Nearly four months into our isolation, there is one app that has returned to prominence on our phones: the app for making phone calls.
As CWTA reported last month in Part 2 of its “Managing Networks in Unprecedented Times”, mobile voice traffic peaked in late March at more than 60% over normal and has remained up to 45% over pre-COVID levels.
This isn’t just a Canadian phenomenon.
Based on analysis of calls made to 150,000 companies that use its systems for analytics, CallRail is reporting call volumes increasing 57%, and call minutes are up more than 80% compared to early April. CallRail’s clients include digital marketing agencies, automotive dealers, healthcare firms, home services providers, and more.
We’re making more calls and those calls are lasting longer, especially as we wait listening to music or messaging while holding for ‘the next available agent’. As an aside, these shifts in behaviour mess up all the traffic engineering tables that were classically built on an assumption of an average 300 second average holding time.
Call me nostalgic, but it’s nice for an old telephone guy to see people rediscover their voices, using that little icon in the corner on their devices for making phone calls. Sometimes, I just wonder if my grandkids will know what the handset symbol is supposed to represent.