The front page of USA today announced something that I told you, my loyal readers about nearly 6 years ago – that supermarkets are beginning to trust their customers. There are more and more self check-out tills going in to supermarkets all over the USA and the UK.

The fundamental principal that sits behind this is one is easy. If you trust your customers then they can just check themselves out, rather than paying people to swipe something over a scanner.

I first broke this story several years ago in the UK when my local store started handing out scanners. That way I could just scan my goods as I picked them off the shelf and then put them straight in my bag. Flying through checkout at the end. Brilliant.

That’s not the story; the real story is how some stores are actually taking this technology out.

Why remove technology? And what are they replacing it with? People!

Yup, people are making a comeback. Companies are trying to differentiate themselves on service and to do that you need people.

The problem for me is this; the spotty diffident youths of today have forgotten how to serve. As a direct result this, the whole service thing could fall flat on its face.

The other day, I was checking myself out in a Stop and Shop in the USA and an item triggered an alert. This required a spotty oik to come and reset the machine. He grunted in my general direction, scanned something and then disappeared back to the conversation that he had been having before the machine so rudely interrupted him.

This morning I was ordering coffee from a hole in the wall drive through. The speaker blurted out a string of monotone sounds, which I slowly deciphered as English. Having ordered my coffee, I pulled around to overhear a conversation from the two year old teller saying “he thinks I am Jose, why does he think that?” about the customer behind me. Perhaps because you try so hard to sound the same?

I believe that customer service is the future, I am sure of it. The more that people rip service out of the system, the more I believe there is a market for service.

BUT, you need people that understand service to carry out these roles, and that is becoming a rarer and rarer commodity. The days of people considering that great service is an art have gone and these days, spotty oiks go to universities and leave with dreams of being video technicians, journalists or multimedia engineers. How’s that working out for them?

We should be teaching people great customer service. It’s a dying art.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

This has been a very long downturn. Since 2008 business has been living with the burden of reduced business and consumer expenditure.

The result has been that business has had to cut its cloth to suit and slowly but surely unemployment has risen. The other impact is that slowly but surely there have been fewer and fewer people around to serve and those that are left are earning relatively less.

From a pure economics perspective that’s fine. Business has to cut its cloth according to its means. However, there is a really good chance that we are reaching the end of this process now and this brings with it a totally different set of management challenges.

As business begins to tick back up again, the tightly stretched and cheaper resource will begin to stretch tighter. Initially this will be good news because there is more revenue coming in with less cost going out, profits will rise. But, very quickly, this could turn into a death spiral. In the last few days I have already seen instances in service businesses where they haven’t been serving.

- Like a telephone call that needs to be referred on to a supervisor that requires a returned call that doesn’t come – that creates a follow up call from an irritated customer, which quickly spirals.

- Like a call to take advantage of a special offer that is now sold out – that turns into a negative experience.

- Like standing in line at a store where inexperienced staffs are not opening new tills (to the frustration of the supervisor calling them over).

- Like the two day stay in a hotel where the air-conditioning hasn’t been fixed.

All these are examples of where service is being under-delivered in such a way that will impact on the business in the longer term. When new companies enter the markets that are able to better serve, they will hoover up business for dis-affected customers of the low-serve businesses – which really brings us to the crux of the issue.

When is the right time to invest in customer service? I would say just before we start coming out of recession, right now (in the UK). In fact, maybe about 2-3 months ago. Because it takes time to find and train good staff.

The cost of doing this at a time of austerity might be difficult but without any doubt at all, the cost of not doing it will sink your company.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.