Does your business really need a landline?
Chatting with customers by text allows business owners to send information quickly and cheaply at scale, prompting some companies to ditch their landlines completely. So, are voice calls obsolete? Inc. asked two founders to talk it through.
YES
It is really hard to convey tone and to sound genuine in an email or a text message. Whether you’re talking to a customer or an employee, you would never want them to read something the wrong way.
I want customers to be able to think they can pick up the phone and speak to somebody at Tempaper. If you’re a designer or a customer and you have questions, why should you have to type all that out?
Each and every employee has a landline. So we click an extension button and we’re immediately having a conversation. Oftentimes, communication is initiated in an email, and then you pick up the phone and say, “What did you think about it? Let’s discuss.”
We have biweekly phone calls with our sales reps, and the agendas are very lengthy. That kind of information needs to be transmitted through a conversation. Having conference calls allows us to cover many topics in detail within the allotted time frame and ask questions in real time to avoid miscommunication.
JENNIFER MATTHEWS
Co-founder and creative director of Tempaper, a Brick, New Jersey-based maker of temporary wallpaper.
MICHAEL LASTORIA
Co-founder and CEO of &Pizza, a Washington, D.C.-based purveyor of ultra-customizable pizza. Do you need a phone line to communicate with customers? Doesn’t a phone line make it easier for customers to reach you? What about communicating with your employees? Which method of communication helps you do business more quickly?
NO
It’s critical to speak directly with customers, but we don’t believe talking on the phone works anymore. We are selling pizza—a product that is fast and accessible. Our text-based plug-in hooks you up with pizza, and also delivers advice and casual conversation—it’s more authentic to our brand and consistent at scale.
Our average response time is below two minutes and only getting faster. We have live, real-time responders on the other side of texts.
The same advantages of speaking to customers apply to employees. Plus, Millennial and Gen-Z employees prefer texting over any other form of communication.
We currently manage all conversations via text and can process more conversations that way. The phone line that we do have kicks callers over to text. It’s the most common form of communication. Text messaging is engaging, empathetic, and easy to use. It also provides us with robust data and insights that are far more useful than what we’d gather with a phone call.