Relative Something

Our cable company has been running television ads that I’m seeing repeated during the Stanley Cup hockey broadcasts, touting this ‘new feature’ they offer. They call it, “Self-Service.”

What a benefit this is that they now provide. Customers can go online and search for answers to questions about problems they are having with their service. As a paying customer, I can look all over their site to find information I may seek about the services the company provides. I can click on every tab and read through all the possible issues on every page of their web site. I can use the internet to look up and see why the internet connection isn’t working. Wait. I’m not sure that can work. But the information is there.

I can even use the new Self-Service feature to look up the status of my account and to pay my bill. Really leading-edge feature, that one.

This new feature that they are advertising is so exciting that it has inspired me with ideas about other businesses that might want to look into offering it to their customers. Imagine if you could go to a restaurant and be offered a chance to serve yourself. What a great feature that would be. You could get the ingredients together and cook them up, never needing to wait for someone else to prepare your meal.

The dentist’s office could let patients schedule their own appointments, and call themselves a day before with a reminder. With new technology, a little camera and glasses with heads-up display video could allow patients to clean their own teeth, eliminating the struggle of trying to talk with the hygienist while your mouth is open, filled with knuckles and tools.

To eliminate the wait for a taxi to come pick you up, they could just offer the new feature of Self-Service and let customers drive the taxi themselves. That would eliminate the need to describe where you want to go. Just drive the taxi to your destination, give yourself a respectable tip, and be on your way.

I can even see retail stores offering customers a new feature of a Self-Service in checking out and paying for items. Gas stations could eliminate the wait for an attendant to come out and pump fuel by offering Self-Service.

Self-Service is an awesome way to offer customers the FEATURE of providing the desired service to themselves. As a business strategy, being able to offer customers the opportunity to pay for the privilege of doing the work themselves is really forward thinking. If my cable company had not run the ads to inform me of their new feature, I might have resorted to the old fashioned practice of contacting one of their employees for assistance.