How will video conferencing change business?

WASHINGTON -- Anyone who has been squeezed aloft in the rear of an aluminum tube to attend a business meeting in a distant city could easily fall in love with video conferencing.

A few years ago, such video services basically came in two flavors. One was too rich for most wallets, while the other was too poor in quality to bother with.

At the top, huge screens filled mahogany-paneled board rooms or sleek conference centers, allowing small groups of high-level managers to see and talk to their counterparts halfway around the world -- for tens of thousands of dollars. On the other end of the market, cheap video units plugged into the Internet worked off ordinary phone lines. But the lousy pictures evoked the hand-cranked movies in vogue at the century's dawning. While that stuff is still around too, the next wave of technology, coupled with tighter industry standards, promises to change things. Small businesses can now afford the latest video conferencing systems, although it will be a while before they appear in the malls. Picture and sound quality has improved to a level where modestly priced video conferencing units meet TV-broadcast guidelines. That means that more colleges are able to drop satellite systems and adopt direct two-way digital links to their extension classes. Telemedicine, hardly known a few years ago, allows specialists around the world to monitor each other's procedures and offer expert advice in real time. The underlying goal -- whether in schools or hospitals, on Wall Street or in military command posts -- is to offer people the tools to do a better job. Accordingly, some large companies equip their key executives with video conferencing tools -- along with fast Internet access, direct e-mail links, portable fax units, cell phones and the like. But even as these new gadgets take hold, ordinary people often find it more difficult to communicate with the mega-firms who are adopting these devices for their own use. Gone are the days when you could simply dial a local number, speak to a customer service representative and get a fast answer to your query. Nowadays, callers are apt to be connected to answering machines, perplexing voice-mail trees or automated fax-back systems. Often as not, these advanced units prove unable to deal quickly and easily with the issue at hand. All this is happening because Fortune 500 firms, in striving to cut their costs, are adopting highly centralized service systems. Within the corporate world, there's also an unsettling trend to stiff end-users ("please call your local re-seller") and to deal merely with high-volume enterprises. As these trends evolve, a need may arise for customer service representatives -- with a twist. This time, such folks would work directly for you, charging a fee to chop their way through corporate thickets so you can get your dishwasher repaired or your computer warranty honored. Perhaps, as one century ends and other begins, some of us will even deal with our consumer ombudsmen via video conferencing.

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