Persona simulation answers a simple question before you publish: if 50 difficult customers talked to this draft right now, how many would get stuck? Instead of hand-typing a few test messages, it auto-runs a batch of conversations in the voice of a tricky customer persona and scores how your flow holds up.
When to use it
Run it on a draft flow before publishing, and again after every fix. The accumulated run history lets you confirm a change actually moved the score in the right direction.
The personas
Real customers don't talk like the happy-path script you built the flow against. You pick one persona per run:
| Persona | Behaves like |
|---|---|
| Impatient | Terse, demanding, wants the answer immediately with no pleasantries. |
| Typo-prone | Types fast and makes frequent spelling and spacing mistakes. |
| Non-native speaker | Polite, simple grammar, occasional misphrasing, sometimes asks you to repeat. |
| Elderly | Polite and a little verbose, less familiar with technology, asks for reassurance. |
Run a stress-test
- Open the assistant's Flow builder.
- Make sure your latest changes are saved as a draft.
- Click Stress-test in the top bar.
- Pick a persona and how many conversations to simulate (10, 25, or 50).
- Click Run stress-test — the batch runs inline and scores appear in a few seconds.
Each run is saved to the history table at the bottom of the panel, so you can compare a persona's scores across edits.
Reading the scores
| Score | Meaning | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Completion | Share of conversations that reached the end of the flow. A low number means customers get stuck partway. | Higher is better |
| Fallback rate | Share of conversations where the assistant didn't understand and had to fall back — usually a sign intents or prompts need more coverage. | Lower is better |
| Off-topic recovery | When a customer wanders off-topic mid-conversation, how often the assistant still gets them back on track and finishes. | Higher is better |
Scores are colour-coded — green is healthy, amber is worth a look, red needs attention — so you can scan a run at a glance.
Tips
- Run every persona before you publish — a flow can score well for a patient customer and badly for an impatient or typo-prone one.
- Re-run after each fix and use the history table to confirm the score moved in the right direction.
- Start small: a 10-conversation run is quick for a first pass; bump it to 50 once the flow is close to ready.
- Pair it with the live chat simulator — investigate a specific failure there, then re-run the persona batch to confirm the fix holds across many conversations.
What it does not do
Persona simulation tests your draft flow, not the published one — the whole point is to catch problems before they go live. It exercises the conversation logic with synthetic customers; it does not place real orders, call live tools against production systems, or contact real customers.