I finished a great book this week called "now is too late" by Gerald Baron. Gerald is a Bellingham, Washington based marketing and PR professional who runs Baron Communications (www.baron-co.com) and a senior executive at www.audiencecentral.com. Gerald's book discusses how the old way of conducting public relations has changed due to the technological changes in the last twenty years. The web has changed the news cycle from times in the day, to 24 hours 7 days a week. While accuracy used to be important, speed and requests for forgiveness are more important today.

He is right, the web and access to e-mail gives me the expectation that any company will have someone available to answer my questions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However I may not always be realistic on the level of service that I should expect back from the company. High levels of customer service costs money. One way to satisfy the customer is to develop an agent or answer robot somewhat similar to those annoying "sexbot" you encounter when chatting with your pals in your favourite chat room. Only, an answer-bot is a good solution for satisfying the customer and keeping costs down. If first it is explained to the customer, that currently a live human is not available, but that rather than leaving a message the customer has the option to talk with answer-bot.
- posted by John_Cass @ 6:02 PM