Communications overload
I had the privilege of visiting Vodafone’s headquarters in Newbury, UK, this week to talk to one of their senior managers in R&D. When you walked into his building on the impressive campus there is a sign up which tells the number of calls, text messages, etc. I noticed it when I went in at 11:30 and again when I came out an hour later. What was amazing was the numbers. Bearing in mind that Vodafone is only one of a number of mobile phone operators in the UK in that one hour period there had been 13m text messages delivered and 20m calls!
These are impressive numbers and if you extrapolate these up to an eight hour day then that would be 104m text messages – this is more than there are letters if my memory serves me and over 160m phone calls. What passed my mind is what is all this communication about? Is it just noise – how much of it is business and how much consumer?
The breakthrough into business came to the fore this week when I ordered some bathroom fittings from Bathstore – I had a delivery confirmation text 20 minutes before the goods were delivered which gave me time to either re-time or make sure I was in the house to accept the delivery. This is such a simple solution to what is a very frustrating problem – so, apart from cost, why don’t more companies adopt this practice – particularly Royal Mail. I cant count how many times I have been ‘carded’ by Royal Mail which results in a 21 mile round to the delivery office to pick up the packet or parcel – why can’t they just send me a text to tell me they have a delivery for my – and then give me a choice of picking it up on the way home or delaying delivery?
The downside of businesses adopting text messaging is of course that it annoys me when I get unsolicited advertising text messages – although there are far fewer now than there was (not sure why).
Text messaging seems to be an integral part of out lives now and has changed the way we communicate for the foreseeable future. The question I have is what can the physical delivery networks learn from the text messaging revolution?
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