We launched Yuki as an inbound assistant. Multilingual, channel-native, polite. We expected daytime overflow. What we got was a night shift.
The shape of the day
Across the beta, 38% of customer-initiated conversations land between 7pm and 7am local. WhatsApp at 11:47pm. Voice at 6:32am. Email at 2:14am. The patterns are different by industry — service businesses skew early evening, e-commerce skews very late — but the shared truth is that nobody is awake to catch any of it.
What Yuki resolves without escalation
- Booking and rescheduling: 91% resolved end to end
- Pricing or service-area questions: 84% resolved
- Quote intake: 72% qualified to a human follow-up the next morning
- Complaint or refund: 0% — these go to a human, by design
That last line is a feature, not a limitation. We deliberately escalate anything that smells like a refund, a complaint or a contractual dispute. Yuki is good at scheduling. It is not your lawyer.
The single most valuable thing Yuki does is not the message it answers. It's the customer it doesn't lose to a competitor who didn't answer either.
The math, plainly
A human virtual receptionist runs $1,500–$2,500/month for full coverage and is awake from 9 to 5. A live answering service charges $250–$500/month for 150–300 minutes — generous on staffing, miserly on minutes. Yuki is $199/month, never out of coverage, fluent in four languages, and writes everything to your CRM.