> Why would I want to talk to a low-level customer service rep who's following a script and can't help me? That doesn't "build a relationship".

Exactly. I think the underlying issue here isn't so much automated vs. personal, it's just good service vs. bad service, or if you prefer, effective vs. ineffective communication.

Telephone service is usually the worst: tedious automated menus, up-front warnings about recording this and invalidating that if you so much as breathe during the call, long (or worse, unknown) queuing times, and then you just get to speak to someone who can't deviate from their script to help you, assuming you can even understand what they say if they're based in some far-away call centre where employment is cheap and accents are strong. Neither the automated aspects nor the personal ones are much good here, though I've noticed a trend in the past couple of years for some companies to make a marketing point that they do have local call centres with real people answering the phone and very short queuing times.

Personal favourite anecdote for poor telephone service: I once had to call a credit card company to notify them that someone had been acting suspiciously with my card in a restaurant in a foreign country and I thought they might be trying to double-charge me. The card company left me on hold for so long -- calling from abroad on a mobile phone -- that my phone battery was starting to die and I lost the call, though of course not the charge for it. Since they clearly don't take security seriously, I now use a different credit card.

In contrast, automated on-line services often work fairly well these days: all of the banks, investment firms, etc. I work with have decent web sites, they basically work, they're reasonably easy to use, and they let me do what I want to do quickly.

For some things, I would still rather use a real person, though. For example, I am quite tall, so if I'm booking seats for any sort of show in a venue I haven't been to before, I usually still prefer to call or visit the booking office and ask them about which seats have enough leg room, even if the company has an otherwise excellent web site for ticket reservations.

The most striking example of preferring personal service I know is that several of the supermarkets in my area have recently installed self-service checkouts, where you scan all your own items and pay at the end. Typically there are just a couple of store staff supervising a whole set of these, instead of one staffer per checkout aisle. However, unless you're just buying one or two things, almost everyone seems to have these infernal machines and will join a queue of half a dozen people for a staffed checkout in preference to using an immediately-available automated system. They are just too hard to use without the training that store staff get in all the little options and details, and they are too unreliable, frequently shouting (incorrect) things at you about putting unexpected items in the wrong places or not recognising your card/voucher/whatever.

Amusing anecdote for this one: the other day I went into the store, and in the time that one trained staffer got through six customers on a "basket only" aisle, one customer with a single basket was still trying to get one of those infernal machines to work properly, with three different store staff called over to help by the time I left.

Most important of all, though, is if anything goes wrong. Then I want to speak to a real person who is right in front of me, listening to what I say, and able to do something about it. No automated system is ever going to replace that, and I won't deal with companies that don't even try.

In short, if you want to build customer satisfaction, make the routine things easy, automate where it works, but always provide good personal service as a back-up.