New service combines online promotion with automatic telephone follow-up.

If you were to test drive a new automobile and it ran out of gas before you reached the first corner, you couldn't really say it was the car's fault--but neither could you conclude much about how the car handled.

That was our reaction after looking into a new service that offers e-mail promotion prospects the ability to request an immediate return telephone call from a salesperson.

inChorus.com (with a web site of the same name), which produces and manages e-mail messages, has formed a partnership with USA Global Link (www.usgl.com) to create the Instant Call service.

Instant Call, which may be embedded in your inChorus message or in your own web site, allows the prospect to click on an option requesting a telephone call to receive further information and answer specific questions. The prospect may request an immediate call back, or one five or ten minutes, or an hour or a day, later.

"Instant Call provides what has always been missing from internet commerce--the warm, personal touch of human interaction," said USA Global Link's senior sales manager for corporate accounts, Lewis Weiss.

"Instant Call will allow any e-marketer to connect instantly on the phone with pre-qualified, interested customers at the 'critical moment,' when they've just read their e-mail and they're most inspired to do business," Weiss continued.

We "test drove" the service at www.talkclick. corn/link inchorus. We clicked the "Call me in 10 minutes" button and exactly 10 minutes later received an automated call back.

The recorded message said to "Press 1" for a salesperson, and when we did we got another recorded message saying that person was out of the office and to please leave a message.

There went Lewis Weiss's "critical moment" up in smoke, The whole point of a fresh prospect receiving "the warm, personal touch of human interaction" was lost in the universally dredded voice mail runaround.

To be fair, however, that was the work of inChorus. At USA Global Link's web site we learned that the call-back service is available directly from that company, without inChorus's intervention.

The only publisher we were able to find using the service was Ziff-Davis. The web site quotes ZD Market Intelligence senior vice president Harry Henry:

"Many web users prefer speaking to someone when making a purchase decision," he said.

"Transaction security is a concern for many customers, and others may have specific questions about our products that are not answered on our site," Henry said.

"Whatever the reason, we want to make it easy for our customers to go from our web site to speaking live to one of our agents. We're very excited about Instant Call because it fulfills that need in a simple, economical manner.