The cost of servicing external customers remains a significant expense for most companies. In order to contain customer service costs, customer service organizations, over the last ten years, have tried many remedies: e-mail response management, chat, co-browsing, off-shoring live support agents and even implementing "virtual" support agent software. Through all of this experimentation, enabling customers to find their own solutions to problems has remained an effective component of any customer service strategy.

Self-Service, Serve Thyself

While customer self-service today is usually transactional in nature (e.g. online banking, order tracking), allowing customers to find simple information about products and processes is a required component of customer self-service as well. Indeed, the more self-service transactions are added to customer facing Web sites, the greater the demand has been for text-based assistance with the self-service transactions themselves.

Historically, SMBs were at a disadvantage when considering...