Rachel Hill, Tom Owen, Julian Hough
Despite careful design involving classifiers, parameters, and safeguarding, errors during human/AI interaction are not rare. Poor error recovery can disrupt interaction flow, damage user trust, and decrease user engagement. Whilst existing work has explored LLM recovery, tone, context, and personality as separate design dimensions, no existing work has combined these variables into a structured guidance framework. This paper presents a recovery code that maps four common LLM chatbot task contexts to associated personality traits (four Big Five personalities: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Openness, and Extraversion), tones, and three-stage recovery instructions. A recovery evaluation rubric was also designed, comprising three dimensions (Recovery quality, Tone alignment, and Appropriateness) and nine sub-dimensions. The methodology is exploratory, with no participants used. A between-subjects design was employed across two conditions: Condition A (baseline, uncoded), four separate Claude Sonnet 4.6 agents received no recovery code training; Condition B (coded), four separate Claude Sonnet 4.6 models were trained on the recovery code. Identical 'user' prompts and error scenarios were used across both conditions. Eight LLM evaluator agents assessed the recovery responses using the evaluation rubric, producing scores out of 5 for each sub-dimension. Results found a 27.8% average performance increase in coded recovery responses (76.7%) compared to baseline responses (48.9%). Condition B performed strongest in the appropriateness dimension (83.3%), with notable improvement in personality appropriateness (75% versus 50%) and providing explanation (60% versus 20%). These findings suggest that structured personality, context, and tone-informed recovery codes can be successfully learnt and applied by LLM chatbots to improve error recovery quality across varying contextual tasks.