Why is everyone so convinced that customers are delighted to have the opportunity to serve themselves? There are lots of ways to justify why they might like it, and why it s in the interest of any company to have customers that like it. But it s not so clear that they actually do instead, it appears to us that the customer service industry has fallen into the trap of believing its own wishes, and then putting tools and practices into place in hopes that those wishes come true.

Here are the premises on which this possibly-flawed assumption are based:

1. Self-service is cheaper to provide than agented-service. True. Lots of evidence exists to support this contention. And it seems self-evident that a person who finds an answer through a Web interaction will not rack up the kind of costs associated with a long phone call. The consensus is that on a per-interaction basis, nothing costs as much as agented-phone service. Every other option, from email to Web to chat, costs less.

   How much less is a matter of conjecture, though. Most alternatives to the phone also involve agents; it s just that those agents are handling data rather than calls, and are supposedly handling more of them per hour than phone reps. When you add the massive costs of the new technology infrastructure to the continuing ongoing cost of agents, our guess is that you don t come out that much better. All you ve really done is add another channel of access,...