Introducing intelligent follow-ups: The first step toward proactive customer experiences

The customer service industry has been in reactive mode for decades. Today, that changes.

We're announcing Siena follow-ups—the first proactive capability in our agentic customer intelligence platform. For the first time, an AI agent doesn't just respond to customers; it detects out when a conversations go silent, completing interactions that would otherwise fall through the cracks.

This is a fundamental shift in how autonomous customer service works.

The silent killer of customer experience

Here's a scenario that plays out millions of times every day: A customer emails asking to cancel their order. Your support system asks for more details to securely cancel the order. The customer never responds. The ticket sits open indefinitely—one of hundreds accumulating in your queue, distorting your metrics and creating noise that drowns out actual issues requiring attention.

Traditional support teams solve this with brute force—agents manually reviewing pending tickets, sending follow-ups, eventually closing abandoned conversations. It's tedious work that doesn't scale. When companies deploy AI agents to handle volume, they inherit a new problem: the AI never follows up. It asks for information, then waits forever.

The result? Inflated ticket counts that muddy reporting. Helpdesks cluttered with dead conversations. And for companies with BPO contracts tied to open ticket volume, real financial impact.

Why AI agents have stayed reactive

Building proactive capabilities in AI agents is deceptively difficult. It's not enough to send a message after 24 hours—you need intelligence about context, timing, and appropriate intervention.

Should the AI agent always follow-up or only for certain topics? What’s the maximum number of acceptable follow-ups before customers feel annoyed? Should the agent follow up if the customer opened a new ticket about something else? What if a human agent looked at the conversation but hasn't responded yet? How do you consolidate multiple pending requests into a single, coherent message without overwhelming the customer? What happens when the customer finally responds—do you cancel scheduled follow-ups immediately, or risk looking tone-deaf by sending them anyway?

These are just few of they're the edge cases that separate basic AI from AI that customers trust. At Siena we obsess over details like these.

We've spent the past year building the infrastructure to handle this correctly. Siena follow-ups uses our agentic infrastructure to understand when customer input is genuinely needed, schedules follow-ups with configurable timing, generates contextually appropriate messages that reference the specific conversation history, and stops immediately when customers respond or a human agent intervenes.

The result is an AI agent that behaves like an experienced support professional—persistent without being annoying, helpful without being pushy, and smart enough to know when to step back and close the loop.

How it works

When Siena detects that a customer hasn't responded to a request for information, it waits a configured period, then sends a follow-up message based to the conversation context. If the customer still doesn't respond, Siena can follow up again, and optionally close the ticket with a polite message explaining they can reopen anytime. Every follow-up is personalized and contextual, protecting your brand and building empathic experiences.

What makes this powerful is what happens behind the scenes. Siena consolidates multiple pending requests into a single message, preventing the spam problem that plagued early automated follow-up systems. It monitors for customer activity across all channels—if someone opens a new ticket, Siena knows not to bother them about the old one and closes the first one silently. Above all, it respects human judgment: when an agent takes over a conversation, follow-ups stop immediately.

Brands can configure follow-ups to their processes and desired experiences: timing intervals, message tone and content, or advanced actions to take at each step. The system integrates seamlessly across all major helpdesk platforms—Zendesk, Gorgias, Gladly, and others—with no additional integration required.

The bigger picture

Proactive follow-ups represent something larger than a single feature. They are a fundamental evolution in what autonomous customer service means.

The first generation of AI customer service tools focused on answering questions—chatbots that could pull information from knowledge bases and respond to common inquiries. Useful, but limited. They couldn't take actions, couldn't understand complex context, and certainly couldn't manage conversations over time.

Siena's architecture was built for more. We designed an AI agent that can execute actions across systems, make decisions based on business logic, and maintain context across complex multi-turn conversations. Follow-ups are the natural next step: an AI agent that doesn't just react to customer messages, but actively manages conversations toward resolution.

This is just the beginning of proactive capabilities. We're building AI agents that can anticipate customer needs based on behavioral signals, reach out with relevant information before customers ask, and proactively resolve issues before they escalate. The vision is an AI agent that works more like an experienced account manager than a reactive helpdesk—aware of customer history, attentive to patterns, and proactive about solving problems.

Why this matters now

The customer service industry is at an inflection point. Volume is increasing faster than companies can hire. Customer expectations continue rising. And AI has finally reached the capability threshold where truly autonomous service is possible—not just answering questions, but managing entire customer relationships.

But autonomy without proactivity is incomplete. An AI agent that perfectly handles inbound requests but never initiates outreach will always leave value on the table. It will let conversations die when customers get busy. It will miss opportunities to resolve issues before they become complaints. It will operate like a sophisticated answering machine rather than a partner in the customer relationship.

Proactive messages change that. They let AI agents complete the interactions they start, maintain momentum in conversations, and ensure that no customer request falls through the cracks because Siena is taking ownership of customer outcomes, not just answering tickets.

For brands that put a premium on customer experience, this isn't optional. It's the difference between reactive automation and truly autonomous service. Between technology that supplements your team and technology that fundamentally transforms what's possible.

What comes next

We have released intelligent follow-ups to our customers today. This is the first of several proactive capabilities launching this year, each building on the same foundation: AI agents that don't wait for customers to come to them, but actively work to ensure every customer interaction reaches successful resolution.

The reactive era of customer service is ending. The proactive era is just beginning. And for the first time, AI agents can lead the way. Ready to lead the proactive era? Let's talk.