Use Workflows for what needs to be guaranteed
Workflows are best suited to situations where the outcome needs to be consistent every time. If you find yourself adding a lot of guidance to a Guide to make it behave a certain way on every Conversation, that's a signal the behavior might belong in a workflow instead.
Typical workflow use cases
required disclosures
spam filtering
collecting specific information before a handoff
routing logic that should never vary based on AI judgment
Keep workflows focused
A workflow that tries to do too many things becomes hard to read and hard to maintain. Where possible, build workflows that solve one problem well. A spam filter, a greeting message, and a pre-handoff information collector are each better as separate workflows than combined into one.
This also makes it easier to reuse workflows across multiple Agents.
Write clear output variable descriptions
For Ask steps, the description you provide for each output variable acts as an instruction to the AI. A vague description like "customer info" will produce inconsistent results. A specific description like "the customer's order number, formatted as a string of digits" gives the AI clear guidance on what to collect and how to format it.
The same applies to the Ask prompt itself. The more clearly you describe what you want, the more reliably the workflow will collect it.
Use the tester before connecting to a trigger
The workflow editor includes a built-in tester that lets you simulate a conversation against your workflow before it goes live. Use it to verify that your steps run in the expected order, that your If conditions branch correctly, and that your output variables capture what you intend.
The tester only runs the workflow you're looking at. It does not create a real conversation or produce items in conversation review, so you can test freely without affecting your team.
Add a Say step before Stop when the customer needs context
Stop steps end the workflow silently. If you're closing a session or scheduling a follow-up, the customer won't receive any message unless you add a Say step immediately before the Stop. This is especially important for Close Session, where the customer's conversation will simply end without explanation if no message is sent first.
Remember that creating a workflow doesn't activate it
A workflow has no effect until it's connected to a trigger inside a Gladly Agent. After building and testing a workflow, go to the Workflow Triggers tab in the relevant Agent and add it to the appropriate trigger. See Workflow Triggers for instructions.