For a short time there, it was possible to talk to your butler and give him or her commands where ever you might be in game so long as you had the chat window open.
This, of course, was a bug, and has been, in the parlance of our times, nerfed.
However! I think it would be brilliant, and seemingly within intended game mechanics, if you could get a card upgrade that would be called "Butler Phone" or something like that! It would have a picture on it of a pair of cans with a piece of string between them, and it would allow you to issue commands to your butler from afar (your butler might appear in your friends list or something for this to work.
It would also give you an added command that you could activate over the chat window: "Who's on my street?"
And maybe another one, "Say".
There are a lot of possibilities.