Remote consultation system for participants with different skills and roles

In this paper, we propose a remote consultation system in financial and public areas, which allows customer and consulting staff to communicate with the same productivity as in face-to-face consultation. For remote consultation, current groupware technology alone is not enough since it is intended to support participants who are uniform in the sense of sharing same objectives, roles and knowledge, and having same skills of computer operation. Basic design concept of the proposed system involves supporting remote conversation among participants with different skills and roles. For this purpose, we propose following additional support functions for these two types of participants to operate terminals and communicate smoothly: 1) tele-monitoring of customer and customer's terminal; and 2) tele-operating of customer's terminal. Experimental result of user testing and practical interaction data demonstrate that the proposed functions are powerful to support smooth remote consultation.