The random old-fashioned phone call
Our core business is communication. Veeting has a wonderfully rich platform with HD voice capabilities and collaboration tools. I love to “Veet”, it makes communication so much easier.
Even though I spend a lot of my time talking on Veeting, I sometimes ask myself how I managed to do business a few years back when low bitrate codecs where the norm rather than the exception.
Just this morning I had one of these old-fashioned collaborative telephone calls. I sent someone a PDF a few days back for some feedback. He called me and we went through the slides. The voice quality was terrible, we had trouble staying “on the same page”. I was still on slide two whereas he was already talking about slide four and ideas got lost and confusion arose. Everyday business in the old days, horribly inefficient.
At some point we decided to switch to Veeting. It didn’t occur to me at first since we always spoke on the phone before. A minute later we met on Veeting, the voice quality was clear and we breezed through our presentation together using our virtual laser pointer to highlight stuff, moving back and forth on the whiteboard and coming to a common understanding within 15 minutes. A wonderful new world of rich communication!
Lots of people talk about “contextual communication”. Ericsson describes it as “bringing together the right information at the right time with the right group of people to collaborate and solve tasks“. We human beings are very adaptive, we use what we have available and adopt the tools and ways of communication accordingly. For instance, I hardly ever speak on the phone with my family. We use LINE and WhatsApp. On the other hand, even though I have quite a few business contacts in WhatsApp it is a strict “no-go” to ever talk business with these apps. For business it is exclusively email, phone, and of course Veeting. I would not “Veet” just to find a meeting date or arrange a lunch meeting, on the other hand, discussing slide decks on the phone is just not an option any more.
How do you use different communication channels in different contexts?
