Mobile phones have been used by businesses since their inception late last century. In fact, mobile phones were first payable (i would have said affordable, but that wasn’t always the case) by businesses and their high paid execs and sales guys, for utility and show-off. In the mid 90’s the early adopters caught the cell train and the rest is ongoing history.
On many fronts, the cell phones have evolved immensely. These days i use my phone to navigate to customers, i read my mail and feeds, listen (and occasionally watch) podcasts, have it as a calendar and occasionally i even use it to call people. Much this is due to development in hardware, usability and packet data capabilities. But what really remains in limbo is business use.
The simplest example is one that’s been bugging me for quite a while is how the phone simply isn’t up to par in a business exchange infrastructure. Here at work, we don’t have a single wired phone, save the conference phones. All the phones have three phone numbers:
- the “real” number from the original operator, often with a 040 or 050 prefix
- the “business” number, with the 020 prefix, which forwards to the “real” number
- a short number, which are the last three digits of the “business” number
When you want to forward a call to your colleague, you use the short number. This is something the Desk gets to do quite a lot, and something the Service desk where i work also gets a fair share of.
When a phone call is forwarded, the Caller ID of whoever is forwarding is shown at the recipient’s screen. This may sound logical, but it’s also a tad inefficient. I’ll get to my rationale in a moment.
The same behaviour is repeated when the phone at either desk rings. The caller ID is that of the Desk (i.e. the exchange), or the Service desk. Now the caller ID is inarguably useless. It tells me what is calling, but not who. For a caller ID to make sense in this case, i would need to know both who is calling and that it’s a Service desk call – both the ID of the caller and the forwarder.
If i knew that Customer M is calling through the service desk, i could make a quick recall of who she is and what she might be calling about while i’m picking up the phone. And i could sound a lot smarter and prepared in the ear of the customer. With proper integration, i could even have the customer’s page in the CRM pulled out when the phone is ringing. My computer already tells me who’s calling (thanks to Nokia Beta Labs’ PC phone, whenever it doesn’t crash), so the step to actually doing something with that information isn’t far.
The context (i.e. “what”) of the call could be indicated with a different ring tone, an icon and a different background colour of the phone screen, and why not a pretty little text label after the “service desk” icon while you’re at it. In previous times (when i had the Nokia 2110… aaaah, those were the days) i would at least get the icon “>” next to the caller ID when the call was forwarded from my wired home number, so some technology close to this must already exist.
There’s another twist on the context, and that’s the context of me. I might be doing interruptible stuff, i might be busy writing something (like this) or i might be at a customer or in a meeting. I might not be at work at all. All these are different contexts and to make things tougher, they’re not simple on-off contexts. If i’m busy writing something (actually more important and… billable than this, at work), then i would rather not be disturbed unless it’s an important call. If i’m at a meeting, my phone should be silent, but may blip discretely and vibrate once if it’s important. And if it’s not work-time and it’s not an emergency, then flush the call altogether.
There are plenty of inputs. Check my calendar. I have a profile manager that already does a part of this. If i’ve marked a calendar entry with a not-entirely-secret meeting code, the phone switches to the meeting profile for what’s marked as the duration of the meeting. If it’s past 22 and not yet 7 (workdays) or 9 (weekends), my phone is in “night”-mode and rings only if my wife or boss call – either of these calling after 22 means it’s important.
Again, this is a rough emulation of reality. The profile switcher knows of locations, but i haven’t used that – and i can’t until i actually pay for the software. What bugs me is that there is no way to react on the incoming phone number used. Now there’s really no good reason for me to remember my “business” phone number because regardless which number the customer is going to use, my phone will ring in the very same manner. If i could filter on the number the caller used (the to-number, so to say) i could filter them to a friendly pre-recorded message during non-work hours while letting the “civilian” callers through even after hours (but before Night mode).
Is this just because i have an N-series phone instead of an E-series one, does the GSM standard just not convey “tunnelled” numbers, is it the operator or is it just that nobody’s been active enough to actually implement this? Nokia, are you listening? 
In a future posting, i will probably write about how useless undeveloped the cell phone interface is for business use.
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