A right to reach a human is no longer theoretical. New consumer rules show how contactability could reshape law, politics, business and culture. On 3 July 2026, Ireland brought in new consumer-protection rules giving...
Latest articles
Richard Hall
What companies mean when they talk about “deflectionâ€
In customer-service and customer-experience circles, deflection has a special meaning. It usually means a customer who might otherwise contact a human support agent is steered somewhere else first. That route might be a...
Eva Stefanidou
Are Public Bodies Now Just Faking Reachability?
Barnet Council’s garden-waste page appears to have told residents waiting for stickers to email its recycling team. In this case, when that route was used, the automated reply said the inbox wasn’t monitored. It’s...
Peter Friedman
Why We’re launching the Customer Support Black Hole Survey
We’ve just launched a new survey into customer support failures because existing research has made one thing very clear: responsiveness matters. But it has also left one major question unanswered – what...
Gabriel Fitzpatrick
Are We Racing to Answer the Front Door, or Just Adding More Doors?
The question behind the knock At ReplyResearch, we keep coming back to a deceptively simple question: what actually happens when people try to contact an organisation? Not what the website appears to promise, but what...
Client Acquisition has a stealthy Evil Twin: Responsiveness Deflation
How reply failure turns hard-won paid-for demand into a stranded asset Customer acquisition cost inflation is usually explained as a media problem. Ad prices are up, search is more competitive, social channels are...
ComplianceCXEmailImpact of AIInsightsReachabilityRepliesReputational harmResponsivenessRevenue Leakage
The Perception Gap Is Really a Reply Gap
Why poor digital experiences are pushing customers away   –  and what responsiveness research tells us to do about it A third of customers switched brands in the past year because of poor digital experiences...
When AI Writes the Email, Who Is Really Replying?
What “Email in the Era of LLMs†reveals about the future of organisational responsiveness The most important change in email may not be that AI can write it faster. It may be that AI is beginning to decide what a...
The AI Reply Rollback: Companies Wanted Faster Customer Responses. They Got a Governance Problem Instead
The promise was contactability For years, the promise was simple: AI would make companies easier to contact. It would answer instantly, reduce queues, stop customer emails from disappearing into the void, and make every...
Agentic AI Can Answer Faster. But Can It Reply Better?
What Alibaba’s customer service experiment reveals about the future of inbound responsiveness The biggest question in modern customer operations is no longer whether AI can respond. It can. The harder question is...
