I was intrigued to find an article on Salesforce.com's CRM Success blog about
improving the customer experience with self-service. But I was a little puzzled over the articles summarization of "5 key elements to providing good customer self-service online":
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An easily deployed, personalized customer portal with appropriate branding.
OK... I'd go along with that.
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A customer-driven web-to-case management system for opening and tracking cases
My usability studies show that a customer opening a case online is an unhappy customer. If the customer portal is properly designed, then customers will successfully "self-serve" themselves to needed information. Web-to-Case forms are a "request to be served" last resort that generally result in higher support costs. Besides, email and web initiated support response times are actually getting worse, not better.
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A comprehensive knowledge base
Definitely. This should actually be the #2 key element.
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Embedded natural language search
I think this myth get perpetuated from the 'Ask Jeeves' days, but customers actually just enter 1-3 keywords into search boxes.... not natural language sentences. And besides, once a customer is using your customer portal, you should be able to anticipate 80% of the keywords and rely on human edited search results to maximize the relevance of search results. Depending on engineered search solutions for your customer portal is really casting your fate into the wind.
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An application programming interface (API) for integrating to other systems such as ERP and contact center telephony solutions.
I suppose it depends on the company size. A small to medium business that is already buying into the concept of on-demand CRM might be best served avoiding APIs and exploring other on-demand customer self-service solutions (shameless plug for i-Dialogue 
). But closed-loop integration and a thorough understanding of your customers can ultimately only be achieved using a service oriented architecture. This, unfortunately, does not really improve the customer experience, but does improve the employee experience.