Zero Price Repetition — Before/After

Three asks, one bar:

• Zero repetition. A price (or price range) is said once per call. Full stop.
• No robotic recaps. "Same range I mentioned" is not how a human answers — a person just answers the new question and moves forward.
• Briefer answers, with evals that actually measure brevity across multi-turn conversations.

One carve-out stays sacred: if the caller asks for the price again ("sorry, what was that?"), they get the real numbers — every time.

The overnight fix stopped Clara repeating the special offer — that half held in all 10 live test calls. But 5 of 10 live calls still re-read the identical price range on the caller's second question. Root cause: the old instruction didn't ban the repeat — it suggested a script for it:

"same range I mentioned — the studios start at twelve-hundred"

That example models both failure shapes at once: the robotic self-quote, and a partial price re-read. When we ran the old prompt against the new stricter test, it failed 0 of 3 — producing that recap phrasing verbatim.

• A stated price is spent. Once said, later turns answer only the new question — no re-read, no partial re-read, no "as I mentioned". Written as a hard rule in both places the model looks (the top-level principles and the unit-presentation section), the same treatment that fixed the special.
• Brevity tightened: when one sentence answers the question, one sentence is the answer.
• The caller re-asking always re-opens pricing — an explicit ask never gets a deflection.

• Three deterministic checks (no judgment calls, 19 unit tests): no money-talk on a spent-price turn — it catches spoken forms like "twelve-hundred", not just "$1,200"; no recap phrases; a hard word cap per spoken turn.
• Four new multi-turn conversations graded end-to-end: second-question-after-prices, a different-topic follow-up (parking), a compound first answer that must stay tight, and a late "how do I get started?" that must not summarize the call.
• Four over-tightening guards: the special must still land on the first pricing turn, and explicit re-asks (prices or specials) must still get full answers. All held.

Passed — zero repeats in 20 calls. The change merged and synced to the live phone agent on Aug 14. The same test that measured 5-of-10 repetition before the fix was then run 20 times against the updated agent (two batches of 10): 20 of 20 clean — no repeated price pitch, no recap phrasing, and no collateral damage (the move-in special still lands, and callers who ask again still get the number).