Interview Agents

Agent customization

Configure how a custom interview agent asks questions — specific pre-written questions, or AI-generated questions driven by research goals (Pro).

There are two dimensions of customization for a custom interview agent: what it asks (question mode) and when it asks (triggers). This page covers question mode. For triggers, see Triggers and Agent governance.

Question mode

Every custom agent operates in one of two modes:

Specific mode

You write the questions. The agent asks them in order, follows up naturally within each, and wraps up when it's done. This mode is mostly deterministic.

Use specific mode when:

  • You're new to interviewing and want to see what's returning useful answers.
  • You're running a controlled study where the same set of questions needs to be asked across many sessions.
  • You want the lowest-friction setup.

Goals mode (Pro+ tiers) coming soon

Instead of writing questions, you write research goals — short statements of what you're trying to learn. At conversation time, Seena generates the questions to match the goal, informed by Seena's knowledge of the science of human-computer interaction, the specific visitor, their session context, and any custom metadata.

  • Goals are free-form strings. Example: "Understand why users upgrade from Pro to Max — the specific constraint that tips them over."
  • You can have one goal or several. Seena weaves the questions together across goals within the conversation length budget.
  • Each conversation sounds slightly different because the questions are context-aware. The insights coming out are still comparable — Seena tags them against the goals you wrote.

Use goals mode when:

  • You want conversations to feel native to each visitor's context.
  • Your research question is broad and resists a short, fixed script.
  • You're on Pro or higher— goals mode requires it.

Switching between modes

You can switch an agent between specific and goals mode in its editor. The questions (or goals) for the other mode are preserved when you switch away, so you can experiment without losing work.

Tone, persona, fallback copy, and conversation length

These controls aren't user-configurable today. Seena uses a consistent warm, curious interview tone across all agents, with length tuned to what the visitor's answers warrant. Expect these controls to appear in a future release — if you have a specific need ("I want it to sound more clinical," "I want it capped at 45 seconds"), tell us and we'll weight the roadmap accordingly.

Triggers — see their own page

Triggers are the other half of customization — when the agent engages a visitor. They get their own page because the space is big:

Appearance — see its own page

Visual customization (theme, logo, color, pill position, label) is covered in Agent appearance.

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