Why is so hard to pick up the phone?
We have moved into a world where everyone wants to communicate via email and no one wants to pick up the phone. Maybe I am just “old school” but that does not seem to work most of the time. I recently went back and forth with someone over 20 emails. The person on the other end was not understanding the point I was trying communicate. I tried to call said person on a couple different occasions and they continued to send me emails. How do you think that cutover went?
I recently had an issue with a number porting situation. A customer was porting 75 phone numbers from one carrier to another. What a lot of people don’t know is that there are a lot of people involved in a number port. There is a losing carrier and a winning carrier. Sometimes (seems more often than not lately) a third party is involved. And, AT&T/Verizon/Century Link always have a hand in there somewhere.
I gave the winning and losing carrier each other’s information. I had phone numbers of project managers, email addresses for everyone involved, and tons of spreadsheets outlining exactly what was happening and told everyone to communicate by phone if there were any problems. Do you think any of them ever picked up the phone? Of course not and it was one of the biggest messes I have ever seen.
The port was supposed to start at 3 PM on a Friday. At 1 PM the customer called me and said that numbers were starting to port. 7 numbers ported (the main phone number being one of them). Then everything stopped. I was told they started early and realized they started early, so they stopped and were going to resume at 3 as scheduled. Of course when I called the project manager from the losing carrier I got voice mail and rather than calling me back they sent me an email.
Long story short, nothing happened for the rest of the day. The losing carrier said the winning carrier messed up and vice versa. I really didn’t care who messed up, I just needed to get it fixed for my customer. The winning carrier and I had multiple phone calls until about 11 pm at night. Do you think we ever got a phone call from the losing carrier? I think you see where this is going….of course not, just a bunch of emails and texts.
Had people picked up the phone we could have taken care of this whole thing on Friday. Instead we all wasted a bunch of time Friday night and over the weekend trying to figure out what happened. Once I knew what happened, I sent an email to everyone saying that I was going to open up my conference bridge at 8 AM Monday morning and I expected everyone on the bridge. Around 9 AM the losing carrier got on the bridge (only because I called the VP of Ops). I kept that bridge open until the problem was fixed around 11 AM. I forced people to come on the bridge as they had more information and we pushed it through.
My point is, if people just picked up the phone and talked, many problems would be solved. I know everyone reading this will have an example in their mind of when you have sent 20 emails back and forth with someone and confusion took over. Moral of the story, pick up the phone. Many times it takes longer to type out an email than it would to have an actual conversation.