FIRMS HANGING UP ON THE DESK PHONE
KPMG latest business to replace land lines with cellphone apps
The days of cradling a desk phone between your head and shoulder on a long conference call are over for KPMG LLP’s Canadian employees.
The accounting and advisory firm has deactivated desk phones for all of its approximately 5,000 employees, who now have to make voice calls with an app on their laptops connected to headsets or puck-sized speakers.
“You couldn’t find a phone if you looked for it,” Greater Toronto Area managing partner Sebastian Distefano said of KPMG’s telecom transformation, which the company first introduced at its new Vaughn office last fall and then rolled out nationwide during the past 10 months.
The move by one of Canada’s largest accounting firms to ditch desk phones and rely on broadband connections for workplace communications reflects what’s going on in homes across the country.
Consumers are cutting land lines and relying solely on cellphones rather than paying for both, with the telecom regulator announcing plans last year to move subsidies to broadband from land lines as people demand more and faster fixed and mobile data. Now businesses are catching up.
IDC Canada estimates more than two thirds of Canadian organizations as of 2016 had substituted desk phones with wireless connections for at least some of their employees, with approximately one-third of all employees going entirely wireless, as smartphones, online messenger services and video conferencing take up residence in the workplace and at home.
KPMG eliminated the option of using desk phones altogether in favour of Skype for Business, which can redirect calls to a mobile phone if an employee is away from the Wi-Fi network and makes conference calls easier to arrange.
“It’s really helped us stay connected, no matter where we are, and better service our clients,” Distefano said. “It’s really been a plus for our business.”
Although many office employees these days already have a smartphone, hanging up on a telecom staple such as the desk phone still challenges ingrained corporate behaviour.
It’s no problem for digitally native firms such as Facebook Canada, where employees only use cellphones and retreat to in-office phone booths if they need a quiet space to take calls. At bigger firms, however, that idea can take some getting used to.
“It was a bit of a change,” Distefano said. “There’s little things you’ve got to get used to. If you’re on a call and you’re packing up and you’re shutting down your laptop, well, your phone is going to die.”
Network stability is also critical, he said, as sometimes voice-overinternet protocol (VoIP) connections can be spotty (Distefano’s connection was indiscernible from a land line during an interview).
It can also be tough to use clients’ guest Wi-Fi networks if bandwidth is limited. But he said there wasn’t much push back, especially since many of KPMG’s clients have already cut the cord on desk phones.
“I’ve seen over the last two years more of my clients actually think about it and do some serious investigation into it, and some of them make the move,” he said. “I think you’re going to see more and more of it.”
There are some cost savings associated with cord cutting — desk phones can cost about $100 each for the equipment alone — but Distefano said the primary driver for the decision was flexibility, as its teams frequently travel to clients where they couldn’t be reached at their primary phone numbers.
The new app also has better collaboration tools, he said, noting it’s easier to conference with people on Skype than it was to distribute a dial-in code for traditional conference calls.
It’s difficult to get a handle on the actual number of Canadian businesses cutting land lines since only two of the top five telecommunications providers (BCE Inc. and Shaw Communications Inc.) separate business and residential customers in their financial reporting.
But in BCE’s last quarter ending March 31, it reported a loss of 30,000 business lines, and it also lost 40,000 business lines in the same period a year ago.
Shaw, however, reported an increase of 7,000 business phones for the three months ending May 31, up from an increase of 5,000 the year prior.
Businesses in general have been slower to ditch land lines than consumers as they tend to be more conservative and cautious, said IDC Canada telecom analyst Lawrence Surtees.
“If you look at the KPMGs and the banks and the governments of the world, most of their employees have been tethered all their lives … they might be wireless on their own, but, for the most part, most companies felt they had to provide a hardwired phone to every desk,” he said.
But that’s changing as employees — no matter their age — increasing prefer wireless over fixed lines.
Smaller business, especially in mobile industries such as plumbing or construction, were the first to become completely wireless because it made more sense as many of their employees are always on the road. Now, bigger organizations are following the trend, driven in part by employees who bring their own devices to work.
Surtees believes the biggest inflection point for land lines at Canadian workplaces came about five years ago when the federal government decided to introduce shared telecom services for about 120,000 employees in the National Capital Region. It gave people the choice of either a desk phone or a mobile phone, but not both.
“The federal government is the most conservative … for them to be willing to enable wireless substitution by the bureaucrats is a huge deal,” he said. “If they can do it, anyone can.”
Surtees expects more large organizations to ditch desk phones over the next five years, especially once they see conservative industries such as government and accounting make the switch, with the pace of change speeding up once ultra-fast 5G mobile networks come online in 2021 or 2022.
Axing land lines at the workplace often accompanies a change to shared office space since employees are no longer anchored to their desk phones.
At KPMG, Distefano said about 70 per cent of the workforce shares space, a percentage that will increase as it renovates offices across Canada.
Even telephone providers are eliminating desk phones in favour of more mobility in the workplace. Rogers Communications Inc. began this shift in 2014, renovating its Toronto campus from what a former executive described as “’80s cubicle city” to communal spaces, meeting rooms, small rooms for private calls and no individual desk phones.
Rogers said the change increased collaboration and productivity for employees. By the end of the year, more than 5,000 of its employees will operate in this environment.
At the same time, Rogers is offering new services for business customers to sync mobile devices with desk phones, computers and tablets under the same telephone number. The service gives people the ability to work from anywhere on any device — something that could only exacerbate the disappearance of desk phones over the coming years.
Financial Post
The federal government is the most conservative … for them to be willing to enable wireless ... by the bureaucrats is a huge deal. If they can do it, anyone can.