Will the current cover situation change our behaviour towards touching screens outside of the home? And can voice technologies play a role in facilitating changing behaviour?
Transcript
If there’s one thing that will change irreparably over this whole covid thing, is the fact that, when we all return back to normality, we won’t want to touch stuff anymore.
People are now becoming far more aware of just how much germs there are, even on your phone and things like that.
The germs are absolutely everywhere; remote controls, phones. It’s bad enough in your home. What about outside of the home?
I’ve never really been a huge fan of touching doorknobs and stuff like that. I’m one of those freaks that, like, rolls my sleeves leave up to open doors on the way out of public bathrooms and things, but after this, I’m probably not going to be alone.
It’s not just doorknobs and surfaces, just think about the amount of things that you touch outside of the home that you need to touch to get stuff done;
digital screens that require people to touch them are everywhere.
From the menus in McDonald’s and the click and collect screens in Argos, to ATM machines and train ticket machines and things like that.
And the irony is, all of these companies that have physical locations and digital screens that people need to touch, they’re all kind of shutting up shop and battening down the hatches trying to weather the storm.
They probably don’t realize that, when this storm is over, people’s behavior and attitudes towards those screens may well be different.
So really, if you think about when is the best time to add a voice interface to your digital screens out of home or to add voice interfaces into systems and machines that require people to touch them outside of the home, what better time than when everything’s closed, you have no customers in the store and you have a little bit time to think about how you can make changes to your business; about what life is going to be like after this whole lockdown thing and what you can do to make improvements to your customer experiences in your physical locations as far as digital screens and machines and systems are concerned.
There really isn’t a better time than right now to do that because when everything goes back to normal and people start coming into your bank’s again, into your stores, life will be different and people’s attitudes to touching stuff will be different as well.
For me, there’s no time like the present, is there, Winston?
