Why it’s still good to talk

I started writing this just after finishing a phone call with a customer service agent.

The conversation lasted no more than five minutes. And the person I spoke with was understanding and helpful as she resolved my issue quickly.

I ended the call by thanking her and wishing her a nice day. The whole thing had been a positive, pleasant experience. And my burden even felt a bit lighter as I turned to the next task on my to-do list.

All of which is a little surprising, because I’d been in an email exchange with her colleagues for the previous two weeks and that conversation had been anything but pleasant.

Email ping-pong

I’d been trying to rebook an appointment with an online legal service after the lawyer I’d originally been scheduled to see hadn’t shown up for the first one. I won’t bore you with the details. But the exchange had become an incredibly frustrating game of email ping-pong.

I confess that my tone may have lapsed into being more than a little tetchy at times. In my defence, the firm in question seemed not to have been reading their previous correspondence before sending each reply. So, not surprisingly, those replies often made little sense.

The last straw was when they emailed to say that an appointment they’d offered me (also by email) had been given to someone else because I hadn’t accepted it in time. (Even though I’d replied to that offer within the hour.) Exasperated, I finally picked up the phone.

Speaking changed everything

I’m so glad I did though, because that call changed everything.

Instead of another back-and-forth that might easily have lasted another week, the problem got fixed there and then. The agent, who sounded genuinely concerned about the mix-up, found and booked me another appointment while we were speaking. She also apologised profusely and emailed a colleague to arrange compensation.

So why were things so different? And how had we ended up in such a frustrating muddle in the first place?

Locked into screens

One of the biggest changes of the last decade or two is how reliant we’ve become on the written word. We now spend much of each day of our adult lives tapping away on computer keyboards and smartphone screens.

The trouble is, we are all so locked into our screens that we don’t even notice when we might be better off speaking instead. And even if we do, the gravitational pull of our devices is so strong that it can be almost impossible to tear ourselves away and do things differently.

We evolved to talk

The irony is that we’re often doing this on a device that was originally designed for talking. So the only extra effort we’d need to make to do that would be to raise it to our ear.

It’s not just the phones. We originally evolved for speaking and listening. Humans have been reading and writing for less than five thousand years. That may sound like a long time, but it’s only a heartbeat in evolutionary terms. It’s certainly not long enough for our brains to have evolved structures dedicated to the task.

In contrast, the ability to communicate with our voices is hardwired into everyone’s brains. And that’s why a conversation – a real conversation using our voices and ears – not only tends to resolve problems more quickly but feels good too.

Wave of relief

When I finally made that phone call, I felt a wave of relief washing over me as soon as I heard a human voice on the end of the phone. It instantly broke the tension of that interminable email exchange.

That wave was real. Studies in 2010 showed that hearing the human voice releases the hormone oxytocin, which acts as a lubricant for many social interactions and modifies our emotions. The same study found that communicating through the written word has no such effect.

We type out hundreds or even thousands of words every week. Those words often have a massive impact. But when the stakes are high, it can be incredibly difficult to get them right. Sometimes the amount of heavy lifting we ask them to do is simply too much for them to bear.

In those situations, it can be remarkable how much things change – and how quickly – when we remember that there is another way.

Image credit: antoniodiaz / Shutterstock