chapter 8 the rise of self-service a boon to your customers--but only if you do it right employees aren't the only ones with an expanded inclination toward autonomy. Today's customers also have an increasing desire for-- and expectation of--autonomy, in the form of self-service options. This is a very powerful trend among today's customers, with some customers wanting to do business with you wholly in a self-service environment and even more now growing accustomed to augmenting human service providers with self-service . . . as I myself did not long ago with my smartphone when shopping at the local music store. awarding myself the mobile prize One Saturday morning, I found myself trekking to the guitar store uptown because I needed strings for a ``Baby Taylor.'' (A Baby Taylor is a reduced-sized version of a standard acoustic guitar.) The clerk, who was knowledgeable in an approximate sort of way, told me he thought medium-gauge, full-length guitar strings would work well: just cut off the excess length as needed to make them fit the ``baby.'' I had a hunch that his answer might be incomplete, and I vaguely wondered why the clerk didn't look in his system for Taylor's ``manufacturer's stringing 111 American Managememt Association · www.amanet.org