Interview Agents

Agent governance

The rules that keep Seena from over-interviewing visitors — per-session cap, cooldown, dismissal escalation, visitor recurrence, and priority.

Triggers decide whether an agent wants to engage a visitor. Governance decides whether that invitation actually goes out. The goal is a visitor experience that doesn't feel harassed, no matter how many custom agents you've built.

Governance is a workspace-level setting. The workspace owner sets the rules; they apply to every agent on every site in that workspace.

The four rules

1. Per-session cap

The maximum number of times any agent (across all agents on a site) can prompt a single visitor during one session.

  • Configurable: 1 to 10.
  • Default: 3.

If an agent's trigger fires and the visitor has already been invited N times this session, the invitation is suppressed.

2. Cooldown between prompts

The minimum time that must pass between successive agent invitations within the same session.

  • Configurable: 1 to 60 minutes.
  • Default: 5 minutes.

After an agent invites a visitor (whether they accepted or ignored), no other agent can invite that same visitor for the cooldown window — even if their triggers all match. This prevents a visitor from being "bounced" between two eager agents.

3. Dismissal escalation

The number of consecutive declines after which an agent stops prompting a visitor entirely.

  • Configurable: 1 to 10.
  • Default: 3.

When a visitor dismisses an invitation (explicit close), Seena counts it against that visitor. Hit the threshold and that agent goes silent for the visitor for an extended period (tracked in browser storage per site). Ignoring an invitation does not count as a dismissal — only an explicit close does.

4. Visitor recurrence cooldown

After a visitor completes (or dismisses to escalation on) any interview, they won't be prompted again on the same site for the recurrence window.

  • Configurable: 1 to 168 hours (1 hour to 7 days).
  • Default: 24 hours.

This is the "don't talk to the same person three days in a row" rule. It persists across sessions, stored per site in the visitor's browser.

Priority

When multiple custom agents match the same visitor simultaneously, the one with the lowest priority number fires first. First match wins — there's no tie-breaking. See Triggers → Priority for more.

The order of checks

When a trigger fires, Seena evaluates in this order:

  1. URL target — does the current page match the agent's URL target? If no, stop.
  2. Trigger conditions — do the manual + agentic conditions match? If no, stop.
  3. Visitor recurrence — is the visitor still in the recurrence cooldown on this site? If yes, stop.
  4. Dismissal escalation — has the visitor dismissed past the threshold for this agent? If yes, stop.
  5. Per-session cap — have we already invited this visitor N times in this session? If yes, stop.
  6. Cooldown between prompts — has enough time passed since the last invitation in this session? If no, stop.
  7. Priority — among all agents still eligible at this moment, pick the lowest priority number.
  8. Engage.

Think of governance as a sieve: the trigger asks "should I prompt?" and governance answers "yes, but maybe not now, and not this visitor, and not yet."

Recommended settings

The dashboard shows recommended values based on how many active agents you have. As a general rule:

  • One or two agents — defaults are fine.
  • Three to five agents — consider bumping per-session cap up slightly, and tightening the cooldown if you want each agent to get a fair shot.
  • More than five — rethink scope before tuning governance. Too many agents chasing the same visitor is almost always the wrong answer; consolidate using compound triggers instead.

Who can change governance

Only workspace owners can modify governance settings. Members and viewers see the current values as read-only, labeled "Managed by workspace owner." This prevents a single site owner from relaxing rules that affect the whole workspace.

A testing note

When you're building a new agent and want to see it fire without waiting for cooldowns to clear, add ?seena_test=true to your URL. This bypasses all governance checks for that session. Don't leave it on production links — it's an internal testing aid.

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