Making the Organization Come Alive: Talking Through and About the Technology in Remote Banking

Abstract

Organizations have increasingly been seeking to interact with their customers using more "remote channels" such as telephone and computer-based technologies. This process has been a part of dramatic technological upheavals as technology enters into customer interactions. This article examines examples of this changing relationship, documenting the role of technology in delivering banking services over remote channels. We present details from two ethnographic studies concerning physical and digital representations of artifacts, talk, and the organization of customer-facing work and their relevance in "designing for the expanded interface." In telephone banking, sharing of objects and reconciliation between different instantiations are achieved through conversation. In video- conferencing, despite visual access to the same artifact, operators still need to guide customers around objects, explaining what they are seeing and what is happening. We look at the use of scripts designed to standardize operator interactions, the demeanor work undertaken by operators to account for the behavior of technology, attempts to configure customer interactions, and issues of trust in such technologically mediated communication.