(FORTUNE Magazine) – There's a thin ribbon of blue clay that slopes to a pool under one of eastern Bordeaux's most renowned wineries, Chateau Petrus, causing less acid to touch the roots of its rich merlot grapes. The rose-flavored result, a superconcentrated wine that would be too harsh to drink without the influence of the clay, is limited to 4,000 cases per year. At about $700 a bottle, it is the most expensive, hardest-to-get wine in the world. Once in a while, the folks at FinestWine.com have it in stock and ready to ship at their little shop in western France. If not, they will do everything they can for a serious customer, even if it means driving across the region to Chateau Petrus to buy the vintage themselves.

But in the past, reaching someone live at FinestWine.com was a problem. Voice-mail boxes were overstuffed because of the limited number of customer-service representatives working the phones at the ten-person company, which expanded to the Internet about two years ago. Answering e-mail was laborious: Letters, which arrived through different forms based on the type of customer inquiry, were divvied up and sorted manually. Customers who were lucky enough to have tagged their notes "Seeking rare merlot" in the header received priority. Response to others was slow--delayed by both the mass of messages and the time-zone difference.

Something had to change if the folks at FinestWine.com wanted their online customer service to match the class and level of help they offered in the actual brick-and-mortar shop in Bordeaux. But how is solid customer service translated to the Internet, where salespeople have been rendered obsolete and response time is rarely immediate? How realistic is it to offer customer service that every customer deems warm and worthwhile?

It's one of the most difficult dilemmas businesses of all sizes--not just small businesses--face. "[It's] nearly impossible," says Rick Moses, vice president at Americana Resources, a Gaithersburg, Md., antiques mall that has been online since 1995. Moses is one of two agents who pick through all incoming e-mail, and his frustration in trying to keep up is palpable. But there are solutions--both strategic and technological, some new, some common sense--that help make online customers satisfied ones.

Customer-service packages offered by service providers and software companies start at an average of $2,000 a month. That is considered cheap and usually covers only one application (such as e-mail) for use by two or three customer-service reps. Kana Communications' Kana Response--targeting small businesses--is a thorough, glossy e-mail management system. Customers' requests are automatically routed, tracked, and answered through customized templates. It's efficiently ideal--and it starts at $3,000 per month.

Does a company really have to spend this much to offer good customer service online? "There are free offers out there like live chat," says Kana's vice president of marketing, Joseph Ansanelli, "but no one offers as complete a communications solution as we do." Spoken like a VP of marketing. But after experiencing terrible customer service from a big spender on this stuff--CDnow (a Kana customer) sent us a generic e-mail in response to an order inquiry, and it was later than promised--we concluded that good service must resonate from more than just expensive technology.

"There are things out there that don't cost a penny," says Jay Levinson, author of the Guerrilla Marketing book series, which targets companies with big dreams and tiny bank accounts. "It just takes investing time, energy, and imagination." And perhaps a bit of market research to know exactly how to spend that time and imagination. According to Jupiter Strategic Planning Services, 90% of online customers prefer human interaction but report that it's so expensive that most companies restrict it to their most valuable customers.

That's what FinestWine.com's webmaster, Phillipe Lang, tries to do. With a free live-chat product called HumanClick, Lang uses a shopper-tracking feature to weed out the customers who he determines are just browsing. "We get a lot of people asking us what a bottle they inherited from their grandmother is worth. It drives me nuts," says Lang. "I try to get rid of visitors who I feel are not going to buy."

That's a risky strategy with the potential of losing a lot of business if Lang guesses wrong about who's a browser and who's a buyer, but he feels he doesn't have much choice. After "watching" a customer pause to click on five or six $500 wines from above the Riviera, Lang can assume that the customer is "high value" and will initiate a conversation--through a small, white chat window--to get a sale rolling. To establish trust, something Lang cites as critical when expecting a customer to surrender a credit-card number for a $1,000 cabernet, he'll instigate a more personal conversation--perhaps a chat about vacation-worthy wineries or what foods complement the almost-sold wine nicely.

