Two weeks ago, Annkur P Agarwal’s credit card was temporarily blocked by his bank. An email from the bank cited a suspicious transaction as the reason. “Apologies if we jumped the gun here. We did try to reach you, but couldn’t get through,” the mail said. Agarwal remained unreachable because he had activated a setting on his iPhone that silences calls from unknown numbers. Since enabling this feature a year ago, he has missed several parcel deliveries, including that of a new iPhone. Lately, he has added his colleague’s number to his Amazon Business profile,requesting them to attend to the calls of delivery agents so that office products reach on time.
Why does he take such extreme measures? “The spam calls were getting too much to bear,” says Agarwal, who runs a media company in Pune. “Further, tele-scams have gotten so innovative that it scares me. I thought this was better than to always have my guard up,” he says. Agarwal is thrilled that WhatsApp, too, allows filtering of unknown callers. “That was a loophole scammers and spammers used to get through to me despite the iPhone setting,” he adds. It is not just him. “I’ve noticed even my mother is wary of picking calls from unknown numbers because she keeps hearing about digital scammers targeting unwitting senior citizens.”
The surge in spam and fear of scams via phone calls have resulted in a widespread tendency to ignore calls from unknown numbers across age groups. Consequently, not only promotional calls but crucial transactional calls are also going unattended. Customer data analytics firms note that one out of three calls from consumer-facing companies enquiring about a recent or ongoing transaction goes unanswered. Ecommerce and logistics firms note a comparable drop in calls for deliveries longer than same-day or next-day, leaving gig workers hassled and late for their next drop. Businesses are trying to find ways to adapt to this change, all the while finding ways to get consumers to pick up important calls.
Many apps now proactively inquire about users’ communication preferences. Tinder users have the option to define their communication style in their bios. Data from the company, from January 1 to March 10, 2024, reveals that phone calls rank third among the preferred communication methods of Tinder users in India, trailing behind in-person meetings and WhatsApp chats.
Urban Company has “introduced options on its app for users to indicate their preference for minimal phone calls regarding bookings,” says Abhinav Garg, associate director of product at the home service marketplace. “This preference is then nudged to service professionals so that they can approach the user through in-app chat instead,” he adds.
Even as companies focus on building and improving their messaging interfaces, calls are sometimes necessary. “In tier-2 and -3 cities, addresses fed by consumers could be 1.5 km from the actual location where the delivery has to be made, so the delivery agent tries to call the customer for navigation assistance to prevent a failed delivery attempt,” says Ashish Sikka, chief strategy officer at Ecom Express, a n ecommerce courier service company. Similarly, in tier-1 cities, delivery agents often initiate calls to facilitate entry into gated buildings or to request OTPs, particularly for high-value items, when customers are unavailable at their addresses.
VERIFIED NUMBERS
To prevent calls from going unanswered, E c o m Express and Urban Company use verified business caller ID services provided by the likes of Truecaller and CallerApp, which allow them to have a bunch of phone numbers marked as verified to increase the chances of users picking up their calls. Sales and marketing professionals tell ET that companies pay anywhere between $10,000 and $250,000 annually for this service. “Such solutions usually lead to an improvement in call pickups by 18%,” says Sikka of Ecom Express. He did not specify the service the company uses U r b a n Company u s e s Truecaller’s verified caller ID service called Truecaller for Business. HDFC Bank also uses Truecaller for Business especially “for urgent and timesensitive matters, particularly those involving transaction monitoring to detect suspicious activities,” says Ravi Santhanam, group head, CMO and head of D2C business at the bank. “These calls [on Truecaller] are distinctly highlighted in purple colour so that customers notice the difference and sense the urgency to pick up the call and get sensitised on a particular transaction,” he adds. There is a purple-coded Truecaller pop-up for calls from food-delivery apps like Swiggy and ridehailing apps like Uber.
Launched in 2021, “Truecaller for Business currently has over 2,500 clients globally,” says Priyam Bose, global head of go to market, Truecaller for Business. “India is our biggest market, followed by others such as Middle East North Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America,” he adds. The clientele includes companies in sectors like retail, ecommerce, food tech, ride-hailing, BFSI, auto and logistics. According to the company’s annual report, Truecaller for Business earned roughly $16.6 million in revenue in 2023, up 61% from the previous year.
