Web self-service only for emergency situations

In file "best_practices_web_self_service.pdf" you can find an article "Dynamic Knowledge Management". Author mentions there that knowledge should be built in the context of customer and publishing manuals will not help users to solve their problems. I must say I do not agree with that.
Reading official documentation before deploying some product seems quite time-consuming and complex at the beginning, but when you know the basics of product, especially if it is some complex software, there is a chance that you'll never have to deal with tech-support.

This model works perfectly with Open Source products, for which there's no tech support. Users create official documentation, which aims to fully describe the whole product and contribute to other sources. Other sources of user-generated documentation like wiki pages, or user forums in exreme cases, where they deal with unusual situations, like bugs.

To summarize: Web self-service is used by companies to reduce costs of call centers and tech support, but providing good documentation, which covers most features of the product and making users actually read it will even reduce the need of using web-self service.