And chat can translate into increased volume. FinestWine.com reports higher sales for the months that it has used live chat, and it hasn't cost a penny so far to deploy it. Al Heirich, CIO of SkiMall.Net, an online mall that spotlights local services and goods from Telluride, Colo., has five customer-service reps (mostly work-at-home moms who will never miss work because of a sudden snowfall) who chat with three or four customers at once--as opposed to directing only one person over the phone. "Live chat has increased our returning customers greatly and allows us to answer more of them," says Heirich.

Of course, that is only for the 12 hours when live chat is available at SkiMall.Net. "On the Internet, time has shrunk. Customers expect you to be there then, waiting for a chat box to pop up," says Bill Santos, president of the Atlantec Group, a high-tech consulting company based in New Jersey. Companies such as FinestWine and SkiMall can't afford to have a rep waiting 24 hours a day, especially when the ratio of unique site visitors to service reps clashes by a landslide--as many as 1,000 customers per day to three reps. Santos recommends that sites manage expectations by posting hours of availability, and if customers reach the site off-hours, make sure they can easily send e-mail.

All this chatter does cut down on the time that needs to be devoted to tackling the flow of e-mail, but any site that continues to attract more visitors will see its e-mail tide rise as well. What's the best way to handle that tsunami, for lack of an extra $3,000 per month? "I just sit down and do it," says Jeff Rahilly at the nine-person Flexdex.com, a fiberglass-puffing skateboard e-tailer in San Diego, "though it might take some time." Rahilly, a sales rep who's inundated with about 100 orders and sponsorship requests daily, tackles e-mail in two ways. First, Flexdex has separate, topic-specific addresses (info@flexdex.com, orders@flexdex.com) to help customers identify their needs and send them to the right place--thus urging them to "read before they e-mail." But to prevent the occasional wheel order buried beneath a trade-show invitation, Rahilly uses Microsoft Outlook's filters with rules that let Flexdex route e-mail to a specific address. The program can direct problems with orders to one place and dealer inquiries somewhere else--and also make e-mail from Rahilly's boss visible the minute it drops into a special folder. While this e-mail sea-parting system helps makes things clearer, Rahilly and other reps still read through every message. It's taxing work--especially first thing Monday, when Rahilly gets a late start because of good waves and the Pacific time zone--but he insists that using these simple filters is the best way to deal with and satisfy customers.

Inevitably, though, no system is fail-safe. "Sometimes a filter may not catch what you thought it would," warns Mark Anthony, a business advisor with CPR Business Recovery, a consulting firm in Minnesota. Then your only choice is to "get on the phone or send a personal e-mail, and tell the client you goofed. This adds a human and emotional touch to the relationship."

This touch of humanity is essential in keeping customer relationships somewhat personal--not to mention civil--in an automated world. "I've gotten a few nice little flamers [angry e-mails]," admits Moses of Americana Resources, "and the best way to deal with them is to maintain a level of professionalism." Moses puts speed first when responding to customers' concerns--such as an unexpected scratch on an 18th-century rocking horse--even if he has to crank out a "shorty" to soothe the customer while he's fixing the problem. Customers, he says, shouldn't be left hanging.

That's what was worrying Tim Fong, CEO of LassoBucks.com, a business-to-business bartering service that lets customers negotiate the worth of their services and then swap them online. Fong realized that based on the dates of the e-mails between service reps and site users, his customers' questions weren't being answered quickly enough. To remedy the problem, he began sending around usage information via a free e-mail list provided by Topica.com, to which any user can contribute comments.

"These sites are becoming more of an outlet--to get answers for critical products, problems, updates," says Atlantec Group's Santos, describing the forumlike atmosphere that can result from people contributing to a mailing list. In particular, the sites let customers answer one another's questions. "You achieve customer satisfaction without having done anything," says Santos.

In order for any technology to work that seamlessly when dealing with customers, it needs to be paired with creative, innovative ideas and a companywide obsession with service--so the sense of isolation and abandonment that causes shoppers to flee sites can be minimized or completely eliminated. "Good customers," says Anthony, "are won not on price but on service."