The personal touch is good business in a retail store. You can be sure I'll shop there again. It just means that visitors to your Web site will be interacting with a somewhat smarter machine. The personal touch is something no machine can provide in and of itself. To provide the personal touch, you need at least one real person, who will answer questions, resolve problems, follow through on promises, and in short see to the needs of your site's customers.
Technology can facilitate that, but it's no substitute.
Building in the human side to your commerce site doesn't have to be expensive. If your site has substantial traffic, you'll find that you need to dedicate full-time staff to handling email queries, just as you need to hire sales and service staff to answer your phones. And once you have more than one person fielding email messages from your site, you may find that you need a more efficient way of dispatching those messages to the appropriate destinations. That's where technology comes in. In fact, there are at least two products designed to help manage the flood of incoming email messages.