I believe that many of the customer service software solutions have what amount to pre-programmed macros. Eg they may have a 'greet' one saying "Hello ${NAME},

I believe that many of the customer service software solutions have what amount to pre-programmed macros. Eg they may have a 'greet' one saying "Hello ${NAME}, I will do everything I can to assist you." and another 'orderstatus' "I understand your message is about your order status." The support rep can then chain together the macros for some or most of the response far quicker than they could ever type. And of course that increases their productivity (messages handled per hour) and possibly even has an effect on happy customers per hour although that is harder to measure and seems less of a interest. The net result are email responses that are indistinguishable from robots, and I suspect the systems would take an initial stab at which macros should be used for a response. The real problem is companies rarely seem to take the effort to work out why people used email or call centres instead of self service. For outsourced providers there is absolutely no incentive to do anything to reduce call volumes. Joel also has a good article http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html