Slashdot Mirror
The Slow Death of Voice Mail
HughPickens.com writes: Duane D. Stanford reports at Bloomberg that Coca-Cola's Atlanta Headquarters is the latest big company to ditch its old-style voice mail, which requires users to push buttons to scroll through messages and listen to them one at a time. The change went into effect this month, and a standard outgoing message now throws up an electronic stiff arm, telling callers to try later or use "an alternative method" to contact the person. Techies have predicted the death of voice mail for years as smartphones co-opt much of the office work once performed by telephones and desktop computers. Younger employees who came of age texting while largely ignoring voice mail are bringing that habit into the workforce. "People north of 40 are schizophrenic about voice mail," says Michael Schrage. "People under 35 scarcely ever use it." Companies are increasingly combining telephone, e-mail, text and video systems into unified Internet-based systems that eliminate overlap. "Many people in many corporations simply don't have the time or desire to spend 25 minutes plowing through a stack of 15 to 25 voice mails at the end or beginning of the day," says Schrage.
In 2012, Vonage reported its year-over-year voicemail volumes dropped 8%. More revealing, the number of people bothering to retrieve those messages plummeted 14%. More and more personal and corporate voicemail boxes now warn callers that their messages are rarely retrieved and that they're better off sending emails or texts. "The truly productive have effectively abandoned voicemail, preferring to visually track who's called them on their mobiles," concludes Schrage. "A communications medium that was once essential has become as clunky and irrelevant as Microsoft DOS and carbon paper."
In 2012, Vonage reported its year-over-year voicemail volumes dropped 8%. More revealing, the number of people bothering to retrieve those messages plummeted 14%. More and more personal and corporate voicemail boxes now warn callers that their messages are rarely retrieved and that they're better off sending emails or texts. "The truly productive have effectively abandoned voicemail, preferring to visually track who's called them on their mobiles," concludes Schrage. "A communications medium that was once essential has become as clunky and irrelevant as Microsoft DOS and carbon paper."
I use youmail for my VM provider. its great because I get texts if i want, transcripts if i want, emails if i want. I tend to stick with the emails (texts before my smart phone). I for the life of me cannot tell you the last time i actually listened to a VM, if i see you called, and i want to talk to you, i call you back.
Im sure other companies offer the same features, i know google does but to this 29 year old, this is spot on information
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Not so much having to leave a message, but listening to the messages others left. And smartphones are worse, some giving you the date and time that the phone call was made before playing the message. It won't be missed.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Because text messages or even emails are vastly superior.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpDRdXUIKLI
Proper voicemail systems are evolved.
At work, my extension is tied into my email. When someone leaves me a message, it's sent as a wav file to my email, and I can listen to it from my mobile device. At home, Vonage gives me "visual voicemail", where my calls are transcribed and sent as an email, along with a wav file, to my personal email. On my cell phone, my phone, my provide provides the same service as Vonage. I don't need to pick up my phone at any location and press * or # or dial a special number to listen to my voicemail, instead it's delivered to me in an easy to consume format. This is proper voicemail. Arcane voicemail systems that require you to dial in and listen to a message will die, simply because they provide no convenience compared to newer alternatives, just like tape driven answer machines were driven out by remotely hosted voicemail services because of their superior featureset and accessibility.
was once the cutting edge of computers, electronics, and business. Back when Silicon Valley was about actual products and innovation and providing good engineering jobs in the West....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Oh well.
If you had it as part of a set of Emails that you could quickly discard or pull up based on a transcript like (Google Voice provides) or by caller ID/number, you would find it rather useful.
Nuances on things for communication are lacking on the text side of things. It's easier to not make mistakes in communication via voice communications.
So...I see the traditional form of it dying. I'll be working up a RasPBX setup on a Beaglebone Black in the next couple of days. I'll be tying the voicemail DB to the Email server so that each Extension's mailbox is in their personal mailbox on the server. Should be fairly useful. (We won't get into forensics when someone screws up (Bill collectors, that sort of thing. Without written permission with a signature, it's all a violation of the TCPA to call hospitals, pay services, etc.) however...voicemail systems DO have their uses still... >:-D)
My Cell transcribes all voicemail to text, my work and home voicemail forward a wav to my email... This is imo a much more efficient way to handle voicemail, rather than seeing the 100 "as a valued westjet customer you are awarded 1000 reward points please press 1" and having to listen to each one and delete each one, I can see oh yeah, skip, skip, skip, oh I was waiting to hear from that guy, lets see what he has to say.
