We all want to provide our customers with exceptional self-service options but it's not altogether clear how to achieve that goal. This special supplement focuses on Best Practices for customer self-service, with five leading vendors offering their views on how to build sustainable and superior customer self-service options.

Let's start with a basic premise: Technology solutions that empower customers to resolve typical service issues without assistance-via phone, kiosk, or Web-are a good way to cut costs for the corporation. An often-cited Forrester Research study notes that, on average, a company incurs a cost of $1 for each Web self-service interaction, compared to $10 for each email response and $33 for each telephone call. Certainly the business case for driving down costs is clear: From the organization's point-of-view, shunting significant numbers of routine inquiries toward less-expensive channels has become a compelling reason to deploy customer self-service options.

But there's a problem with looking only at the quantitative metrics of customer self-service: Those metrics often pit the organization's goals of reducing costs per transaction, hold times, or live-agent assistance against the customer's goal of receiving better service or getting an answer to a question. What is not easily gleaned from productivity reports and statistical dashboards is the value of providing exceptional customer service in order to support the company's brand experience, increase customer satisfaction, and expand lifetime customer value. As products become increasingly commoditized, and as competing on price becomes a race to the bottom, customer service may be the last major differentiator and remains the leading contributor to customer loyalty. As a recent Gartner study notes, customer service used to be a department within an organization-now, for leading organizations, it's become a full-fledged enterprise strategy.

The goals of a corporation and its customers need not be mutually exclusive. Almost 50 percent of airline passengers prefer checking in at a kiosk with a simple swipe of a credit card and a few keystrokes on a touch screen. And specific task-oriented applications-including the ones at the airport kiosk-accomplish more than merely achieving high satisfaction marks. They also free up ticket agents to deal with customers who have complex problems-the kind that can't be solved as easily or handled properly without affecting the rest of the people in line. Self-service for those who only wish to check in and print a boarding pass makes service-real, substantive service-possible for everyone else. Furthermore, the airport kiosk works because it's integrated with the other channels and databases that hold customer information. What we take for granted, as we rush to our flights, is a highly evolved system that serves customers and airlines very well.

If there's one consistent theme in the following essays, it's that customer self-service can effectively and efficiently serve both the organization and the customer. Leading corporations get it, and they're reaping the benefits. Increasingly, mainstream organizations are following their lead.

Where will the cutting-edge leaders in customer service turn next? And how will technology help shape the next generation in customer self-service? The vendors included here may hold the answers.

This section is also available online at www.destinationCRM.com/whitepapers for download.