MEX

Unusually for the UK, this builders’ van advertises the names and individual mobile numbers of the 3 tradesmen who comprise the company, in addition to the standard expectations of company name, skills, location and fixed line telephone number.

What does this say to you? Would it make you more or less likely to contact them?

Are you still re-assured when you see a telephone number identifiable as a ‘land line’? Do you live in a country where it is even possible to differentiate between fixed versus mobile telephony numbers? In the UK, all mobile numbers start with 07.

The legacy of fixed telephony does not stand up to today’s new mobile logic. In an age when you can search for someone by name, see their photos, read their posts and then connect – for free – over a video link, why would you want to dial an arcane set of numbers which will connect you to a socket in a building?

Industries become tied to process and when these processes stop being effective ways for customers to get what they want, they die. In the near future, most customers will expect to contact a person, not a place or a machine. Small companies already operate this way by necessity. The larger your organisation, the more you need to think about how you connect individual customers to the individual experts within your company who can best serve their needs.