The Phone is Dead... Again

Last month there was this interesting article in the New York Times about how we are using the telephone differently now.  For those of us in the business to business marketing industry there are several choice one liners in the article including "The telephone has a very rude propensity to interrupt people." and “I remember when I was growing up, the rule was, ‘Don’t call anyone after 10 p.m.,’ ” Mr. Adler said. “Now the rule is, ‘Don’t call anyone. Ever.’ ”

This is particularly interesting to us at CSG because a very big part of what we do is talk to our client's channel partners: on the phone.  As the article points out, people are more sensitive to the interrupting nature of the phone call, so we do this with ever increasing number of our calls scheduled in advance through other means.

Now in our 14th year of doing a majority of our business over the telephone, we have seen the predictions of the end of the telephone before.  Here are a few of them:

• The email killed the phone
• The web killed the phone
• Cell Phones killed the phone (AT&T’s service is so bad that people just stopped calling)
• Skype killed the phone (Skype is pretty cool and will continue to take over)
• Social Media killed the phone (Really? I don't buy it)

The way we use the phone is indeed changing. However, I spend more time on the phone now than ever before.  Just about all of the calls are scheduled on my calendar as meetings for a specific time and duration. In many cases the phone calls include more than one other party, and often are aided by shared online workspaces or presentations.  These calls are much more productive than the old calls, and even when all of the participants live in my city they consume much less time than in person meetings.  

There are many reasons this is happening.  Here are a few examples:

• People are more sensitive to interruptions 
• People seem less likely to meet face to face
• The conference bridge brings in multiple people
• Desktop sharing creates a rich experience

In the middle of all of this is the phone.  I guess the reports of the phone's death have been somewhat exaggerated.

Accelerating Innovation in the Land of the Telephone

In March of 1876, 134 years ago, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the master patent on the electric telephone.  There have been many advancements since then but in the age of the web, interesting and telephone have not really gone together lately. Interesting and mobile phone maybe -- but not your plain old landline phone. With the wide adoption of VOIP, however all of this is changing.  Here is just a sampling of new and innovative telephone stuff out there:

Skype:  Skype has been around for what seems like forever (7 years) and has just emerged from four years of ownership by eBay.  Here is a formula for success:  create free internet telephone company, sell to ebay for $2.6B ($1.9B in cash), go on vacation for a while, buy it back for $400M.  Hats off to founders Zennström and Friis for pulling this off and not only is Skype going to live on, but we should expect them to retake the leadership position in the industry.   

Google Voice: Still invitation only, and I have not been invited.  From what I gather is is pretty cool.  One phone number, take it with you anywhere, read your voicemails, view a list of your voicemails, and other features that make your telephone and voicemail as much like email as you can imagine.  If you can get over letting Google into another area of your personal data -- then it could be a great service.

Phone.com:  All the features you can imagine, conference calls, chat sessions, international, text voicemail, and more.  It is not free, but it is cheap.

Ring Revenue:  Described with a pretty good tag line: "Track Calls Like Clicks", this inbound call tracking service is innovative and a powerful tool for marketing departments.  Call by call reporting has been around in the call center industry for a while, but only a few people do a good job with it.  The founders of Ring Revenue came from web conferencing to mobile serivce provider CallWave.

Twilio: Want to turn your web site or web ap into a phone?  The Twilio API delivers all of the functionality you need with simple code in HTML.  This could be a turning point in the industry where anyone capable of writing a simple line of HTML can now have Click to Call functionality.

Vodburner: Be careful what you say on that conference call -- it could be on You Tube in 5 minutes if the person on the other end is using Vodburner.  That is right, you can easily record both the audio and video of a video Skype call with Vodburner.  Good for people like me who can't remember what I had for breakfast.

Jajah:  Make phone calls on Twitter!  Who would have thunk?  (in Beta only right now). This service also let's you build a directory of local numbers for your international calls (essentially custom call forwarding to international) which is an interesting twist on long distance billing.

Stay tuned for many new interesting developments in an area some have written off as old and stuffy.

Convergence

All of us are watching the convergence of the telecom and computing industries from a vantage point so close to the action that we often miss the larger implications. The more cell phones get to be like computers the more we have to wonder about the role of the carriers. You know, the carriers are those guys that are processing billions of cell phone calls and mountains of data. The iPhone has accelerated their entry into the computing industry and the netbook and the Google phone push things along even faster. This is going to push the carriers into the channel marketing mix -- which will be an opportunity for some and a threat to others. The carriers could bring a very interesting new layer to our industry in 2010.

In addition, let's not forget the cable companies and their competition with You Tube and the fight over net neutrality.

If that is not enough, add in the Panasonic, LG, Direct TV, and Skype partnerships bringing down the price of video teleconferencing over the web and you have another dimension -- I have lost count -- is this the 4th or the 5th dimension of the telecom and computing convergence?

Yow!  This is going to be interesting.

Here are a couple of news stories on the Skype announcements:

Information Week             PC Magazine