My mom, impatient, then told me: "why don't you just call them and ask?" Truthfully, I've thought about that, but I purposely avoided it until it's not really logical to maintain. So I did. I thought of the things I'd like to talk about, ran them in my head, enter the number, and then press the "call" button.
I needed 5-10 minutes just to gather enough will to press it. It used to be worse, but it's getting better.
Apparently, I'm not alone.
81% of millennials get apprehension anxiety before summoning up the courage to make a call. 75% of millennials avoid phone calls as they’re time-consuming, 64% try to avoid whiny or needy people. 63% of people use the excuse ‘I didn’t notice it ring/vibrate’ as a reason for avoiding your call, followed by 12% blaming phone signal. https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/why-mil ... nore-calls
In general, phoning people without prior text-based notification first, if you're a stranger, seems to now be universally seen as rude at best and a criminal (in a legal sense) malice of hostile or scammy intent at worst.
Calling without even texting or emailing first is also deemed inconsiderate by today’s youth. For them, it means the caller is imposing on their time, or disrupting their schedule. Your CRM personnel will most likely receive the cold shoulder (or a hurried “goodbye”) when your consumers realize they need to wait for five to ten minutes before they get what they need. Studies also reveal that members of Generation Z are even less likely to want to be “always reachable” by phone call than their millennial counterparts. https://godeskless.com/blog/millennials ... ies-adapt/
This dramatic shift has had a significant impact on how businesses operate and interact with customers, as the two youngest generation seems to have a significantly lower attention span and patience to those asking for their time.
Millennials and Gen-Z don’t like the “small talk” aspect of phone calls, including niceties and greetings. They prefer faster, more direct communication, with straightforward results. A quick text, they think, would have the same effect in an arguably shorter time. In a business transaction setting, this will only trigger impatience and misunderstanding with your customers. By the end of the call, they will have likely Google-searched your competitor as an alternative to your services. https://godeskless.com/blog/millennials ... ies-adapt/
A recent comScore study shows that millennials don’t engage with longer pieces of selling content. Ads targeting millennials need to be just 5 to 6 seconds in length to be effective. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/21/comscor ... ntion.html
(On that note, I think I now understand why the New York Times employs the should-be-illegal "click to subscribe, call to unsubscribe" policy on their customers.)
Anecdotally, I think two other additional reasons unmentioned above are (1) today's far stricter awareness of privacy and (2) the prevalence of telemarketers and scam calls. If someone calls you through your phone, 90% of the time it'll be an annoying salesman who illegally (at least according to my standards) acquired your number, or an annoying scammer from a scam farm. Now, if a number i don't know calls, I pretend to not notice and wait until the call dies down (I don't even try to reject it - there are various rumors circulating here about how even "rejecting" a phone call can compromise your security), with the assumption that they'll text me is it's actually something important. From which I'll then engage - through text.
Then again, this might not be entirely caused by phone itself, but part of a larger cultural shift.
The Center for Generational Kinetics has found that millennials prefer to communicate in this order:From this, we can see that the issue is not with phones themselves, but calling. In fact, research shows that 39 percent of millennials would rather interact with their phones than with actual people. https://genhq.com/marketing-selling-to- ... als-gen-y/
- Texts and texting apps like WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger
- Email, with the subject line being the most important aspect
- Social media
- Phone calls
- In-person interactions
Thoughts? What do you think about phone calls? What does this phenomenon say about the development of our society?