Customer service continues to gain in importance -- not just among customers, but with businesses. The realization that customer retention is at least as important as customer acquisition was spurred by the economy, and that's helped investment in the area of service.

There's a grain of veracity to the idea behind customer self-service: For many normal, ordinary things, customers do indeed prefer to help themselves. Applying for a loyalty program, changing an address, looking up basic questions, finding addresses of outlets -- all of these can certainly be handled by the customers themselves, and the experience is better than if they'd had to talk to a representative.

Instead of focusing on how customer self-service helped the experience for the customer, they focused on how it helps their bottom line.

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