I log into my work voicemail once every 3-6 months to change the outgoing message to say i'm away... I usually have to change my voicemail password at that time too...
Email is a much better way to get a hold of people these days.
with a dozen old voicemails lying un-listened to on my cell phone. I'm an over-50, So I guess that i'm one of those who is schizophrenic about voicemail.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
I've always hated talking on the phone and will ignore my red light on the phone for several days or even weeks. Heck, 95% of the time the "voice" message is *beeeeep* (a hangup vs leaving a message). As to the phone, probably half of the callers are from outside the company ("can I send you a white paper from symantec?"). I always prefer an email or text message at home and just email at work. I leave my IM off at work typically just because of the number of "drive by" IMs. If I bring IM up for a problem where I'm working with others, I'll have 4 or 5 other popups asking me about this or that.
And I'm 57.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Serious question.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I invented voice mail, menu driven phone systems and script kiddies back in the 1980's. These are the least favorite of the things I created. Of course, if I hadn't someone else would have but I detest all three. I will be glad to see these die.
To be clear, as long as:
- callers call callees;
- callees are not available to pick up the phone;
- callers want callees to know there and then why they called;
voicemail is not going anywhere soon (although the means through which voicemail may be consumed might change).
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
V-enema: The Act of rapidly going through your voice mail just to get rid of the icon/flashing light.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
But I find that next to nobody ever leave a message.
So, I ain't calling you back. If you can't be arsed to leave a simple message like "it's ****, call me back when you have the time", then I can't be arsed to call you either.
I dont even have voice mail on my phone anymore. Anyone important enough will have multiple other ways of sending me a message.
Good-bye
I'm old enough to remember when voice mail was a privilege and you had to get your superiors to give you access because you were special. Even back then I didn't want it. I hated having to sift through the menus to listen to some irrelevant crap that someone could just as easily put in an email. I politely declined when my supervisor asked. That is, until the new phone system was installed and everyone was given their own voicemail. I hated getting pestered by some IT flunky to clear out my inbox because it was using up limited space, otherwise I would have let my inbox fill up to the point where it would reject incoming messages. I wasn't high enough on the food chain at that point to be able to get them to remove my inbox entirely but I did know at least one senior staff engineer who was able to make that happen. Though later in my career, once hard drive space was cheap enough to have way more storage than you needed because you couldn't even buy a hard drive that was too small, I did just let the inbox fill up. And after leaving a job of 3.5 years, I did log in to clear out the messages and I had a whopping 13, about half of which were from family members who ended up calling my cell phone. The rest were people who were following up on emails they had sent within 1-2 minutes of calling me.
So count me in the over 40 crowd that is happy to see voice mail going the way of the floppy disk. Good riddance. I look forward to not having to deal with it.
One reason for the death of voice mail is the change from convenience to annoyance imposed by the carriers.
First you hear “Hi, it’s John Smith. Leave a message, and I’ll get back to you”. (5 seconds)
And THEN you hear a 15-second canned carrier message "[Phone number] is not available right now. Please leave a detailed message after the tone. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press pound for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5.”
That extra 15 seconds is annoying as hell to wait out, and it's only put there so that the carrier can use up metered minutes on an artificially scarce resource.
Then when you go to *play* the message, you have to wait through the "First message, from, phone number xxx-xxx-xxxx, received at ".
The old-style was much more convenient. Leave a message *beep* "Hi, this is your sister, please give me a call". Oftentimes 10 seconds *total* gets the point across.
The new-style - not so much.
Take the time wasted on each worthless recording (15 secs), multiply by the number of messages each year, and you get a *lot* of wasted man-years.
Thanks, carriers! Your relentless pursuit of money has ruined a perfectly useful feature.
I'm the IT director for a 150-ish person company. our CEO's voicemail got hacked (greeting replaced w/rant from PO'd customer) b/c he'd never changed it from the default of his extension (which was set before they hired me). I was terrorfied of telling him but when I did he response was: "I have voicemail?!? why? delete it!"
