The Most Important Business Communications Problem and Why
My main criticism of Unified, and OmniChannel, Communications are in the problems they solve. I agree, they are problems, but I disagree that they are today’s most important communications problem. It is often more efficient, if you have multiple communications paths to your company, to unify them. It is both interesting and efficient to track the customer as they change modes of communications. Not arguing these problems, and the benefits the solutions provides. Obviously useful. Just not in the top two, in my opinion.
My vote for the most pressing problem in communications is simple: call avoidance. We avoid communicating with companies; it’s particularly painful. Our children won’t do it, and we don’t blame them. Enduring that sort of suffering is an adult practice. Hell and “on-hold” music are cousins.
But not all communications are like that. In contrast, consider how painless inter-personal communications is. We text; we sometimes call. If you don’t text me first, don’t expect me to answer. We share selfies, links, GIFs and emoticons. We all do, every last one of us in the workforce. We all have smartphones with basic functionalities: make a phone call, send SMS, take a picture and open a browser. We use them to communicate with our friends and family, and far from them as a source of pain, we can’t stand to be parted. Why? Exactly because we need them to communicate with our friends and family; it is an actual lifeline. We love our phones, they connect us to the ones we love. Interpersonal communications is pleasing.
If you were to go back thirty years, you would recognize the phone systems. They had auto-attendants, voice mails, extensions and phones on the desks. When the feature set was designed, the phone had two functionalities: voice and dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF). All of the requirements had to be completed with those two methods. When the requirement was to to talk to any employee in the company, by calling a phone number, the auto-attendant was born. Listen to the prompt, punch the key. “Use the keypad to spell the first, or last, name of the party you to call.” Nearly all of the features that we associate with a phone system were designed in an age where all phone calls came from the kitchen or the office handset. Those designs were elegant, considering the functional restrictions. Only in the commercials did those phones serve as love’s lifelines.
Businesses are living in a different communications age, one optimized and designed for the kitchen phone. But, the landline phone has a limited capability to communicate with smartphones. Worse yet, the particular limitations include the preferred mode of communications (text) and the Internet. (No small misses.) Yet, our businesses are optimized to communicate with landlines, not with what human beings actually use. The pain experienced in business communications is directly attributable to the incompatibilities (emotional and functional) between the landline and the smartphone. It has setup two communications camps: the pleasing, personal communications and the avoided business communications.
After a dozen years of smart phone penetration, we have had no corresponding redesign of business communications. If the business phone system were designed today, in the age of the smartphone, the interactive voice response (IVR) would not have been born. To find any employee in the company, you would never make a smartphone user call a number and type in DTMF. The smartphone user would text the name of the employee into the number of the company, and the text would be delivered to the right employee. They’d text back and forth, send a link to an explainer video, or send a photo of a billing question, and then talk, maybe.
But you cannot send text back and forth with your customers, not like you can with your friends. You can’t get an explainer video, but your friend could send one if she had one. The most important problem is call avoidance. The reason? Business communications is painful because businesses don’t communicate like friends. Literally.
