The family and I were enjoying lunch at a local restaurant today, just catching up on the happenings of our all too busy lives when my 10-year old daughter said something that caught my ear.

One of her friends recently was given a cellphone and my daughter was doing her best to convince us she was ready for one herself. When my wife asked my daughter what kind of voice plan her friend had on her new phone, my daughter replied "It doesn't matter because in my grade (5th) people don't talk on the phone, we just text.".

As we drove home, I thought about that comment and the long-term implications for contact center executives like myself. We invest a lot of time and effort into understanding how to attract, train, and motivate great employees across multiple generations (Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, etc.), but I never thought to ask myself this question:

What if the phones stopped ringing?

I immediately made myself a note to touch base with our IT Ops staff first thing Monday morning to talk long-term strategy for our contact center infrastructure. We continue to explore new technologies to process phone calls more efficiently across geographical dispersed locations. But with a customer base shifting more toward my daughter's demographic ("Oh, we don't talk on the phone..."), I'm thinking I need start painting a vision where chat, social media, and mobile have become the "traditional" support channels.

It's time to start applying all that knowledge about hiring, training, and motivating the different generations into how we'll support them as customers.

Funny as I was finishing my lunch, the background music being pumped into the restaurant was playing a song from 1979; Cliff Richard's "It's So Funny, How We Don't Talk Anymore".

I swear I'm not making this up...