Question about referral tags and the system prompt. I work with referral partners and each has a custom tag at the end of my URL (?ref=lender_jim_smith). Currently, if a user types ‘Jim sent me”, the chat will lock into Partner Exclusive Mode and will not mention or refer other competing people or companies to my referral partner.
The chat recognizes the URL tag and does recognize the partner name, but I am trying to get it to acknowledge that partner in the very first message and lock into Partner Exclusive Mode without the user having to type ‘Jim sent me’.
I want it to reply to the very first question a user types and say ‘Absolutely-I see you came here through my partner Jim Smith from XYZ Bank, I will keep everything exclusive to Jim’. Then I want to to finish the answer to the question and lock into Partner Exclusive Mode.
How can I achieve this?
***edited 2/15/26……..
I have a OpenAI to my wordpress site, with a URL parameter `?ref=lender_jim_smith` that gets injected into my system instructions as `{REFERENCE}`. I can confirm in console the parameter is being captured correctly. My system instructions say: “When {REFERENCE} contains a partner tag, immediately acknowledge the partner in your VERY FIRST RESPONSE before answering the user’s question.” PROBLEM:
The bot completely ignores this instruction and responds to the user’s question without ever acknowledging the partner. I’ve tried:
- “MANDATORY FIRST ACTION”
- “BEFORE you respond, you MUST check…”
- “Your VERY FIRST RESPONSE must start with…”
- Searching a knowledge base PDF for partner details
- Direct PHP injection of partner name into instructions
Nothing works. The bot skips the partner acknowledgment every time. How do I force a OpenAI GPT to execute a specific instruction BEFORE generating its main response?
Thanks!