15/11/2006

" The state of live nature" and an way of being " Agent

Consumer loans have become the center of attention due to the so-called "gray-zone" interest rates these days. Although the market size has greatly increased after the bubble economy, interest has grown primarily due to use of famous entertainers in ads, and to the "Automatic Loan-Application Machine". Both are appealing psychologically to consumers, especially the automatic loan machine, which has succeeded in lowering the psychological barrier of customer reluctance of verbally telling a human representative personal financial information at the lending window.

From a company's point of view, there are services that require interaction face-to-face; however, for some of these same services, customers would rather perform autonomously and not have to interact with another human being. The Automatic Loan-Application Machine could be considered one example of a service where a machine takes over the role of a human being. But in practice, a person in charge could also conduct a transaction remotely by either A), simply looking into a camera on the second floor (man is not only in a window) or, B) by RIMOTO from the call center.

In this way, more services similar to loan applications involving a conflict between a company and its customers could be seen to have huge business market potential, especially if using a robot or other type of machine is more cost-effective (and makes customers more comfortable) than using a human counterpart.

At this point, the impersonal nature of not dealing with a human will be felt more often, but as I explained in my article "Robot Technology That Improves the "Live" Nature of Service", it might be a useful service that can be realized since it eliminates all time and distance constraints, and it might also be conceivable that humans current working in the front office could be replaced with 'interfaces' of Robot or Robot technology. Using robot technology would theoretically allow customers to receive service at any time of the day as well as from any location. Therefore we see a definite market for technology that replaces humans for the improved service and convenience for customers.

Now, let's take a look at an image of service. As mentioned before, the keywords are 'live nature', 'transcendence of time and distance', customer's 'psychological barriers', and as a function of an agent (substitute).

For example, consider a real estate brokerage service. Although these days putting up listings for vacant houses on the Internet is common, customers would undoubtedly be disappointed if they receive a negative reply such as, "This property is already taken" after they call the real estate agent.

According to sources in the real estate industry, updates for real estate listings average about only once a month, and a listing cannot be sold until the buyer comes into the office. Although this might be inconvenient to the user, land developers usually place such listings more as advertisements than full real-estate brokerage services. But it can also be said that these practices narrow the width of selection for users. If we provide the service as we described above, we station a monitor and an agent robot in an uninhabited office (for example, size of a telephone booth), and have people browse a real estate database. When people want detailed housing information, they can connect to a center via TV telephone so that an operator can take over the further service and provide further real-time information to them. The benefits of this system are that it eliminates the need for customers to physically visit an office, and it consolidates many stores into one central location. And most of all, this system made appropriate allocation of task possible. The problems of this system might be the cost for machine installation, and also new technology for closing a sale would be necessary (In the end, then, people would have to physically go see the property).

Although these are simple examples, when the network information is being used as an advertisement like in the real estate example, an agent robot could eliminate human intervention, particularly for repetitive jobs, which would free up workers to perform more mentally challenging and rewarding work. I firmly believe this approach would be a step up from current convention and will ultimately produce much more value for companies.