Why Packages Have Trust & Transparency
But Calls and Emails Don’t
Think about the last time you tried to contact a new person or company. You sent an email, called a phone number, or filled out a contact form online. And then you wait. Does anybody check that voicemail box? Did the email get eaten by a SPAM filter? Or maybe just the attachments?
You have no data to show your call or message arrived to the right person. But the problem doesn’t stop there. If the other person gets the voicemail and tries to call back — you’re not likely to pick up the phone, either. If they send an email, it might get eaten by your SPAM filter. Communication fails when there’s no data for transparency and trust.
Decades ago, FedEx solved a very similar problem in package delivery — inventing the tracking number and giving customers on both ends the data for transparency and trust. Both sender and recipient can see exactly what is happening in a trustworthy, 3rd party system. FedEx founder Frederick W. Smith said, “The information about the package is as important as the package itself.”
This article explores why FedEx’s solution worked, and what we can do to raise transparency and trust for people sending communications instead of packages.
A Reliability Mystery
Delivering an electronic message or call across the internet should be much more reliable than delivering physical items across the country. A physical item has to be delivered through the rain and snow, and if it’s lost or damaged at any point the game is over. There’s no redundancy.
The internet has incredible redundancy and error-checking at the network level — after all, DARPA designed it to withstand a nuclear attack. If a few packets are lost, they can be re-sent and re-assembled on the other end. It’s all automated, data is delivered without human error.
But in practice, the FedEx package is a lot more likely to arrive than a phone call or email. Here’s an example.
A New Customer Tries to Contact a Business
I visit the website of Tom, a real estate appraiser, and look at the contact information available. There’s a postal address, a phone number, a contact form and a generic-looking company email address.
I can send a FedEx Standard Overnight envelope for about $26.95 and based on past data it’s about 98% certain the package will arrive on time. The other 2% of the time, FedEx will give me a refund and a full report showing what happened and what they’re doing to get it there. I can even watch the truck travel across a map to the delivery address.
But if I fill out Tom’s contact form or send an email? I’d give it a 50% chance that the business owner sees it the same day. Another 20% chance the business owners sees it within a few days, when they check their junk mail folder. I don’t know if the message arrived unless the business owner sends a reply message — and only if that reply makes it through my SPAM filters and onto my desk.
If I call the phone number on Tom’s website? 62% of calls to small businesses are not answered. Many calls that are “answered” let you talk to someone in a call center who’s never met the owner and knows nothing about the business. More than 30% go to voicemail. What happens when the business owner calls back? He or she gets to leave a voicemail for the customer.
If the package companies delivered only 62% of the packages, they’d be out of business. If it took 3 tries for a package to get through, they’d be out of business. So why are we OK with it taking two voicemails and a 3rd call before people have the “tracking data” they need to pick up the phone and talk?
Package Networks are Integrated
When my wife sells a hand-made scarf in her Etsy shop, she creates a shipment in the FedEx website, then drops off the box. It’s an integrated system, so there is never a data gap. FedEx can show both the shipper and recipient where the package is and when it will arrive. Every step in the transport and delivery is controlled and monitored by FedEx’s IT systems.
Open systems like the email system are much different. Messages are passed from server to server in a daisy chain, with nobody having a full view of the process. Any spammer can set up an email server (or take over an existing device) and start sending emails on the global, open network.
The phone and text networks are decentralized and almost as open and anonymous as email. It’s easy for robo-callers and robo-texters to join the network with essentially no identify verification, and send out as many calls and messages as they want. (Rollout of fixes is not going well).
Imagine this — you’re shopping for a house in Sacramento, CA. The advertising networks know you’re exactly the kind of buyer Rosie the realtor is looking for: the right age, the right zip code, the right income level. They show you her ads. But when you pick up the phone and call, all that data is lost. And she doesn’t pick up the call, because from what she can see it’s probably just a robocall.
Today, every time you send a communication you’re hopping onto an open, un-trusted network and all the information needed to make the first communication transparent and trustworthy is lost.
Putting Communications On The Same Network
The first part of the solution is, put the sender and recipient on the same platform — just like the FedEx shipper and recipient.
Free Apps like Facebook Messenger or LinkedIn’s InMail are integrated — the whole chain of communication takes place inside one platform. Messages that are sent will arrive with high confidence. But these free platforms have a serious problem: Free is Evil. We’re never going to trust them.
Privacy Apps like Telegram and Signal are integrated and more trustworthy, but they don’t work for the initial call or message that starts the conversation. It’s too big a hurdle to ask people to get an App, learn how it works, and then use it to contact you. Pick any privacy app, and 90%+ of the people you want to talk to will not have it.
Privacy apps have a chicken-and-egg problem. They don’t have the market share to be a default mode of communication that you put on your website, or in your profile on Twitter or LinkedIn. And because people can’t use them as a default, they will never get the market share.
Hybrid Solutions Are the Future
What’s needed is a hybrid solution, where the conversation happens on one platform, but allows new users to have calls, texts and emails forwarded off-platform to their existing phones and accounts. That gives you the trust and transparency of a platform, with reverse compatibility to the default phone and email networks.
So now imagine you arrive at Rosie’s real estate website and click the “Contact Us” button. Your identity is validated automatically — using the same cookies that Google already used to serve you Rosie’s ad.
You’re assigned a unique UserID and a cookie is dropped on your browser so you can return to the conversation anytime. With a click in the browser, you can send a call or a secure message that goes to an App in Rosie’s pocket. Rosie can pick up the call or read your message with confidence.
The message from you (on Rosie’s website) goes through completely on-platform and never hits the email, phone and text networks. That solves one half of the problem.
In order to let Rosie reply, the guest needs to put in their phone number or email address. Rosie’s reply call, text or email is forwarded to the phone or email they already use. But if that call isn’t picked up or that email is lost — the guest can return to the same website link and see it in their conversation thread on the platform.
That solves the other half of the problem. It’s a “default” mode of contact because the guest can start the conversation at the website and then go back to call/text/email. But the guest can also go back to the website and see anything she missed in the conversation history on the platform.
It’s Time to Build the Future
The phone, text and email networks are collapsing under the weight of robocalls, robotext, and email SPAM. Real people can’t reach each other, because trust and transparency have been destroyed on the open communication networks.
FedEx solved this problem in the world of shipping physical packages — putting senders and receivers on the same, integrated network and sharing the data to establish trust and transparency between people who didn’t know each other.
We have the technology within reach. It will take a hybrid approach, using elements of the privacy Apps along with reverse compatibility to the older networks of phone, text and email.
