There’s a type of customer that should terrify you more than the one actively complaining to your call center. It’s the one who says nothing and then flat-out leaves or goes away drip by drip.
They buy a little less. Then, they visit less frequently. Finally, one day, they are simply gone. No complaint, no survey response, and no clue as to why they were unhappy.
Bill Price, founder of Seattle-based Intend AIcalls these people “silent sufferers.” In a recent interview with Inc.he shared that for most companies, these types of customers bleed them dry.
Price would know. He built customer service at Amazon from scratch as the company’s first global VP of Customer Service. What he did there was simple and, at the time, a little radical. He categorized every single reason a customer picked up the phone: “Where’s my stuff?” “Why is my bill so high?” Then he figured out how to make nearly all of them go away.
That was the secret. Not answering faster or being friendlier on the phone. The solution was eliminating the reason for the call.
Eliminating friction
Price left Amazon in 2001 and spent the next two decades as a consultant, refining this approach for the clients he was serving at the time. Then, conversational AI showed up, and he saw the opening.
In 2025 he incorporated Intendra AI in Seattle in collaboration with co-founders in Bangalore and Bogota and started automating what he used to do more laboriously. What used to take six to eight weeks now takes two to three days.