With roughly 259 million monthly active users in India, Truecaller captures roughly 31% of 820 million internet users in the country. However, users can still mark a company’s verified number as spam on the app and the number of spam reports will be visible every time that verified number calls a Truecaller user.
CallerApp is an Israeli caller ID company, which is one-fifth the size of Truecaller and has a limited presence in India.
IN-APP CALLS GO UP
Some large enterprises, in sectors like food tech and financial services are showing interest in building in-app calling capability like Uber, says Jacob Joseph, VP–data science at CleverTap, a consumer engagement platform. “Brands want to adopt ways that either bring the cost down or increase revenue, all the while maintaining trust and adhering to data privacy. In-app VoIP (voice over internet protocol) calls are not only a privacy-friendly feature but also come at a fraction of the cost of regular, outbound calls,” he adds.
So far, Uber is the only major consumer-facing company to have in-app calling, which it launched in India in 2019 as a cost-efficient and privacy-focused feature. But it hasn’t entirely solved the issue of riders not answering a driver’s call, says Shaik Salauddin, founder, Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union.
“Customers tend to avoid answering driver calls to conceal destination and payment method, fearing ride cancellation,” he says. “During morning peak hours, many book from multiple apps. The customer boards whichever app’s vehicle comes first and ignores the other driver’s call to avoid cancellation fees. The drivers then have to cancel these rides, which increases their cancellation rate, impacting their ratings.” Uber declined to participate in the story.
As businesses adapt to consumer’s changing phone habits, they will have to set strict rules for calling, says Ayisha Patnaik, a product manager specialising in customer growth and retention. Her suggestions include seeking explicit permission to place a call, checking time preference for a call and switching to an alternate mode of communication after one call goes unanswered. Even though this change makes her job harder, Patnaik favours it because it corresponds to a broader cultural change concerning making and taking calls.
THOU SHALT NOT CALL
According to several international studies, millennials brought in the trend of texting over calling, and got labelled as “Generation Mute”, roughly around 2018. Gen Z seems to have taken it to the next level.
“One of my closest friends has her phone on DND [do not disturb] mode so that she doesn’t get any calls even when she is scrolling Instagram,” says Bhumika Khatri, a 20-something management professional at a SaaS company in Delhi. Khatri, too, is not a fan of calls, a sentiment that has exacerbated since the pandemic. “I think during Covid we lost the boundaries of work and life, and so we are constantly trying to optimise our time, which means everything is agenda-driven, including impromptu calls.” Taking calls increasingly feels like stepping out of her comfort zone to Khatri. “I don’t want to give my time that easily,” she adds.
Farah Maneckshaw, a psychologist from Bengaluru who works with younger clients has seen how this trend manifests during her sessions. “It’s rare for my clients to receive a call or take one during our session,” she says, indicating it happens often with peers who work with relatively older clients. “So many times, clients go, “let me read out the text for you” for significant stuff you would think someone would want to discuss over a call,” she adds.
While psychologists attribute this decline in calling culture to dwindling attention spans and technology making calls cheap and omnipresent, the ties to the pandemic are not tenuous. “Phone calls were correlated with news then, most often bad news,” says Anshuma Kshetrapal, a creative arts psychotherapist from Delhi. “Clients who were already anxious about taking calls are more so now,” she adds. “As for the rest, they, too, are questioning people’s choice of calling over texting because we are receiving too much information, so people have become more demanding of the way they want to receive it. They want to receive it in a shorter format, to the point.”
But where does this expectation of always being to the point take us, she wonders. “The scope of meandering during a conversation, which would help in building relationship, takes a hit,” she says. Agarwal from Pune feels his tendency to do only agenda-based calls, while essential in an increasingly overwhelming world, is affecting his ability to strike up a conversation with strangers in real life. “These days, when I go for a wedding or any other event where one has to make and receive calls for the sake of logistics, I undo my silence unknown caller settings,” he says. “Good to get out of your comfort zone every once in a while.”
