How do you feel when you call a company and have to press 1 for some information or press 2 for something else? What about when all you want to do is talk to someone live and when you hit 0, all you get is a message that says, “I’m sorry, you have pressed an invalid entry, please try again.”

I know that the reason why auto-attendants were invented for business was to speed up the handling of calls and save money, but when do we consider ourselves to have taken it too far?

I was watching the Jetson’s with my children the other day. I think that when we have an automated dresser and baby feeder, then we have certainly gone way too far, but I would imagine there is a point before that where we should try for a little more personal interaction.

People still like to talk to a live person on the phone. People don’t care how much more efficient your business is because you are not talking to customers, they want their problems solved and they don’t care what you have to do to solve their problems.

Bottom line: Make sure that you don’t automate the customer experience.

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Corey Smith is the Vice President of Innovation at Fisher’s Document Systems where he maintains a blog on business and technology.

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