If you’ve been paying attention at all, self-service is a critical trend in almost every industry. We are doing things for ourselves that our parents would never have dreamed of. Complex financial transactions, complex real estate dealings, and complex ordering of expensive and custom manufactured items—all online, all in a self-service fashion. It's starting to look like we might only interact with software to procure just about anything. 

The print industry seems to be trying to hold onto the synchronous, full-service interactions (phone and email) in customer service, insisting that each order must be handled by a human. Print is not more or less complicated than other procurement events that are all online today.

Moving to self-service is a strategic move. It can’t be done without leadership. I’ve been interacting with lots of customer service departments lately. Without leadership, customer service will continue to process orders like they have been processing orders in the past. The status quo is a very compelling option. Change is hard. Change introduces uncertainty. Change makes humans feel uncomfortable. Change can be even more difficult the longer your employee has been doing their job or the more experienced the humans are. If you’ve mastered your job responsibilities over the last decade or so, it's hard to back up and be a “beginner” for a while when changing to a new process or software system. Often, process changes take more time in the beginning and are open to the criticism that “this is making my job harder.” Moving to self-service is strategic.