Even though we do things like this, we could do what you said and go nuts with autoresponders and probably eliminate customer service all together, but we try to strike a balance between being automated and being personable and accessible. Things like this make sense, but there are still a lot of areas where we handle the emails one by one. We just can’t do that in every scenario because we just don’t have the resources (and quite frankly in a situation like this, it’s a win-win by automating).

Now, if I were in your situation providing a premium service to a higher value customer, I’d totally do what you are doing. I almost think it’s a necessity. There IS nothing like that personal touch.

All you could ever want to know about us is listed on our website and in our FAQs, mailouts etc. yet we still get people asking really basic questions all the time – I’m talking things from headlines, from our front page and in replies to emails we’ve sent that actually contain the information. For us (with fewer but high value customers than you) we just reply with the same old information, often using template emails. I’ve considered having a catch-all email or perhaps redirecting them back to the website, but In the end I figure the more human and real I can make the contact the more likely I am to convert them into a customer. I wholly understand why you do it your way though – we’re busy if we get 20 customer queries in a week, never mind a day!

Kidding aside, it seems like you made a wise entrepreneurial decision based on your on the fly analysis of the data. Seeing patterns like this is essential to making your job less demanding for low level problems allowing you to focus on higher level work which returns much greater rewards monetarily and intellectually. In a case like the one you mentioned in this post it frees up your time and offers the customers a faster solution to the problem, everyone wins.