As a Vonage customer I like the fact that I can setup my voice mail to be automatically transcribed and sent as an email. Easily 99% of the voice mails I get are accurately transcribed, or at least 'Good Enough'. My spouse has an unusual name that it always gets wrong but I can figure that mistake out from context pretty much all the time. In the rare case that the text is unintelligible, I get a sound file as an attachment that I can play back. This makes checking my voice mail take seconds per message and it happens as part of my checking my email.
I would note that I never use the telephone to check my voice mail, so I probably look like one of those people that never even bother to retrieve those messages despite the fact that I do read them all.
I suspect voicemail may fade but won't disappear, much like radio. It has improved and certainly can further. Sometimes voice is faster or better than text (longer messages), and frankly since most people in my company don't have a company smartphone, voicemail is pretty handy.
Not that hard to have your voicemail system automatically record an mp3 and email the file, listing the telephone number as the "from" address.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
O.K. if I WAS taking twenty calls a day yes, but the job I do I get maybe one call a month ? and password rollover of 30 days.
Get real, takes over half an hour to reset the password so you can retrieve the mail, that's just not happening.
I'm not unique in that either, it's not just the young you can't be bothered with the disfuctional POS.
Wasn't too long ago... 1990's... that everyone still bought a cassette tape based answering machine for their homes. (and if you had a dual cassette one with a separate tape for the greeting and the voicemail recording, that was da bomb)
Well into the 2000's, people still bought flash memory-based answering machines for their homes.
You'd have to be awfully young to not have used voicemail. Maybe the kids just starting college today.
We recently switched our 15 year old on premise PBX to a Cloud Provider for our ~100 lines across two locations. The new phones have red blinking Voicemail indicators, which the old ones did not. Never did I ever realize how many people just never checked their voicemail or missed call history.
My VM box is like the Roach Motel; messages check in but they don't check out. I'm not even sure I remember my VM password.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
For many years my outgoing message at work has been "I rarely check my voice mail. If you have my EMAIL address, please use it."
I wish I could do the same at home, but too many callers don't have my EMAIL address, and I certainly wouldn't want to broadcast it.
1. Triage calls for call back. If they won't leave a VM on my cell it is generally not a serious issue requiring immediate attention
2. To tell people they have reached the wrong number and the person they want to reach is at extension xxx. I use that at a client site because a PM has the same last name as I do since I get calls for him by accident on occasion. This message at least lets callers know they have reached the wrong person so they know to call back and dial the correct extension; which I give in my VM. I do get the occasional idiot who insists they dialed the correct extension, and says so in their VM, and leaves a request for information they need RIGHT NOW. Since I am rarely in my office and all my clients have my cell # anyway those requests generally never get answered. I assume they call back and actually dial the right extension when they do not hear back from the person they thought they left a message.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I recently dumped my cell phone provider becaues they wouldn't disable my voicemail, that used to be disabled until they "upgraded" my service. Voice mail wouldn't be so bad with a web interface, but I could only get messages through that annoying phone interface. I've always viewed voicemail as one technological step past fax machines. Disclosure: 64 year old computer professional
I do not use my cell for work. That number is not available. I have a live secretary and voice mail. E-mail of course. If you want to talk to me, leave a message. If you want to leave a note for me to phone you that works as well. Send an e-mail and ask me to phone you. It all works. There is no question that not having the ability to leave a voice message is unacceptable. And for all those posters above, who respond to electronic messages and ignore your voice-mails, I hope your employer doesn't know. If you don't take care of your customer, someone else will.
Ah, but VM has a big advantage. Let callers you don't want to talk with go to VM and then ignore it. Hopefully, they're never call again. Without VM, you either have to answer or they keep calling back.
Both my google voice mail and tmo voice mail transcribes into text, and I can delete or hear it with only press. Go ahead and leave me a voice mail! Only problem is most carriers charge for "visual voicemail" services... That should be the thing to attract people, after using transcribed voice mail services, you never ever ever want to go back.
I can read my voicemail in meeting, its great.
If I was a phone system vendor id be adding transcription, make those IP phones display the voicemail, etc.
