Test and deploy your agent

Previewing the agent before customers see it

Previewing your Customer Agent before it interacts with real customers is a crucial step to ensure accuracy, relevance, and professionalism in every response. This testing phase allows you to experience the agent exactly as your customers will, helping you catch errors, verify Procedures, and confirm personalization settings in a controlled environment. By previewing, you reduce the risk of delivering incorrect or embarrassing answers once the agent is live.

what is preview and why it matters

Preview is a feature designed to let you test the Customer Agent from the customer’s perspective before deploying any changes to production. It replicates any customer situation by allowing you to set conditions such as Audience, topic, Living Context state, and surface (like marketing site, product, or helpdesk). This setup mirrors the real environment your customers will encounter, so you can see how the agent responds in various scenarios.

Using Preview helps prevent the common pitfall of pushing untested changes live, which can lead to inaccurate or inappropriate answers. Instead, you get a safe space to verify that your agent’s answers, Procedures, and personalization behave as expected.

how preview works

When you start a Preview session, you enter a conversation panel identical to what a customer sees. Here, you can type questions and watch the agent respond in real time. Alongside this, an inspection panel reveals what the agent is “seeing” internally, including which Sources it used to generate answers, what Procedures are available, and the current Living Context values. This transparency helps diagnose unexpected or confusing responses.

Every Preview session is automatically saved in a session log, allowing you to revisit the conversation later or share a session URL with colleagues for collaborative review. This makes it easy to gather feedback or demonstrate the agent’s behavior to stakeholders before going live.

when to use preview

Preview is especially useful in these situations:

when not to use preview

While Preview is excellent for one-on-one testing, it is not designed for large-scale or automated testing. For those purposes, use Simulations to run scripted conversations at scale or Quality reports to score the agent’s accuracy against control questions.

getting started with preview

To start a Preview session:

  1. Open the Test > Preview section in your dashboard.
  2. Set the conditions for the session, including Audience, topic, Living Context, and surface.
  3. Click Start Preview to begin interacting with the agent.

You can also set Living Context to a specific customer profile to see how the agent treats that customer’s plan, history, and signals. This helps ensure personalized responses are working correctly.

sharing and troubleshooting

You can share a Preview session by copying the session URL from your browser’s address bar. Anyone with access to your Unless account can open and review the session.

If the agent answers differently in Preview than in production, check that the conditions (Audience, topic, Living Context) match exactly. Differences in these settings or changes in live Sources after setting up Preview can cause discrepancies.

conclusion

Previewing your Customer Agent before deployment is an essential safeguard that helps you deliver accurate, personalized, and professional customer interactions. By replicating real customer conditions and providing full transparency into the agent’s decision-making, Preview empowers you to catch issues early and confidently launch your AI assistant. Use Preview regularly as part of your testing routine to maintain high-quality customer experiences.