As more businesses and homes adopt caller ID, Peter Post is beginning to hear that question a lot. As director of the Emily Post Institute (he’s Emily’s great-grandson), Post is a traditionalist, saying a straightforward “Hello” remains correct, caller ID or not. Post calls the “Hi, Bob” technique “a breach of etiquette,” though a minor one comparable to using the wrong fork at a fancy restaurant. “Some people seem to be uncomfortable when you do it,” says Post.
Indeed, telecom analyst Jeff Kagan says companies that have experimented with caller ID to answer phones using customers’ names (“Hello, Mr. Smith, how may I help you?”) got mostly negative responses. “It created so much confusion it stopped customers in their tracks,” Kagan says. But as the technology spreads, more people are adopting their own strategies. Some answer by name for personal calls and use “Hello?” for business calls. A twentysomething NEWSWEEK editor admits to using the “Hi, Bob” for male friends and “Hello?” for female romantic prospects (in a lame attempt at nonchalance).
This answering dilemma will only grow. Roughly 40 percent of households have caller ID, up from 12.6 percent in 1998, according to senior analyst Will Stofega of IDC. Stofega, who usually opts for the “Hi, Bob” answer himself, says younger people are increasingly adopting this approach. “With older people there’s still this sense of ‘Is this technology telling me the truth?’ " he says. For better or worse, as more people grow to trust caller ID, the cut-to-the-chase answering style may become as ubiquitous as the annoying ring of cell phones in restaurants. Technology marches on.
