflow, or assigning it to a specific inbox.

Routing rules are evaluated continuously during conversations while Hugo handles them.

Routing rules should not be used to:

• ✘ Control tone, style, or personality → For that, you would use Instructions instead
• ✘ Store knowledge or factual information → This would instead be Q&A snippet to train Hugo on
• ✘ Define how Hugo should reply in this situation → This would also be an Instruction

Hugo routing rules support 3 types of actions:

• Inbox → Hands the conversation over to human agents, by moving it to the selected inbox
• Workflow → Triggers the workflow if your choice
• Agent → Used if you only wish to trigger Hugo for the situations you've described

How to create Routing rules

Routing rules can be managed by navigating to Crisp then ⚡️ AI Agent → Guidance → Routing

Once you're there, simply hit the Add a rule button to create one, and:

1. Name your rule (choose a clear title to manage them more easily)
2. Describe the situation Hugo should detect and react to
3. Select the action you wish to perform when this situation is encountered
4. Save & enable your routing rule to activate it

And you're done! Hugo will now trigger your designed action if it encounters the situation you described.

Routing rule examples

Here are a few examples of well-written versus problematic routing rules.

✔ Example of a good routing prompt:

The customer asks about personalized cookies for events (e.g. weddings, birthdays, corporate gifts, bulk quantities).
Does not apply if the customer asks about the delivery status of an existing order.

We could then select the routing action Workflow and select a workflow to collect information that we've prepared.

✔ Example of a good routing prompt:

The customer is very dissatisfied about:
- The quality or taste of the cookies we shipped
- The order accuracy or delivery time
- Their experience with our support

We could then select the routing action Inbox to hand it over to the "Support" team's inbox.

✘ Example of a bad routing prompt:

The customer is asking about an order.

✘ Example of a bad routing prompt:

If a user is not satisfied with their order or the products they've received, please be empathetic and try to calm them down.
Suggest them to give us a phone call directly so we can help.

Frequently Asked Questions

Still have some questions which were not covered above? Perhaps you'll find our answer in this FAQ.

If your question does not figure here, share it with us directly by chat, we'll be available to assist you

What is the difference between Hugo routing and Topic detection? They basically detect the same thing?

The way you compose prompts and describe situations are similar indeed, but there is one key difference:

• Topic are purely related to Analytics, they allow you to track and monitor the conversations handled by Hugo.
• Routing rules on the other hand aren't used for tracking, they are used to perform an action when the described situations are encountered.

Updated on: 01/02/2026