Shaz Memon, Founder of Digimax Dental | The worlds highest rated Dental Marketing Agency | Charity: Wells on Wheels | Best-Selling Author.
Here’s a bad joke for you: Why do young people never pick up their phones? Because they never put them down.
But, like most jokes, it’s funny (or half-funny) because it’s true. For many young people today, and for many older people, too, the phone is where they send and receive messages, it’s how they organize their lives, how they buy things, how they read the news, how they watch TV. It’s their diary, their alarm clock and their personal assistant.
But one thing they most certainly don’t use their phone for is making phone calls.
A 2017 survey by Ofcom found that just 15% of 16- to 24-year-olds thought that phone calls were the most important method of communication. And, writing in The Times (paywall) in 2017, 24-year-old Eleanor Halls revealed how an unexpected call could cause her generation paroxysms of anxiety and that she personally would often ignore phone calls altogether, even work calls.
It’s not exclusively people in their 20s who are becoming phone call phobic. In an article from The River, 47-year-old blogger Kate Beavis recently opened up about her own aversion to answering the phone, revealing how this has led to her missing out on a series of high-profile interviews. Scott Wilson, professor of media and cultural studies at Kingston University has also detected a “phone-phobic” trend in people born pre-1980.
But before we bemoan the loss of something crucial in our society, we should consider whether the so-called “Generation Mute” might be on to something. Just like bad jokes, behavioral trends tend to be underpinned by a certain sense of logic. And if you’re running a business, there’s no point criticizing your consumers’ habits. You simply need to find out what they’re about and make them work for you.
In this case, those within Generation Mute are probably communicating with and keeping up to date with a larger number of people than was possible in the pre-smartphone era. If a weekly phone call has been replaced by several daily text exchanges, who’s to say the friendship is any less strong as a result?
And when it comes to business exchanges, it’s particularly difficult not to see the logic. No one enjoys calling customer service hotlines, waiting on hold, repeating a query to three different call handlers, not knowing if the inquiry will take five minutes or an hour and five minutes to answer. And, in fairness to Eleanor Halls and her reluctance to answer work calls, a ringing phone can be a huge distraction.
In his book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, behavioral psychologist Nir Eyal explains the importance of being able to focus on one task at a time and how even a two-minute deviation from your main task can throw you considerably off course. In contrast, sending someone a written communication allows them to respond in their own time.
Taking all of this into account, anyone running a business would be well-advised to cut down the amount of time they spend using phone calls to communicate with customers. You might find it will save your employees time, increase their productivity and improve how your customers feel about your business. Crucially, as I have explored, the time saved allows you to reach out to more potential customers with a response rate that can far outstrip traditional cold calling.
That’s why I recommend WhatsApp Business, which allows you to reach your customers through a medium with which they’re more comfortable. Your customers can send inquiries any time of the day, and you can set auto-responses for when you’re out of the office. There are other platforms you can use and, of course, if you haven’t done so already, you should make sure to automate as much of your business as possible. If your customer can’t buy your product or book appointments online, there really are no two ways about it: You will miss out on business.
However, if you’re concerned that a decrease in voice calls will depersonalize your relationships with your customers and lead to less of a bond, you might well be right. Customers are still creatures of habit, and they’re likely to stay with a company that’s providing consistently good products and services.
That said, keep in mind that recent studies (paywall) have suggested that brand loyalty is on the decline. It’s therefore essential that you consider replacing time spent on the phone with written communication that’s clear, concise and engaging.
As we have seen, one of the main reasons voice calls are going out of fashion is because they’re time-consuming. So, it’s no good sparing your customer the trauma of calling a call center, only to present them with the horror of dense blocks of text, an endless stream of FAQs, hazy descriptions of your products/services and annoying mail merged emails that don’t actually tell them anything of interest.
In this new era, written communication is more important than ever, while time has never been so precious. So keep it clear, keep it simple, stay in touch with your customers but only contact them when you genuinely have something to say.
For many business owners, it can be a real struggle when customers’ habits change, and it’s always easy to criticize or mock new modes of behavior. But the reality is that you need to shape your business around your customers, and when they change, you must change with them. After all, if you don’t take Generation Mute seriously, you may well find the joke is on you.
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