The flow still says Ramadan

Two weeks after Eid, the welcome email at a fair number of brands here still greets the customer for a month that has finished.

The basket reminder is still offering a set menu for a table of ten. The countdown in the push notification is counting down to a sunset that stopped mattering when the month ended. Somewhere in the account there is a banner with a lantern on it, serving to every visitor from every country on the list.

None of this is carelessness. It is the ordinary output of how automation gets built. The flows were written in February, by the same person who was writing the campaign, in the fortnight when everything had to be finished at once. They were correct on the day they went live. Then the campaign ended, because a campaign has an end date. The flow did not, because nobody gives a flow an end date, and by then the person had moved on to the next brief.

Paid media has a daily report and an owner who is measured on it. Automation has neither. It is the only channel nobody reads after launch, and in a direct-to-consumer business it is usually the most profitable one per message sent.

Which is the part worth sitting with, and it is bigger than a lantern. An automated message is a decision taken by someone who has left the room, and it keeps taking that decision, every hour, in the voice of the company, to the customers who are closest to buying. The default it falls back to is not neutral and it is not empty. It is whatever happened to be true on the day it was built.

Nothing in a business runs longer unsupervised than a message that sends itself.