OK, so the day’s sessions aren’t quite over, but I’m going to go out on a limb and call the best quote of the day (it’s the title of this post if you don’t want to read the development of the concept below).
I have oftened talked about (and written about but I can’t find the link) how incredibly inefficient it is to speak to someone with the traditional phone network. My rant usually goes along the lines of imagining a typical attempt to call someone. Here’s something approaching worst case, but you’d be surprised at how often this happens:
- Look up callee’s office number
- Dial 10 digits
- Speak to reception, get transferred
- Listen to ring, time out, get voice mail
- Decide to try mobile number instead, so hang up
- Look up mobile number (well, OK, hopefully this is still on the screen from Step 1, unless you are not at your screen …)
- Dial mobile number
- Listen to ring, time out, get voice mail
- Maybe leave a message here. But, I know some people that only use one voice mail in preference to the other
- Hang up. Redial office number
- Speak to receptionist, get transferred
- Wait for ring to time out and the “I’m not here now, please leave a message” prompt.
- Leave a message
Elapsed time can add up to several minutes, maybe up to 5 or more depending on the length of your message. Now, if this happens a few times a day, by the time you multiply it out across say a year of your time, or say across a day of your company’s collective staff’s time, it really adds up. This is the incredible time inefficiency of the PSTN network: most calls do not result in an actual connection. In fact, a reputed stat is that only 40% of dialed calls reach the intended recipient. (would love to get a real refence here if anyone has one)
Now, in this current session on presence Ed Simnett of Microsoft had a great quote “The telcos are the only companies I know that run five-9 systems that fails 60% of the time”. It captures this point just about perfectly.