1998
“Hello! My name is XYZ. I’d like to complain about…”
“I’m sorry about your experience. Could you please help me with your ABC number?”
2005
Dialling a number. “Triiiinnng. Triiiinnng”. “Good evening! Welcome to the IVR of Ajax Inc. Please select an option from the following menu”
“Your call is important to us, please hold on”
“Your call will be attended to in XY minutes”
2010
Looks up brand website for mail ID to write to. Opens email, writes a complaint email. Sends.
Gets response in 24 hours.
2014
Opens Twitter. Tweets complaint to brand.
Gets acknowledgement of tweet in 10 minutes.
Gets response to tweet content in 5 hours.
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1998
“Triiiinnng. Triiiinnng”. Man, why doesn’t she pick up her phone?
2002
“Triiiinnng. Triiiinnng”. Man, why doesn’t she pick up her phone?
Sends sms. Gets response in 10 minutes.
2014
“Triiiinnng. Triiiinnng”. Man, why doesn’t she pick up her phone?
Messages on Facebook/Whatsapp. Waits to see if, ‘XYZ is typing…’ appears. Waits for a few more seconds. Gives up.
Gets response in the next 7 minutes.
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Whether it is brands talking to customers or people talking to people, our society seems to have broken new ground in 2 things.
1. The variety of communication vehicles that have come into existence
2. The number of people we can get in touch with
The Holy Grail still is a one to one communication. This requires ‘real’ time where a person needs to commit to being in a place or being in a conversation (via a phone) to make it work. This is real-time.
This real-time seems to be increasingly expensive to hold on to, for brands and for individuals (time is money; time as a limited commodity).
So, we substitute real-time with near real-time, or “my time”. My Time is the time a person deciding to act when he/she wants. If the other person or the reason for that person’s communication is critical/important to me, I’ll invest my most valuable commodity – time – in it and offer real-time attention. For everything else, I’d let that proposed communication go into a ‘Shortly’ box. This may mean I’ll have that communication waiting for my attention on Whatsapp, or Twitter, or Facebook messenger, or plain old text message. And get to it when I want, depending on how important it is to ‘me’.
—
An interesting parallel to this is the way we deal with ‘events’ in our life. I was in my daughter’s school recently, for her annual fest. I asked my wife to use her iPhone to capture photographs and I said I’d use my Nexus 6 to capture video. We both ended up looking at the stage and the fest through our respective phone screens, while seated right in front of it.
We were not alone. 99.9% of all parents present were doing the same. The 0.1% parents who did not were complaining about their phone’s poor battery life and were looking for a charging socket.
Here, the capturing-an-event-for-posterity becomes more important than soaking-into-that-event-right-now. This appears to apply to all things these days – vacations, wedding, office parties, a random lovely scenery on the road, an interesting occurrence on the way etc. We want to capture it for consuming it eventually, or to share it.
—
Another angle. A Quartz piece recently argued for a bizarre side-effect of Apple’s new smartwatch. It argued that the smartwatch trend is likely to bring about a new social phenomenon – one in which humans who still think twice before engaging with a smartphone because it seems rude to the person seated in front of them, talking to them, may do it more boldly because the device to which they are interacting to is smaller and almost inconspicuous. A wrist watch is conventionally a one-way communication medium. It tells you time and date. There are only so many things you can do with and get out of it.
But when it is evolved to tell you many other things like your mails, text messages, Whatsapp messages, Facebook updates, stock prices, heart rate, steps, sleep details, among others, you suddenly find it to be fitting enough to use to distract yourself from your real life taking place in front of you, and immerse yourself sneakily into your online/virtual life. A judge is supposed to have said that he can find the smart watch’s use while being in the court as people are talking… most probably to him, making arguments!
Or, read about the Bangalore couple who got annoyed with the nurse in a hospital because she was busy shopping on her phone instead of attending to their crying daughter. Now I guess you’d understand why all those Indian IT giants were annoyed when they saw their employees spending time on Facebook and Twitter.
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The second-screen phenomenon too is perhaps on a similar trajectory. Brands want us to watch TV and be on Twitter, at the same time. To share our live commentary with our friends while watching something, even if those friends are not next to us.
In real-life, if a group of friends are watching TV together, they’d no doubt be talking to each other while watching TV. Does doing this virtually when the friends are in different locations mirror the offline experience? I don’t think so, at the outset – one, the virtual group demands that we focus our attention with another screen, and two, the banter is not real-time; it is ‘my time’, that is, when the other friend(s) had the time to assimilate both the TV content and the friends’ comment and then react to it. So there is a friction in the communication that doesn’t quite qualify as real-time.
I watch most India-playing cricket matches in the ongoing World Cup 2015 while being on Twitter. I find the commentary on Twitter more attuned to my taste than the one on TV. And I’m ok with the temporary breaks from the match since I value the content I’m getting from Twitter (too, besides the actual event that led to it).
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The larger narrative around this is about our attention, or what we choose to bestow our attention upon. There are things that we need to focus our attention on, in the real world. But, for assorted reasons – it bores us… it is not ‘too’ important… we can get a download of it later… we’re confident we can simultask – we seems to be diverting that attention into something that is not in front us or is not surrounding us.
Sometimes, this can be deadly – driving and texting, for instance. Most other times, it is considered a social malaise. At least for now. There may be a tipping point when this ‘my time’ is shunned upon as a certified social evil and abhorred. But the rate of technological evolution and personal computing devices’ proliferation seem to be pushing that tipping point further away.
Instead, a more likely scenario may be that ‘my time’ becomes an acceptable new standard and we, as a society, would go to live more in virtual worlds than the real world. That was a sci-fi premise a few years ago (a wildly enjoyable fictional novel on this topic is Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. There is the Matrix series of films too, of course!).
It seems closer than ever, now, thanks to social media, smartphones and wearable computing.
Related read from my blog, over the years!
1. Should brand responses on social media be real-time? You have a choice!
2. Social media participation ? are certain levels of employees better suited?
3. Real-time? Really?
4. The redundancy of phone customer care
5. Real-time is a misnomer. The social web is helping my-time evolve!
Pic courtesy: http://verilobi.com/time+stops/#prettyPhoto