It happens to all of us. We visit a Web site, search and search, but we don’t find the information we need. Then we search in vain for a toll-free telephone number. At that point, most of us would be willing to pay the long-distance phone charge to get answers to our questions. But there’s no phone number at all, which prompts would-be buyers to shop elsewhere and current customers to reconsider future purchases from a company that can’t be bothered to provide customer support.

In an effort to save time and money, many companies are encouraging customers to serve themselves online. “It used to be that the Web was the stepchild of customer service—nobody wanted to deal with it, but we knew it was there,” says Esteban Kilsky, research director at IT consultancy Gartner. “It’s [online customer service] that’s actually getting more respect and getting better results. Because of that, customers are using it more.”

In some cases they’re using it more, because they have no choice. Amazon and eBay, for example, don’t even publish customer service numbers on their Web sites, believing that their self-service technology infrastructures meet the needs of the vast majority of its millions of customers. They’re probably right, but most small and midsize companies haven’t reached that level of technological sophistication, and when they actively discourage customer contact, the result can be a permanently lost customer.

Use of online self-service is rising, but a recent study by Jupiter Research revealed that while 90% of survey respondents said they used online customer service at least once between July and December of 2004, the level of satisfaction with the experience was only 51%.

Clearly, companies need to improve their online customer service, particularly because dissatisfied consumers are potentially the most valuable customers. According to the Jupiter survey, dissatisfied self-service consumers spend 35% more online than their satisfied counterparts, and they account for 41% of total revenue from all shoppers who contact customer service. “Consumers who spend more online are coming into contact with customer service more frequently and actually increasing the risk of a potential service slip-up,” says Zachary McGeary, Jupiter research associate and lead analyst of the report.

Companies are beginning to respond by evolving customer service Web sites from static FAQ-type information to tiered-access systems. The first level continues to be basic product information and FAQs; the second level includes search boxes where customers can ask specific questions and receive e-mailed responses; and the third is interactive, including live online chats with customer service agents.

The most evolved companies, and those with the highest levels of customer satisfaction, are those that give shoppers a choice of service contacts, including a live human being on the other end of the telephone line. A population of potential customers exists who prefer personal contact, and probably always will. Many in that group are older and less comfortable surfing the Web, but know what they want and are ready to buy. Discouraging those potential customers can be an expensive mistake.