How telephony has altered the face of business

Few inventions have altered the course of history as unequivocally as the telephone system. This is most true for businesses, as electronic communication systems have fundamentally shifted the way business is done on a multitude of levels.

From the humble telephone, to leaps in technology such as cellular, Internet and VOIP, business has always been among the first adopters and investors, and has driven the development of telecommunications technologies, because better communications means better business. Richard Vester, Director of Cloud Services at EOH, says the telephone opened up a previously unimagined world of communication.

"Many organisations benefited from the new and additional options that suddenly became available to business following the invention of the telephone. As communication technologies continue to develop, companies of all types and sizes are benefiting from the additional communications channels that are opening up with the aim of making transactions and customer interactions simpler and quicker."

At the time of its invention in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone was only available to very wealthy individuals and large enterprises, who used it as a means of communicating between specific locations, which would need to be physically wired to each other via 'direct lines.' "Next, telephone exchanges were built to centralise the telephone network within a specific area. These exchanges identified the central office to which a telephone was connected, and each exchange served a limited number of subscriber lines identified by the last four digits of the telephone number," Vester explains.

"The telephone exchange is what truly changed business, and were essentially the predecessors of switchboards. The operator would need to manually connect the wires to one another through the switchboard, and most of the early users were businesses such as banks, or emergency services such as police stations and doctors in the area."

He adds that automated exchange systems didn't come into play until the 1960s, so for over 75 years, there were a large number of people manually routing the calls. The sheer number of people meant that a lot of space was needed, so only large corporates could boast switchboards that covered their entire company.

At least for the larger businesses, internal communications were considerably sped up, as employees could speak directly to each other without having to physically leave their desks, Vester says. "Telephones made it easier for companies to communicate with each other internally, and as the telephone networks grew and expanded, they began to use telephones to talk to other businesses, building networks of customers and partners."

Of course, says Vester, this was only the beginning. "As telephony and communications technologies have continued to develop, and have evolved from exchanges, to landlines and switchboards, to cellular technologies, the use of telephones has totally altered the way businesses connect to their customers and each other."

He says, however, the true game changer was the invention of the cellular telephone. "Much in the same way as businesses initially benefited from simpler and faster intra-office communications, cellular technologies enabled them to take the office beyond its physical boundaries. Employees could now be contacted anytime and any location. Although initially at least, the costs involved were too high for cellular to be a ubiquitous solution, this changed after a few years, and left organisations in no doubt that phone systems were evolving way beyond the limits of actual phones lines and wires."

Another game-changing technology, that has done as much if not more than the telephone in terms of shaping the future of communications, he says, is the Internet. "Where the telephone made it possible for businesses to be located anywhere in the world, and have their staff work in-house or remotely, the Internet brought with it true enterprise mobility, and the means for staff to work anytime, from any location."

An organisation's ability to communicate with its employees, customers and associates changed dramatically with the advent of the Internet and all its new communication tools. E-mail and instant messaging have changed the face of business communication, particularly in the written format, as have Web conferencing, cloud services, VOIP communications and a host of other platforms and tools.

Communications technologies will continue to evolve and organisations will have to carry on adapting to the changes, Vester says. "A successful company will manage these changes and find new ways to use these new technologies to improve their business operations, customer interactions and their bottom line. By understanding the fundamental, irrevocable impact that telephony has had on the global business community can help businesses discover new ways to adapt to the evolving nature of communication."