Phone-based customer service, as necessary as it may be for your business, is expensive. An increasing number of companies are using the Internet as a customer-service channel, offering text chat with both automated responses and real-life agents. We talked with Stan Orelove, senior director of technology innovation at Cincinnati-based Convergys (CVG). While text chat represents less than 5 percent of his clients' customer-service use, he says improvements in the technology will ensure it's the main channel of communication for Generation Y.

Why should companies use an automated customer-service system?
Virtual service representatives basically serve as [phone] call avoidance. Our virtual rep is a server-side program that functions like the frequently asked question page on the Web site, but it also serves as a tour guide for the site. It simulates a text chat session with a live agent, with page-push or cobrowsing capability [controlling the browser].

We also do callbacks, and we're trying to launch [teleconferencing over the Net]. We think we're ready to do voice over IP, where we can use the customer's computer as the voice conduit, but most of our clients are skittish about being the first to try it out.

How do you keep the virtual rep experience from feeling impersonal?
The standard content on a Web site tends to be dry. We try to give a little more life to the bot ... [with] a picture of the virtual agent. Depending on the question asked, you can have a visage that greets your customer, one that smiles, frowns or looks confused. The virtual rep can also be conversational and answer off-topic questions. Depending on how our client wants us to answer those questions, we can give the bot personality - it can be polite or very sassy.

A common question for the bot seems to be, "Where do you live?" The answer we've scripted is, "I live in a server in Company X's data center." Then people might ask, "What's the weather like there?" We'll push a Web page displaying the weather at the company's city and say, "Here's the weather for Cincinnati, Ohio [my home town]. But I don't know what the weather is like anywhere else."

But allowing off-topic questions can lead customers to abuse this form of customer service with inappropriate questions. How do you deal with that?
People tend to get more off-topic with the automated bots than with live chat, where a real person is on the other end. [Bots are] a novelty. They're not used to asking a computer system a question and receiving seemingly intelligent responses. We try to make the customer aware of the fact that they are speaking with a virtual service rep, but I guess not everyone gets that.

[The site flags] four or five profane words in a row. Our first reaction is to try to end the use of foul language. Some of the responses that the auto rep will try to use are, "Chill," or if you want a sassy answer, "Do you really kiss your mother with that mouth?" If someone keeps swearing, though, the virtual service rep warns the customer that it will terminate the session, just as a live agent would. We try to be humorous about these situations. For example, if you call our virtual reps stupid, you'll get one of several answers: "I'm not stupid - I'm a program, my flaws will be corrected," or "Tolerance is a good quality for a service representative to have." My favorite one is, "I'm an inanimate object. You're hurling insults at an inanimate object. Which one of us is more likely to fit Webster's definition