May I Ask Who’s Calling?

Chatting with customers by text allows business owners to send information quickly and cheaply at scale, prompting some companies to ditch their landlines completely. So, are voice calls obsolete? Inc. asked two founders to talk it through.

—BY BRITT MORSE

JENNIFER MATTHEWS Co-founder and creative director of Tempaper, a Brick, New Jersey-based maker of temporary wallpaper. MICHAEL LASTORIA Co-founder and CEO of &Pizza, a Washington, D.C.-based purveyor of ultra-customizable pizza. ADVANTAGE: MATTHEWS Customers still want to talk to people. As reported by the Harvard Business Review, a 2017 study by research advisory firm BIA/Kelsey found that calls to businesses are expected to exceed 169 billion per year in 2020, and that calls are 10 to 15 times more likely to generate a successful sale or follow-up activity than text-based communication. That’s not to say that texting isn’t more useful for some businesses than others—it allows information to be distributed faster, and data to be collected more easily. And it can be popular with a younger crowd. But the numbers say you shouldn’t give up that…

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Inc. (Digital) - 1 Issue, May/June 2020

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