angry phone call

I recently read an article in the New York Times (online) by Pamela Pail called Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You. It brought home a lot of changes over my lifetime as to how we use the venerable cell phone. When I grew up, we had a home phone, that mom, dad, my sister and I shared. My parents of course were able to demand use of the phone at any time, meaning my sister or I needed to end any call whenever they wanted the phone. Yes, like most Americans, we had just one phone line. My cousins were very rich and had two phone lines as the three boys entered their teen years….WOW! There were rules of etiquette about not calling anyone before 9AM and not calling anyone later than 9PM. Even to this day, I look at my watch (or the time on the phone itself) before I ever make a phone call.
Not too many years ago I disconnected my home phone. It wasn’t so much the cost of having a cell phone as it was the fact it was rarely ever used. The day that fact came home to roost was the day I picked up the phone to make a call, heard the beep-beep-beep indicating a voice mail message and finding out that voice mail was left over from two months previous. That was certainly a sign we were not using our home phone…or not enough to justify the $30+ we were spending each month.

Pamela Paul’s article however brought an even more vivid point to the table regarding how we use phones that cellular versus landline. We are using the actual phone portion less and less. I use to explain to people that a regular cell phone is a phone with a few apps and that a smartphone is a computer with a phone app too. We are not talking on the phone anywhere near as much as we use to. We are emailing, text messaging and facebooking. Where I grew up in a family with one phone, each of my children have a mobile phone as well as myself. It’s hard to imagine sharing a phone in today’s world.

It’s not so much we each need a phone. We don’t. It’s the mobile device the phone is part of we want. We hardly use the phone function. Phone calls are intrusive and often annoying. One could be talking to someone else, or doing something else. Text messages lack the nuance and inflection of a voice, but we can answer a text message when we want to…and that can be anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours from now. Text messaging allows us to conduct multiple conversations at one time, while surfing the net, eating, working, whatever. Plus, talking on a cell phone can be expensive too.

Want to upset your customers? Call them on their cell phones. Businesses, charities and political campaigns are learning that when someone pays for their minutes, they guard them with a zeal. How do you deal with this? Learn to email. Learn to text message. At the very least, ask your customers how they want to be communicated with before assuming the old rules are the same as the new rules.