Voice.... It's Alive!!

The last few years of living in the connected world have been truly fantastic to watch play out. I am sure we will look back 20 years from now and we will think we were in the dark ages or something, but it still has been so much fun to see all the changes in how we communicate, what is important, what is possible and how these changes can have some incredible impact. Both good impact and maybe not so good impact.

One of the trends that we have been seeing though with both mobile devices and traditional devices is the continued "irrelevance" of the use of voice communication in the daily lives of most of us. I remember when I got my first mobile phone in 1998 and couldn't wait to make phone calls to my family and friends to tell them about the phone and to see how it sounded. Never mind that SMS was killing it all over Europe as a shorter, faster and less expensive way to communicate with a mobile phone, we here in the US loved talking.

Fast forward 14 years and every where I look, on blogs, in the news, on podcasts, everyone is commenting on the "death of voice". You see the impact of this thought process in the simple things like young people getting data rich mobile phone plans instead of voice heavy plans. But you also see the so called "death of voice" in the intense and difficult negotiations that Verizon is having with their Unions right now. Companies like Verizon and AT&T are trying to figure out how to manage their work forces in the traditional land line business when people are getting rid of land lines by the millions every month.

A word of caution folks.... Voice is not dead. Voice is only just beginning. We may be seeing the death of a certain kind of transmission of voice that is outdated, costly and inefficient. That is the natural cycle of business. But by no means is voice dead. In fact, there are likely more opportunities today for voice than there have ever been. What do I mean?

Think of all the possible outlets today where you can communicate with your customers. All the different places that voice could be used to facilitate a discussion or help with a problem or reassure or express frustration. In the last example, you can only use so many exclamation points in a paragraph to show emphasis before it gets annoying. But what if instead of writing that same message, you could leave a voice message in that space? What if when you went to leave a recommendation on a site for a great book you just read, you could leave your voice message instead?

See communication is only a fraction about the content that is exchanged and almost entirely about the way it is communicated. Tone, inflection, speed, etc... The written word can rarely communicate the most important things we need when we receive a message from another.

So voice is not dead my friends, in fact, it is alive and well. I would challenge those that are thinking about how they can redefine customer service and experience to think long and hard about how they might use technology to help their customers express themselves with their voices in ways that will only enhance the connection they want to have with that brand.