Spoiler alert: Chat will never replace the office telephone, even if telephone technology continues to change. We’ve already seen a big migration from traditional phones to VoIP, for instance. But calling won’t go away.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let me explain why.
Chat (also known as instant messaging) has come on the scene in the past 20 years with a vengeance. I remember back in the early 1990s when we all first began experimenting with chat using Internet service providers such as Prodigy and American Online (News - Alert). It was definitely a novelty—although a good novelty, because it stuck.
That’s basically because we’re lazy and antisocial, I believe. We like socializing, but at the same time we often don’t want to deal with the hassle of full-on social contact. We don’t want to look our best. We don’t want people watching us closely. Maybe we want to do two things at once, or we haven’t showered yet. Or… we just want a flattened social experience that is simpler and more controlled.
Chat gives us that experience.
Whether from laziness on our part or from some form of temporary antisocial impulse, many of us prefer chat over a telephone call (and definitely over a video call, God forbid). So chat has risen as a popular way to communicate, and I admit that I was one of the first people to take up the technology as a preferred communications medium.
But chat will never replace the telephone, and there’s a good reason why: Telephone calls are a wonderful balance between flattened social interaction and robust communication. With a call, you can do business much faster for anything more complex than a one-sentence question. And with a call, you have so much more information to work from as a result of that all-important voice inflection and when the other person pauses.
Plus it just is more human; use the phone for several hours in a row, and you get tired. Use chat for the same amount of time, and you have become antisocial and isolated. Something is lost with chat, namely the human element that comes through with voice.
So voice calls will never go away. The technology might evolve, but voice will disappear no more than mail will disappear (and despite the rumors and the hopes of Facebook (News - Alert) founder Mark Zuckerburg, the death of e-mail has been greatly exaggerated).
Neither will chat disappear, however. We all need to flatten the communications channel sometimes—and we’re definitely all antisocial sometimes. And for that, chat is brilliant.
We need both. So while chat is wonderful, really it is an addition to business calls, not a replacement.
Edited by Alisen Downey