It’s Only a Matter of Time Before the iPad Replaces the Desktop Phone

Headed for the Museum?

Imagine it’s the not-too-distant future and you walk into a museum exhibit entitled “The History of Voice Communications.” On display is a menagerie of antiquated voice communications devices that were once cutting-edge solutions, that in their day made the world seem a bit smaller. Nestled among old-time rotary phones, 1980s Miami Vice-era car phones and first-gen cell phones as long as your head, you see another, more familiar sight: the desktop office phone. Sure, the desktop phone hasn’t yet gone the way of the telegraph, but its days are numbered thanks to a seemingly-unlikely competitor: the tablet.

According to TMCnet, 25% of consumers have ditched their landlines for their mobile counterparts. Forward-thinking businesses are following suit. According to Jack Gold, founder and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates, “Within two to three years, I expect 25 to 35 percent of business users to employ a mobile smartphone device exclusively and abandon use of a fixed-line desk phone.” Gold lists the popular click-to-call feature as a primary reason for this switch. But smartphones are just the first step. With the right applications, tablets like the iPad can act as the ultimate office phone.

Why Tablets?

Okay, so you might be thinking, “I can see smartphones replacing the office phone, but tablets?” While it’s true that tablets don’t ship with native voice communications capabilities at this time, our app, Revenue.io Free for Salesforce, not only lets you make and take calls on your iPad, but it also delivers a wealth of customer information onto your screen before you make a call or any time your iPad rings.

Here are some reasons we chose to develop our first app for a tablet:

The Perfect Balance of Screen Real Estate and Mobility

Revenue.io on iPad

We want to change your definition of the business call. Looking forward, the most successful sales and customer service reps will be those who can leverage customer data from the cloud and use that data to deliver messages that matter to customers. But in order to adapt their messaging effectively, reps will need to be able to effectively view and navigate through this data at a fast rate. We strongly believe that the screen real estate available on the iPad is ideal for viewing customer records, social media data and phone metrics dashboards in real time. Best of all, the iPad is 100% mobile so you can make and take calls and view data streams from nearly anywhere. The tablet is therefore a happy middle ground between the smartphone and the desktop computer, offering impressive screen real estate and mobility in a single device.

New Security Tools are Making Enterprise Tablets More Viable

One of the reasons that tablets began working their way in to enterprises is due to the phenomenon known as Bring Your own Device (BYOD). Simply put, employees are apt to spend their own resources procuring tools that make them more productive. Businesses are catching on, and they’re even subsidizing business-related charges on mobile devices.

The initial concern about BYOD was that it left businesses vulnerable to security breaches. Imagine if someone left their iPad at an airport, and a stranger was able to access classified business data. However, new mobile device management tools are enabling administrators to monitor and even wipe sensitive data remotely. The result is that businesses are now more apt to encourage tablet adoption–whether brought by workers, or deployed to them by the organization.

We wanted to make sure that Revenue.io doesn’t just make workers more productive, but also appeals to administrators. Our app syncs with Salesforce.com, logging calls, emails and more as activities in the CRM. It therefore uses Salesforce.com to gives administrators visibility into their reps’ actions instantaneously.

It is becoming increasingly common for workers to spend some or all of their time working off-site. As enterprises grow increasingly mobile, it’s imperative that voice communications tools evolve to fit employee needs. Though the desktop phone isn’t yet considered an antiquated contraption, we know it’s only a matter of time. We’ll keep you posted as we continue to develop new products to revolutionize your perception of telephony.

2020 update: This post contains legacy content regarding Revenue.io features. For the most recent up-to-date information about Revenue.io, please check out our amazing solutions at www.revenue.io