Getting started

Glossary of Unless terms

Unless uses a specific set of terms to describe its platform components, features, and processes. Understanding this glossary is essential for configuring, deploying, and optimizing your Customer Agent and Team Assistant effectively. This article provides a structured overview of key Unless terms, helping you navigate the platform with confidence.

core concepts and components

account and workspace

An Account represents your customer organization profile within Unless. It is where you configure agents, manage users, and oversee interactions across channels. One account can contain multiple Workspaces, which are environments holding all configuration and data for a single customer journey or product line. Most companies operate with one production workspace, but multiple workspaces are used for separate brands, markets, or products requiring independent setups.

customer agent and team assistant

The Customer Agent is the AI-powered assistant that interacts directly with your customers across your marketing site, product, portal, help center, and helpdesk channels. It serves all four customer lifecycle moments: Acquisition, Retention, Sales expansion, and Support.

The Team Assistant is an AI tool designed to help your internal team within the helpdesk they already use. It drafts replies, surfaces relevant context, and runs Procedures on behalf of your support agents.

moments

Unless organizes customer interactions into four lifecycle Moments:

• Acquisition: Qualifying and converting visitors on your marketing site.
• Retention: Detecting and acting on churn signals inside your product.
• Sales expansion: Identifying upsell opportunities and routing them to the right account owner.
• Support: Resolving customer issues with AI assistance and team co-piloting.

Each moment has its own Signals, Personality, Procedures, and Notifications.

the engine and its senses

engine overview

The Engine is the back-end platform powering both the Customer Agent and Team Assistant. It operates on two structural ideas: the three senses and the loop.

the three senses

• Living Knowledge: This is what the agent knows. It is a self-maintaining library built from your content Sources such as website pages, FAQs, files, and integrated data. Living Knowledge is structured into the Content library and published as the customer-facing Help Center.

• Living Memory: This sense remembers who the agent is talking to. It stores per-customer preferences, history, sentiment, and goals. Memory is scoped per agent and kept private.

• Living Context: This is where the agent is acting. It connects to your CRM, billing, ERP, helpdesk, and custom APIs, allowing the agent to see the current situation around each conversation and act within your systems of record.

the loop

The Engine cycles through four phases known as the Flywheel or Loop:

1. Train: Building and updating Living Knowledge, Living Memory, Living Context, Sources, Audiences, and Procedures.
2. Test: Validating the agent’s performance through Preview, Simulations, and Quality reports.
3. Deploy: Setting up the Customer Agent and Team Assistant for live use across the four moments.
4. Analyze: Measuring performance, business impact, and AI maturity to inform the next training cycle.

key platform features

procedures

Procedures are agentic actions the Customer Agent and Team Assistant can take on behalf of customers or team members. These include follow-up questions, redirects, UI components, custom JavaScript, live chat handoffs, and API calls. Procedures replace legacy terms like “agent actions” or “AI actions.”

outcomes and pricing

An Outcome is the billing unit in Unless. It is recorded when the Customer Agent successfully completes a job, either by providing a Resolution (answering a real customer question without human help) or a Hand-off (passing the customer to a human or workflow). Unless uses an outcome-based pricing model, so you pay only for successful results, not for every interaction or seat.

trust and compliance

Unless embeds trust and governance into its architecture with four pillars:

• Transparency: Clear disclosure of how the agent makes decisions and uses data.
• Privacy: Respectful handling and protection of customer data, including PII filtering and Privacy Vault safeguards.
• Security: Protective measures against threats like prompt injection, training data poisoning, and supply chain risks.
• Accountability: Audit trails, incident response plans, and controls to prove agent actions and decisions.

additional important terms

• Sources: Content origins ingested into Living Knowledge.
• Audiences: Customer segments defined by behavior or demographics for personalization and targeting.
• Content library: Structured content repository used by the Customer Agent.
• Inbox: Dashboard area where your team handles Messages from the Team Assistant and Engine.
• Dashboard: Interface for configuring agents, monitoring performance, and managing interactions.
• Subscription plans: Two main plans—Fixed (monthly fee with included outcomes and support) and Flex (pay per outcome with à la carte modules).

conclusion

Mastering the Unless glossary is crucial for leveraging the platform’s full potential. From understanding the Customer Agent’s role across the four moments to grasping the Engine’s three senses and the outcome-based pricing model, these terms form the foundation of your Unless experience. Use this glossary as a reference to navigate the platform confidently and optimize your AI-powered customer interactions.