Behind the Message: Todd's Car Wash Isn't Proactive. It's Just Unannounced.

Kustomer recently introduced Todd Waffle, a Chief Happiness Officer with more enthusiasm than judgment, across a series of commercials, each one a joke with a real customer experience story hiding underneath it. This is the story behind the one where he shows up to wash a car nobody asked him to wash.

In it, Todd arrives at a customer's house, uninvited, to wash his car. Jeff comes outside in his robe, tennis racquet in hand as a makeshift weapon, to find Todd covertly soaping down his sedan. Todd's pitch: "We're not just Reactors. We're PROACTORS." Then he sets off the car alarm and flees.

It's a good bit because it's recognizable. A lot of what gets called "proactive" in CX is exactly this: an unsolicited gesture that has nothing to do with what the customer actually needs, executed with a lot of energy and zero context.

The absurd behavior

Todd heard one thing, "your company felt like our service was too reactive," and translated it into showing up at 6 a.m. to wash a car nobody asked him to wash. He's not wrong that Jeff wanted less reactivity. He's wrong about what that actually means. So Jeff gets a stranger in his driveway, a blaring alarm, and zero resolution to whatever the real complaint was.

The real CX problem

"Proactive" has become a word companies say to sound modern, not a description of what they're actually doing. A lot of so-called proactive CX is really just automated activity: a triggered email, a generic check-in, a scheduled outreach that isn't grounded in anything specific to that customer. It's proactive in the sense that nobody had to ask for it. It's not proactive in the sense that matters, anticipating the actual thing the customer needs before they have to raise it.

That gap is exactly what makes Todd's car wash land as an intrusion instead of a service. He acted before being asked, which is the easy part. He had no idea what Jeff actually needed, which is the part that counts.

Why conventional platforms create that problem

Most support platforms are built to respond to what's already in front of them: a ticket, a call, a chat. "Proactive" features get bolted on top as separate, rules-based triggers: send this email if X happens, fire this alert if Y threshold is crossed. Those triggers don't know anything about the customer beyond the one signal they're watching. They can't tell the difference between a customer who wants an update and a customer who wants to be left alone entirely.

The result is what Jeff got: a proactive gesture based on a shallow read of the situation, with a security-system-level appropriate response. If the system doesn't actually understand the customer, "proactive" just means "unprompted.”

What Kustomer does differently

Kustomer's proactive support runs on the same unified customer context as everything else on the platform: order history, prior conversations, sentiment, and real-time signals. That means the outreach is built around what a specific customer actually needs at that moment: a delayed shipment they haven't asked about yet, an issue that's about to recur, a gap in service before it becomes a complaint.

Real proactivity isn't about acting first. It's about acting on the right thing, for the right customer, because the platform actually has the context to know what that is.

The business outcome

UNTUCKit used proactive support built on a consolidated, chronological customer view to close service gaps before they became complaints, by acting on real customer data. The result: a 25% increase in agent productivity and voice handle times cut so far that many issues resolved in under 30 seconds. As their Customer Service Director Mike Vroom put it, the team didn't just get more efficient, it changed how much they could actually do with the context they had.

That's what proactive service looks like when it's built on real context instead of a triggered guess: faster resolution, less friction, no one needs a tennis racquet for self-defense.

The next step

Curious what proactive support looks like when it's actually grounded in customer context? [See how Kustomer powers real proactive service →]