An interesting crystal-ball piece in Time Magazine dedicated one of its “10 Ideas That Are Changing the World” to customer service. Or, to be more exact, its demise. Time writer Barbara Kiviat makes the case for automated self-service replacing human interactions with news of impressive advances, including a completely automated airport check-in system. Supermarkets (yet again) play a role in the story. The origins of the current self-service revolution dates back to an early 20th century Memphis-based grocery store.

Before entrepreneur and inventor Clarence Saunders came onto the scene in 1916, going to the food market meant queuing up at the one-and-only counter, placing an order, and then waiting while clerks retrieved items from shelves. Realizing that profits would rise when customers served themselves, Saunders launched his revolutionary Piggly-Wiggly store in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. It was the first modern supermarket, introducing shopping conveniences that we now take for granted: allowing customers to rove the aisles, prices marked on goods, and check-out stands.

The shopping cart as a symbol of self-service is now literally an icon found on web sites. Besides the bottom-line efficiency to the retailer of doing-it-yourself, there’s also an important 2.0 aspect to the customer—we interact with others and form relationships in the aisle and at the checkout line based on our purchases and product preferences.

To my thinking, this makes Saunders’ self-service supermarket an example of a customer-based social network!

I agree with Forrester Research blogger Bruce Temkin that this new wave of highly automated self-service doesn’t mean that full-service customer support is ending anytime soon. The technology can become a distraction when self-service turns the customer into an unwilling technician who has to grapple with non-intuitive interfaces—graphical or IVR.

I think of Web 2.0 and Contact Center 2.0 as the best of both worlds: providing the customer familiar technology as a helpful aide, while not eliminating the personal interactions that are the key to bonding the customer to the business.