QUARANTINE — "67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking with a live agent" (attributed to Zendesk)

Quarantined claim: "67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking with a live agent," attributed to Zendesk.

Reason for quarantine: Traces to vendor (Zendesk) secondary citations and blog repetition; could not tie to an independent, current primary Zendesk source.

Why we keep this note: The figure circulates heavily in SMB-marketing content. When a client or a competing agency cites it, we need an internal record of why we don't. Replace in our own work with HBR (Dixon et al., 2017) — 81% of all customers attempt self-service before reaching out to a live representative (independent, primary, current).

Source-incentive note: Zendesk sells customer-service software — direct incentive to inflate self-service-preference figures.