First call this evening was a mis-dialled call for the local Chinese take-away. We seem to get quite a few of these. What I really want is to have a personal call announcement and IVR:
Hi, you’re though to Martin and Auste’s house. If you want a Chinese take-away, please call someone else. If you want to sell something, please don’t use a phone at all. If you want to talk to us, press 1 and the phone will ring. Please do not adjust your handset — the awful background noise is just the kids. If you prefer to leave a voicemail, press 2. If you’d like me to call you back instead, just press 3 and I’ll get an email with your number and time of call. If you just like pressing buttons, press 4 until you get tired of it. I’m not paying for this call anyway. Don’t dare pressing any of the other buttons — they’re not safe.
I think the other buttons would cause snippets of Andrew Lloyd Webber shows to be played. Well, they were warned.
PhoneGnome kind of offers all the ingredients (I’ve got one installed here), but not in the combination I want. Maybe the future is in personal, customised telephony experiences? I’d pay for someone to put together what I want.
The second call was my bank. They undoubtedly wanted to sell me something (it’s the only reason you get calls from them). “Mr Geddes, is this a convenient time for us to talk to you?” Daina (age: 13 months) is screaming her head off in the background, and banging on the study door where I’ve retreated to shelter from the infant onslaught. “It’s OK by me, but my daughter has other opinions.” “In that case, we just need to ask you a few security questions. Could you confirm the first line of your address?”
Now, I’ve been around the block a few times when it comes to security. I’m pretty sure it’s my bank. But I’d NEVER give out personal information to an unauthenticated inbound caller. (You’re going to do well to emulate my mother or wife well enough to fool me.) So there’s an opportunity here too to sell the premium, secure phone call. Indeed, something like Skype, where I can do a one-off entry of my Skype ID into my online banking service, is the ideal place. Citibank then becomes a “buddy”, but with extra security information shown with inbound calls that non-partners can’t display. (Skype gets to collect a zillion dollars for handing out the security certificate for premium authenticated B2C calls.)
We actually ended up in a deadlock situation, where they wouldn’t tell me the purpose of the call without me authenticating myself, and me refusing to say anything until I knew it related to something I cared about. In the end I simply asked if he was trying to sell me something, or whether I needed to call the customer service number to deal with an account issue. He confessed: it was spoot (Spam Over Ordinary Telephony).
I’m sometimes torn between two extremes. On one side, telephony seems to advance so slowly and painfully, despite the hopeless insecurity and inconvenience of the existing system. On the other, lots of us are actually using Skype and similar tools for the great majority of our talk, and we’ve seceded from the telephony system. It’s just we’re locked into little social islands. The great mass of enterprises out there still haven’t worked out that the leading-edge users are moving on, and they need to engage in these other modes of interaction. There’s still only one “public” telephony network. You can’t Skype your town hall or taxman yet.
What I feel in my bones is that the new modes of usage will only come from physically new people. Teens who grow up with stuff, and who get attached to the first bank that has a clue and can Skype them. (Only friends should be ringing your mobile.) They’ll also become employees and junior managers at these institutions, and change will seep into the marketplace. That’s why it’s taking a long time from the first VON conferences a decade back to a true “Voice 2.0” and beyond experience being the market norm.
(If you’re still waiting for an open user-owned telephony system, forget it. Private and proprietary is in for the foreseeable future. At present I also don’t see any prospect of the PSTN evolving to become a new telephony system that solves relevant needs for its users. I look forwards to being proven wrong!)
The implications for the network operators is probably something like this: Skype and co will keep growing gently for a couple of years, nibbling away at prices and margins until maybe 2010. Then the system will enter a chaotic phase, as whole chunks of traffic peel off into other communications systems for non-price reasons, and convulsed telcos try to fight back and recapture secure, private, convenient conversations. That phase lasts a few years. Then it’s all over.
As Gandhi would have it, we’re still in the laughing phase. The fighting has yet to start. This industry is only going to go through ever more interesting times - Chinese take-away style.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:23 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Heh he - I empathize with the bank story. I had a similar experience with my bank calling up and asking for letters from my password as a precursor to an account review. I wouldn't give them this over the phone, so they said I could phone them back, and until then my account was frozen. When I called them back, they refused to accept my call from a mobile, and insisted I use a landline. "Look, I work for Nokia, we don't use landlines..." did not elicit a satisfactory response :)
Posted by: at December 30, 2006 01:25 AM