Question

A support team uses Claude to classify incoming tickets into categories like 'Billing', 'Technical', and 'Account'. With a simple instruction-only prompt, Claude often invents new category names or formats its answers inconsistently. The team wants to improve accuracy and enforce a consistent output style without switching models. What prompt engineering technique should they apply first?

Accepted Answer

Add several example ticket-to-category pairs directly in the prompt (multishot prompting) that demonstrate the exact categories and output format

Answer

Raise the temperature so Claude explores a wider range of category possibilities

Answer

Remove all instructions and rely solely on a system prompt persona describing a support agent

Answer

Split the task into a chain of five separate prompts, one per category, and merge the results