Protocols

Who this is for: Owner and Manager — requires the Protocols app and protocols.engagement.read. Where: Protocols → Queue / Plays / Effectiveness

Every hotel runs on knowledge that lives in people's heads. When a repeat guest books a room below the one they usually take, offer the upgrade at check-in. When a long stay hits day four with no housekeeping contact, go and ask. That knowledge is real, it is valuable, and it leaves when the person does.

Protocols is where you write it down — not as a wiki page nobody executes, but as a play: something that watches for the moment it applies to, puts a specific instruction in a specific person's queue, and then measures whether doing it changed anything.

Ghi chú

Protocols is an installable app on a plan that includes it. Install it from Integrations → App Directory; if your plan does not carry it, the directory shows an upgrade state rather than an install button.

The three layers#

Protocols is deliberately built as three separable things. It is worth knowing which one you are looking at, because they fail in different ways and are fixed in different places.

1. Classification — noticing#

A signal is a rule you author over what the property already knows: this guest is a returning corporate booker, this stay is at risk, this table has turned three times tonight. Signals are deterministic predicates, never a model call.

That is a design commitment, not an implementation detail. Because a signal is a rule, every hypothesis it proposes carries an inspectable evidence trace — you can always ask why did this fire and get an answer made of facts rather than an explanation generated after the event. A learned suggester of new rules can arrive later; it never replaces this layer.

2. The protocol object — deciding what to do#

A protocol — a play — is a stable identity with five parts:

Part	What it settles
Trigger	The moment this applies to
Action	What to do, and what not to do
Debrief	The short question asked afterwards
Projection	The change the answer is allowed to make
Measure	The metric this play is judged on

Plus its authority envelope: the bounds an assignee may act inside without escalating.

Editing a play never mutates a running one. It mints a new version. A past engagement therefore stays interpretable against exactly the version it ran under, which is what makes measurement mean anything a month later.

3. The engagement — doing it#

When a trigger fires for a target, an engagement is minted: one protocol, one target, one moment, one assignee. It moves through a state machine a person drives — that is the Queue.

The rule that keeps this safe#

After acting, the assignee answers a short debrief. The only thing that debrief may write is a caused, reversible change to the target record, through the play's own declared projection.

Not a direct field edit. Not a model write. If a play's projection says it may set a guest's upgrade preference, that is the entire set of things answering its debrief can do — and it can be undone, with the engagement that caused it still attached to it.

This is the difference between a system that learns about your guests and a system that quietly rewrites them.

Where the prompts come from#

Protocols sits on the same event stream everything else in Nerve produces. A booking, a check-in, a folio posting — each one is already published, and classification reads that stream the same way every other consumer does. There is no separate scanner, no nightly sweep, nothing to schedule.

Engagement actions — assign, act, decline, debrief — are also exposed to agents under the same permissions the screens require. A human and an agent go through the identical checked path; there is no privileged back door for either.

Turning it off#

Disabling the Protocols app on a hotel degrades straight to no prompts: no route answers and no signal fires. Nothing is corrupted and no past record changes — the engagements that already happened stay exactly as they were. Individual guests can be suppressed without touching the play; see Governance.

What's next#

• The queue — the work surface, and the states an engagement moves through.
• Authoring plays — versions, envelopes and the starter templates.
• Effectiveness — measurement, mined candidates and the operating manual.
• Governance — consent, guardrails, suppression and the kill switches.