In my profession (engineering consulting to VoIP companies), I hear this a lot from customers who are building new companies or products and emphasise that what

In my profession (engineering consulting to VoIP companies), I hear this a lot from customers who are building new companies or products and emphasise that what they need has to be "low-touch", and that the "user experience" needs to be "self-service oriented". This is generally a euphemism for, "I don't want to hire real support staff", and to some extent, is understandable given the low margins and race to commoditisation in the general VoIP service provider space. And to some extent, the self-service aspect is objectively more efficient. I wouldn't want to call someone like Vitelity to order my DIDs; I'd rather just order them myself instantly on the web. But there are certain things that you'd rather call or e-mail someone to open a request to address, and then just let go of the problem and let someone else solve it. I think porting requests rank fairly high on that list, although most of the bureaucratic complications with that are imposed by regulatory requirements--meaning, the task isn't _inherently_ "high-touch". But the point is, these, too, are things that companies are trying to keep from crossing the customer-vendor barrier. I think anyone that can figure out how to get their customers to pay a premium for good service (at a large scale), but still actually provide said good service, wins.