In the past several years I have participated in the chorus of people railing against phone calls. People dislike them because they aren’t asynchronous, and they don’t allow for the depth of in-person exchanges.
So I decided to run some analysis of my phone calling behavior over the last 14 months (the longest period of call records I could pull from AT&T). I found a series of patterns that lead me to three conclusions: (1) Phones are no longer social devices. The days of calling friends and gabbing are clearly over. (2) Phones are, however, still a major vector of business communication—though it is unclear how long that will last. (3) Speaking to family or your inner circle on the phone still matters. So, perhaps there is a future for voice if the experience of calling can be improved.
The Data
Over the 14 months I participated in 1,870 phone calls for a total talk time of 13,300 minutes. I spent an average of 30 minutes per day on the phone and participated in a bit over four calls a day. Fifty five percent of my calls were more than one minute long while 29% lasted more than five minutes, and 10% were more than 20 minutes.
I spoke to 650 distinct people (far more than I thought). But I only spoke with 20% of those more than once, 3% more than 10 times, and just 10 people more than 20 times.
If I look by call volume, my family dominates. I speak on the phone to my wife the most by a mile. We had 227 calls for 608 minutes together in the last 14 months. Of my top 10 callers, that amounts to 42% of the total call volume.
After that my top callers by volume are family (mother, brother, sister), and then a mixture of service providers & business relationships (conference call line, taxi app Flywheel, co-founder, banker, investor, alarm company, accountant, broker, lawyer). Only two friends are in the top 20, and both are people I do a lot of business with.
There are some funny trends in the direction of calls. Luckily for me, I call my wife about as often as she calls me. Phew. My mom can legitimately take umbrage with me, however. Apparently on average she calls me eight times for every one time I call her each month. Unsurprisingly, my calls with my wife are short check-ins (averaging 2.5 minutes). But when I speak to my mother on her cell we talk for 3.2 minutes, and when I catch her at home we speak for more than twice that, averaging 6.7 minutes.
If I look by time spent on the phone, conference calls dominate. Forty four percent of the phone time of my top 15 was conference calls, which is even greater than my wife's domination of the number of calls. From there you see the usual suspects. Family and business contacts. Only one friend crossed more than 100 minutes on the phone in 14 months, and again, this is someone I do business with.
I would have guessed my phone calling declined over the course of the 14 months. But that isn't true. Instead I see a noisy but upward slope in the number of calls and talk time each month. The same holds true for both incoming and outgoing calls.
Analysis
First, phone calls are no longer a social medium. No friend registered consistently for even seven minutes a month in calls except in two cases where we were doing some sort of business together. This was directionally unsurprising to me to find out, but the degree to which I don't speak to my friends on the phone is somewhat shocking. I might be extreme but I am not alone. Social has clearly left the phone-building.
As an aside, it is interesting to me that while for many millennials the phone has been replaced by text, for me it is clearly all about FB Messenger (as shown by my rising data usage). In the last 14 months I sent a grand total of 127 texts. (I received 885, mostly from service providers and 2-factor authorizations.) Of that 127, 33% was driven by one conversation in one odd month.
Second, I am shocked to the degree to which phone calls are still very clearly important to business communication. For me this both takes the form of conference calls, which dominate my time spent on the phone and calls with service providers.
It is one thing for a co-founder, accountant, and banker to be in my top 15 most called people, but the fact that Flywheel and The Bay Alarm Company cracked my top 15 is somewhat shocking to me. Also, when I look down the long tail of the 650 people I spoke to on the phone one or two times, most are service providers and restaurants.
To me this validates the premise that business messaging is going to be a big deal in the coming few years. Clearly, at least in the case of my phone interactions, both the business I do and my interactions with service providers are stuck in the relative stone age. I would love to see all those minutes evaporate to better forms of communication.
Third, despite all my naysaying, the fact that my wife, mother, brother, and sister are at the absolute top of my calling interactions says that perhaps we shouldn't be so fast to write off the phone entirely. There is something powerful in the fact that I speak on the phone most to the people that matter the most to me.
My personal hypothesis is that it isn't so much that voice-calling is broken, but instead that the technology on which voice communications run is horribly antiquated. Speaking on the phone is fraught with obvious product challenges.
The ring-ring waiting for someone to pick up is incredibly annoying in an era where services are supposed to load in milliseconds. The lack of presence, so that you never know if the person you are calling is free to talk, makes finding a connection when you have a spare moment an incredible pain.
In some ways, caller-ID, one of the only advancements in phone technology, only makes it worse. That’s because it makes people less likely to pick up if they know that the call isn't an emergency or business. Therefore it makes matching with a person to talk to even harder. And, with the rare exception when you get an “HD voice” connection, the average call quality is terrible, and worse than it was in the days of wired phones.
I wonder if voice will someday regain prominence, once the product experience is overhauled. Facebook Messenger has a voice feature, where you can upgrade a text conversation into voice when it is clear both people are online and free. Perhaps that’s a start.
Conclusion
The decline of phone calls isn't all about technology. Social changes like open-office floor plans haven't helped voice stay meaningful in the world. You can be tap-tapping on Facebook Messenger during work privately all day long, but taking a personal phone call at work has become effectively impossible. I bet when people had private offices they did talk to friends at work.
Looking at my own data I am, however, weirdly more optimistic about the future of voice calls than I expected to be. True, the relevance of voice to social has fallen off a cliff. And the data suggests to me that there is clearly a big opportunity to move business interactions off the phone as well.
But, in the end, the fact that I still talk to my family on the phone says there is something important in voice that could make a comeback—if the experience of voice could be improved.