New age of tele-presence: Re-personalising market relationships

Tele-presence was a common term in discourse about the significance of connecting computers to telecommunications networks at about the same time as virtual reality and tele-centres were in vogue. Since the term has been pretty much forgotten, imagine a tele-presence scale which goes from a very low bandwidth email connection, through a higher bandwidth voice connection. The highest possible bandwidth is actually being there with all senses firing.

Ten years ago, the implications of high bandwidth tele-presence research were being presented at ground breaking conferences, such as Doors of Perception 3 – ON MATTER: A Meeting between Info and Eco Communities in November 1993. The blurb on the front of the delegate pack is even more pertinent today.

It was at that conference I recall a live tele-presence demonstration in which two people in remote locations shared a room, could feel each others’ warmth, smell each others’ smell, and hear each others’ voice, as well as any ambient noise. The only separation between participants in different locations was an invisible wall through which their physical bodies could not pass. All the rest was both transparent and apparently permeable.

Video conferencing was a high ticket item affordable only to the high echelons of large institutions. It never made it into the wider world because broadband was not widely enough available. People continued to drive and fly to meetings and conferences. Its potential for lifestyle transformation was foreshadowed a year earlier in Trend Monitor’s, 1992 Policy Briefing for the Irish Development Agency, entitled The Market for PC-based Video-conferencing Services. For example, under Opportunities it says,

In terms of human relationships, email and database information retrieval are very low bandwidth forms of connectivity. Being abstract and conceptual, these low bandwidth forms of communication are often hard and time-consuming for people to interpret. Misunderstandings abound.

On the other hand, humans are particularly adept at parallel processing the multi-sensory input of real-presence communication. It was found that trust and commitment could not be achieved using low bandwidth links, such as email and telephone links.

That is why people have used laptops and telecommunications to increase their mobility to enable them to meet in person both in and outside offices, instead of heralding the “radical decrease” in the consumption of matter and energy as the pioneers had hoped.

However, over the past few months broadband and free video-chat systems based on MSN Messenger and Skype have become widely available. So, at last, at least a taste of high bandwidth tele-presence has become available. For the first time, the Internet will afford people the opportunity to make virtual person-to-person relationships. Given that the need to cut waste is now paramount, it would seem that the age of tele-presence based relationships is about to move beyond the virtual sex stage.

CRM applications have to date exploited low bandwidth, information rich communications to individualise relationships between buyers and sellers, while at the same time cutting down the need for meaningful real person-to-person relationships. Successful call centres combine better information about individuals (contact management) with CRM-analytics software to provide customer behaviour data to support campaign management. Most CRM suites provide buyers and sellers up-to-the-minute multi-channel access, too.

The problem is that despite all the investment, overall customer satisfaction and "loyalty" rates have been falling for years.

Findings in our recently published, Beyond CRM: Surviving in a Buyer-Centric Marketplace, suggest that buyers resent the depersonalisation of interaction with sellers, as more and more communication is driven by timed, script-driven call centres. The core of the problem for both buyers and sellers is that neither institutions, nor computer information systems can ‘care’. Only people can care. And care is the very least that people want in a relationship. No wonder the rates of dissatisfaction in commercial relationships are so high.

Now with the new capability and cheapness of video-chat, both for buyers and sellers, an new opportunity exists for developing the missing person-to-person links using basic tele-presence and broadband communications. Once again, people will be able to hold other people directly responsible and the faceless institutional bureaucracy will no longer be an administrative necessity.

Of course, the most important change will be political, not technical. Leading edge sources, quoted in Beyond CRM: Surviving in a Buyer-Centric Marketplace, are now saying that buyer facing staff should be empowered to manage their organisation as much in the interests of the buyer as for those of their organisations. Their job descriptions would be buyers’ "agent" with the authority to get things done, rather than sales or service “rep” managed using traditional hierarchical command and control systems.

If tele-presence means that people, rather than processes, will be held responsible for buyer and seller relationships, then management systems will have to be set up to ensure that they can deliver what they promise which requires a change for direction of "command and control" from the inside out to the outside in.

The new age of tele-presence is yet another factor pushing the marketplace from being controlled by sellers who want to make and sell as much as possible, to buyers who want to consume and spend as little as possible, as the thrift economy begins to bite.

Beyond CRM: Surviving in a Buyer Centric Marketplace can be obtained from www.ark-group.com

Read more about Beyond CRM: Surviving in a Buyer Centric Marketplace.

By Jan Wyllie
Trend Monitor
jwyllie@trendmonitor.com

About the author

Jan Wyllie founded Trend Monitor, the first UK content analysis based intelligence refinery in 1983 after a career in journalism and trend reporting in Canada.

In 1984, Jan was appointed a Director of Microbel where he had an unique opportunity to learn from the insights and wisdom of text-retrieval software pioneer, Dr Tony Kent on the subjects of software and knowledge management. In 1991, he became the founding (and final) editor of Aslib's bold and well respected monthly magazine, The Intelligent Enterprise.

He has been at the leading edge of developing the intelligence uses of content analysis since 1980 when he learned the methodology from Kristin Shannon of the Canadian Trend Report who always said that it was she who taught John Naisbitt of Megatrends fame. He founded Trend Monitor International Ltd. in the UK in 1983.