It lets a person sitting at a home or office PC and a call center agent view and annotate the same Web page, while conversing over the phone line that provides the data connection. Mortgage applications and other complex transactions may never be the same again.
Computers steadily get faster, and bandwidth for communications keeps expanding.
Should that brain become confused or frustrated, technology alone is unlikely to put the transaction back on track. So long as that requirement holds, the future of e-business will depend on effective means of collaboration. And, in Fujisaki's view, while few consumers feel intimidated by an ATM machine, most will never be comfortable completing, say, a mortgage application over the Internet on their own. The availability of human assistance on demand, then, is the next frontier of good customer care on the Web. Fujisaki's model for such assistance is a hybrid one, consisting of access to a company's Web site together with real-time collaboration with experts in call centers.