Mobile Apps And Call Avoidance

“No phone, no phone…I just want to be alone today.” –Cake, “No Phone”

Years ago, I was talking with Davy Kastens, CEO of Sparkcentral, about his product. His company builds products for large consumer-facing businesses to handle, triage, and address consumer complaints about products and service. In our chats, he mentioned a term to me — “Call Avoidance.” I didn’t think much of it at the time, but Devy build his product around the costs companies would incur as a result of fielding customer inquiries via phone.

Only recently did this term pop back into my head. You may remember the “Push For Pizza” mobile app and viral video. (If you haven’t watched the video — it’s hilarious, well worth the time.) As soon as I saw it, Davy’s line came back to me. The entire app is built around the concept Call Avoidance. On mobile, all of the apps that have cropped up where you “tap stuff to get things,” many of them replace our need for having to make a phone call and talk to another person altogether. My immediate reaction to the pizza app was: “Ha! But, I would use that.”

And, then it dawned on me…on mobile phones, so many popular apps have essentially replaced our previous reliance on telephone calls with app-initiated API calls. For instance, we now can now call a taxi, order food for delivery, schedule services, or just send a “Yo” by simply tapping our phones with mobile software which replaces API calls with telephone calls. It’s charming yet odd that rapid growth mobile phones enabled us to not to have call other people at all.

There’s a deeper lesson here for people who aspire to build consumer mobile apps. I’d say, observe the world around you and see where people are still laboring to make phone calls on a somewhat frequent basis. You’ll find issues like medical billing and insurance claims (or any kind of customer service) and phone calls made to local businesses, where consumers often spend the most money within a certain radius of their home (and perhaps why Path acquired and integrated TalkTo earlier). Today’s consumers expect powerful yet elegant applications which will make their lives easier, and not having to call anyone to discuss logistics makes life that much easier.