Landline Blues

I was reading an article online about the upcoming election and recent poll results (don’t worry, this isn’t a political post). It was just another in a series of endless articles spewing numbers that we are supposed to cling to. I also read a couple of posted comments and found an interesting thread that discussed a question I hadn’t considered.

“…hardly anyone in my age bracket (18 to 30) has or uses a landline. What does that say about the accuracy of these phone polls?”

Of course, as too often happens, the posters went on and began arguing how the poll doesn’t reflect this or that and quickly degenerated into a flame war but it aroused my curiosity. I know several people that no longer use a landline and not all of them are members of that elusive 18 to 30 demographic.

Since this thread started with statistics here are some from a recent CDC study:

• More than 32 million American adults, about 16 percent or nearly one out of every six homes, have now ditched their landlines for cell phones, up from 5 percent in 2004, according to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Article
• The trend is strongest among young adults: 34.5% of people 25-29 years old lived in households with only wireless phones. For those 30-44, the rate drops to 15.5%. It’s 2.2% for those 65 and over.

This trend strikes me as another tipping point in the way our customers and market are changing. As recently as 10 years ago, if you wanted to market to people you mailed (snail mail) them something, called them at home or at work, advertised in the paper, or put up a billboard. The information you collected on people was focused and not complicated.

Today we have the internet, email, SMS, social networking sites, blogs, do not call lists, spam filters, privacy rules and hundreds of new ways (and rules as to how) we interact with our customers and prospects. These touch points and rules all fundamentally change the way we have to capture data, store data, and interact with it.

How are you handling this change within your business? Have you adjusted your business process to accommodate these challenges? Or are you and your team still working from outdated information stored in multiple spreadsheets, applications, and restaurant napkins?