What does Dr. Jonah Tebaa's PACA Test for Proactive Customer AI mean in practice?
Dr. Jonah Tebaa designed the PACA test as a strict four-condition gate to determine when customer-facing AI should deploy proactive messaging. Under this framework, an event must be Predictable, Anxiety-weighted, Chase-inevitable, and Actionable before triggering communication. Using an illustrative worked example of 340 delayed orders, Dr. Jonah Tebaa demonstrates that satisfying all four PACA criteria reduces support contacts and cancellations, saving an estimated 2,063 dollars compared to remaining silent, which eliminates costly assumption gaps without generating unnecessary message noise.
Dr. Jonah Tebaa opens his account of proactive customer messaging with a single warehouse moment: 6:52 p.m. on a Tuesday, an order already three days behind schedule, and no one has picked up the phone to say so. He multiplies that one case by 340 identical orders moving through the same delay and treats the resulting silence as a live business decision rather than an unfortunate byproduct of operations.
His central argument is that the most valuable message a company can send a customer is frequently the one the customer never had to request. In his work advising teams that build customer-facing AI, he has watched companies pour resources into faster inbound support while leaving the outbound, proactive side of communication almost unmanaged, either ignored entirely or triggered so broadly that customers learn to tune it out.
The Cost of Staying Quiet
Dr. Tebaa names the gap between a company learning bad news and a customer learning it the "silence tax." He argues that gap is never neutral: left unfilled, customers fill it themselves with worse assumptions than the truth would produce, whether that's fear the order was lost, suspicion that something broke, or simply the sense of being deprioritized. In his framework, that assumption gap is what turns an operational delay into a trust problem.
The PACA Test
To decide which events deserve a proactive message, Dr. Tebaa applies what he calls the PACA test, four conditions that all have to hold before a message goes out. An event must be Predictable, known to the company before the customer could reasonably discover it themselves. It must be Anxiety-weighted, meaning silence about it genuinely reads worse to the customer than the truth would. It must be Chase-inevitable, meaning the customer would eventually contact the company about it anyway. And it must be Actionable, offering the customer a real next step such as a reschedule, a substitution, the option to wait, or a refund. He is explicit that passing three of the four criteria is not sufficient; all four have to be true, or the message doesn't go out.
Inside One Delay Event
To make the framework concrete, Dr. Tebaa walks through an illustrative worked example (a composite built to keep the arithmetic consistent, not a single client's live figures) involving 340 delayed orders averaging $180 each at a 35 percent margin, or $63 of margin per order.
In the reactive scenario, where the company says nothing, 58 percent of affected customers contact support: 197 contacts at roughly $3.80 each, totaling $749. Of those 197, 22 percent cancel, 43 customers, at $63 of lost margin apiece, adding $2,709. The reactive total comes to $3,458.
In the proactive scenario, the company messages all 340 customers first, at about $0.05 per message, $17 total. Only 9 percent, 31 customers, reply with a question at $3.80 each, adding $118. Cancellations fall to about 6 percent of the full 340, 20 customers, at $63 each, adding $1,260. The proactive total, including the send cost, is $1,395.
Dr. Tebaa's point is the arithmetic difference, $2,063 saved on a single delay event, or roughly $6.07 per affected order, produced by the same delay and the same 340 orders. What changed was only who spoke first.
What Belongs in the Message
Dr. Tebaa is specific about content, arguing that a vague "we're aware of the issue" update does almost as much damage as silence, because it gives the customer nothing to act on. His standard for every proactive message includes:
- A named new time rather than a vague acknowledgment.
- One concrete option the customer can take: reschedule, substitute, wait, or request a refund.
- A single reply channel that a human actually monitors, for cases the standard offer doesn't cover.
- A hard rule against sending on any event that fails part of the PACA test.
- One update per genuine change in status, not one per hour of elapsed time.
Guarding Against Noise
The risk Dr. Tebaa flags once a proactive system exists is scope creep: teams start flagging more events "just in case," and the channel that once carried real information turns into something customers learn to ignore. He treats the PACA test as a gate rather than a guideline for exactly this reason, holding every candidate message against all four criteria rather than loosening the bar as volume grows. In his framing, a proactive message earns its place by making a phone call unnecessary, and that's a bar that has to be defended, not just set once.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does Dr. Jonah Tebaa say a delay message should name a new time?
Because he argues vague reassurance gives customers nothing to plan around, while a specific date lets them decide whether to wait, reschedule, or ask for something else. In his framing, the date is the actionable part of the message, not the apology.
How does Dr. Tebaa's PACA test prevent proactive messaging from becoming spam?
By requiring all four conditions, predictable, anxiety-weighted, chase-inevitable, and actionable, to hold before a message is sent, not just one or two. He treats it as a strict gate rather than a scoring guideline, which keeps low-value events from triggering messages that erode trust in the channel.
Why does Dr. Tebaa use an illustrative example instead of a single client's real numbers?
He wants the arithmetic itself, not any one company's confidential results, to carry the argument, so he builds a composite scenario with consistent, checkable figures. The 340-order delay example is designed to show the mechanism, how support contacts and cancellations shift, not to represent any specific engagement.
What does Dr. Tebaa say happens to trust when companies over-message?
He argues customers stop reading proactive alerts once too many of them turn out to be low-stakes or irrelevant, which defeats the purpose of the channel entirely. That's why he insists restraint, not volume, is what keeps a proactive messaging system valuable over time.
Related evidence: Google's SRE book sets the bar for when a system should speak up unasked: an alerting rule should fire only where the condition it detects is urgent, actionable and actively or imminently user-visible, and it warns that where pages arrive too often people skim or ignore them outright, so that a real alert gets lost in the noise. (Google's SRE guidance on alerting only where the condition is actionable)
The FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide sets the legal floor under unsolicited commercial messages: every such message must offer a way to stop all marketing mail from the sender, and that opt-out must actually be honoured rather than filtered away. (the FTC's compliance guide on unsolicited commercial messages)
