Column: Automated letters can do more harm than good

Yes, Julie is on her customer service bandwagon again. Today's pet hate is automated letter generation.

There are undoubtedly time, effort and cost benefits of automation from a corporate perspective.
But, as a consumer on the receiving end of a number of erroneously generated demands or "gentle" reminders, I can vouch for the potential for things to go very wrong.
One of the quickest ways to rub a valuable customer up the wrong way is to send them a letter accusing them of being late with a payment or failing to meet some other requirement of your contract with them.
The "don't worry, it's just an automatically generated letter" response does little to ease the ire of the consumer. The system will have "automatically" logged this letter and made the alleged default part of their permanent record.
For example, I was once accused of having missed a rent payment because of a miscommunication between property managers when the landlord changed firms. Would somebody at the company remember that mix up a year down the track when I was looking for a reference or credit rating?
With a large number of tenants, probably not.
Somebody would consult the system, find the alleged infraction and report back accordingly.
One allegedly missed payment is unlikely to do much harm, but it becomes an unwarranted blemish on an otherwise spotless record.
There is also the inconvenience.
It is all very well advising a customer to "forget about it, it will have been generated before you made the payment/sent your response/returned the item", but when you get a letter telling you something you thought had been done hasn't, you need to check.
You call the company, work your way through the automated telephone system - which never contains the words "for erroneous, computer-generated letters, press 5" - and listen to hold messages for an interminable period while "all our customer service operators are busy helping other callers", only to be flippantly told there is no problem after all.
Automated billing and letter generation is a time and money saver, but there need to be checks and balances to ensure these are not generated ahead of deadlines or that they can be stopped if the matter has been dealt with before they are posted.
There also needs to be a mechanism to expunge incorrectly sent letters from customers' records.
And greater staff empathy when a mistake is made.
Julie Taylor is the business editor at The Daily Post