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The Psychology in Telecommunications

Far advancing technology has greatly contributed to how people relate to more innovations and development of the present modern times. The technologies that we hardly used not a long time ago for email, Social Networking Services (SNS), calls, messaging and many others have bridged the gap between communication across nations.

Operators continue to improve their services as demand grow and gets more critical. In an interview with Axis Capital Group, recent subsidiary of XL Axiata, one of the top three leading telecommunications providers in Indonesia, overall telecommunication operators are no longer concerned primarily with their product and service. Nowadays, they are more centered on customer demands and needs. Being able to read their minds and understand them would require operators to have high psychological comprehension and training.

It’s about time to focus on providing the best possible customer experience - in short, operators must start to think like a psychologist. This is how full spectrum innovation thinking can help, by changing product innovation from being technology led, to being problem, experience or opportunity led.

Take for example the invention of QWERTY on almost all keyboards nowadays. There is the question as to why letters are arranged this way. This issue has even caused some arguments and numerous complaints. Some say that it was invented to slow down the typist who does not memorize the odd arrangement of the letters. Some argue that the most commonly used letter-pairs such as “th” or “st” are put together to speed up typing by preventing typing jams. Psychological experiments were primarily done to test public’s reaction to the alignment of letters. Now that we have fully adjusted to the use of QWERTY keyboard, our minds have been trained to know which keys to type to create a message. Even this article is created with the awareness of QWERTY and the unique psychology behind it.

Other psychological tests were also conducted to further develop telecommunication as we know it today. Laboratory experiments were used to investigate factors relevant to the design of long telephone codes for easy remembering. Factors considered were: Length; grouping; letters v. numbers.

In Jakarta, as adapted from developing cities, new innovations in telecommunications and health called telehealth are coined using psychological care and research. Telecommunications are already being utilized to provide a better health service.

Economic, clinical and social psychology are reviewed to be the most used types interrelated with telecommunications. Better introduction of new issues would affect human behavior towards it. As long as there is the constant demand for new innovation and better customer service, psychological strategies will also continue to be in need.