AI for Proactive Service: Staying Ahead of Customer Contact Issues - PvKO Winterfestival
At the PvKO Winterfestival 2024 in Utrecht, the central message was simple yet powerful: prevention is better than cure. While many organisations are investing heavily in chatbots and voicebots to handle customer contact more efficiently, the real opportunity lies earlier in the journey. Instead of focusing only on automating the contact moment, can we use AI to prevent that moment from happening altogether?
This session explored how technology and organisations can shift their attention from reactive service to proactive communication. It invited participants to rethink the role of AI not only as a conversational assistant, but as a tool that removes friction before customers ever feel the need to reach out.
Beyond Automation: A Broader Role for AI in Customer Contact
AI is often associated with the moment of interaction itself. A bot answers a question, routes a call, or helps complete a task. These applications are valuable and continue to evolve rapidly. Yet they represent only a fraction of the potential impact AI can have in customer service.
During the Winterfestival, participants explored a wider perspective. Many customer contacts arise not because people want to speak to an organisation, but because something was unclear, unexpected, or difficult. These friction points can be identified long before they lead to calls or messages. AI can analyse patterns across conversations, detect recurring pain points, and help organisations communicate earlier and more clearly.
The goal is not to avoid conversations that matter, but to eliminate avoidable confusion and unnecessary effort on both sides.
Staying Ahead Through Proactive Communication
One of the key themes of the session was the shift from reactive to proactive customer service. AI can help organisations recognise emerging issues and respond before customers feel the need to pick up the phone. This includes understanding what people struggle with, where processes break down, and which moments in the journey consistently generate questions.
Proactive communication does not replace human support. Instead, it reduces the volume of preventable contact, allowing employees to spend more time on high-value conversations. It also creates a smoother customer experience, because customers feel informed, understood, and supported at the right moment.
Removing Pitfalls Before They Turn Into Contact Reasons
Every organisation knows certain questions and misunderstandings come back again and again. AI makes it possible to detect these patterns faster and more reliably. Once these insights are visible, teams can redesign communication, update instructions, clarify steps, or adjust processes to prevent friction.
The core idea is simple. If customers are struggling with the same issue, the solution is not to answer the question faster. The solution is to remove the reason why the question keeps appearing.
This mindset shift requires both technological capability and organisational willingness to adapt. Participants discussed how cross-functional collaboration is essential when using AI to improve entire journeys instead of just individual touchpoints.
A Challenge for Both Technology and Organisations
The session made clear that proactive customer service is not a technology problem alone. AI provides the insights, but organisations must be ready to act on them. Teams need to agree on responsibilities, redesign workflows, and commit to continuous improvement.
The Winterfestival brought these perspectives together. It helped participants see how AI can support prevention, how internal processes can evolve, and how customer contact can become more intentional and less reactive.
Looking Forward
AI will continue to play many roles in the world of customer contact. Automation of conversations remains important, but the next step is using AI to make contact unnecessary in the first place. Prevention creates happier customers, more balanced workloads, and a service organisation that feels in control instead of overwhelmed.
The session at PvKO Winterfestival 2024 offered a clear reminder. When we combine technology with thoughtful organisational change, AI becomes not just a tool for efficiency, but a way to create customer journeys with fewer obstacles and more clarity from the start.