Even asterisk and freepbx can do transcription.
Just like faxing, voice messaging will never die. I will continue to have to maintain legacy voice mail servers just like I have to manage POTS lines to provide analog dial tones to fax machines.
There will always be some manager who clings to the technology that will yell at, or threaten the jobs of younger people who do not want to use voice mail. These same managers will force people into using voice mail the traditional way so leaving a greeting like "just hang up and send an email instead" will not please them either, not that I have first hand experience with this one.
I set VM to pickup on the second ring.
I almost never answer the phone at home unless I'm expecting mom to call at that time.
And no, I don't have caller ID because I'm not getting up to go look at the phone either.
I estimate that 90% of the calls I get at home hangup if they go to VM, so that's good too.
At work, VM goes into a wav file that goes to email.
So I don't answer the phone at work either unless the caller outranks me in my chain-of-command, which is two people.
Anyone else that wants to talk to me at work just hollers down the hall. My door is always open.
I've been trying to get my voice mail greeting changed to just a greeting and no ability to leave a message. Just email or text me....that's what I want...
We still use DOS, FAXs, Phones. Many companies don't care about trendy but which is most reliable, and rate of adoption isn't the metric. But, does it work?
Damned if I'm going to buy a smell phone and pay for a plan just so you can interrupt my life anywhere, anytime instead of leaving a message on my land line.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Sorry "youngsters". Arrogantly ignore business tools at your own peril. I'm personally acquainted with someone who ignored their voice mail for several days and missed job interviews. Not cool at best.
Voicemail is not obsolete. What is obsolete is coca-cola's telephone system.
Their voicemail would be more widely used if Coca-Cola upgraded their phone system so that: voicemail can be forwarded as email, voicemail can be automatically transcribed and emailed, voicemail can be forwarded to cell phones, their phones were able to receive and send SMS messages, etc.
What's suppose to be hip, young, and cool just isn't reality. It's a fad at best. There are two groups of people who don't use voice mail. The arrogant who think everybody should cater to them and the elderly who aren't able to figure it out. The same can essentially be applied to email. If you don't check your email and voice mail regularly your just an arrogant prick who thinks everybody else's time is worthless. I shouldn't have to try a dozen communications methods to get in touch with you. I get it if an email was lost, a voice mail was accidentally deleted, etc. Fine. I can handle sending a 2nd message. I can't deal with those who are just responsible ass holes.
And you don't have to be a poor, over 40, etc to take issue with having to pay extraordinary fees for texting. Not everybody has it. It's not a mainstream communications method no matter how many in a particular age group rely on it.
Facebook(which apparently has been reported as dead too now by the 'hip cool younger' generation, or at least, those reporting it), instant messaging, twitter, and for those a bit older Geocities, MySpace, Aim, MSN, Skype, etc. are FADS. So are tablets/smartphones. Laptops, desktops, etc are here to stay and I can't think of a single person who has a tablet or smartphone and doesn't have a laptop/desktop of some sort.
The post office isn't dead either. There are just certain entities that want you to think its dead so it can be sold off, raise prices, etc so some very rich folks can cash in on it. In fact we rely on the post office now more than ever.
I'm not opposed to voicemail, just the way it's implemented (as your post suggests).
If I could access it through some sort of visual interface, that was faster, I'd have no problems listening to audio recordings. Sometimes it's more convenient for both parties. I think the voicemails I usually get are more urgent anyway--the sorts of things it would be difficult to text, and not enough time or something to email.
I don't really usually leave them, and get irritated by them, but it's not the message usually, it's the way I have to access it. I don't know why we equate an entire system with a bad implementation.
There is still a ton of people around thinking leaving a message is some kind of race and you have nearly 10 seconds to tell about your whole life.
That's probably because they're calling you on a pay-per-minute line and want to finish their message as fast as they reasonably can in order not to be billed for a second minute. Land line providers charge extra for long distance. Cell phones have free long distance, but less expensive plans charge per minute for airtime. Finally, international calls are expensive on pretty much any popular provider. This is made even worse by the lengthy instructions that many carriers append to the greeeting: "At the tone, please record your message. When you're finished recording, you may hang up or press 1 for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5."
I would like to see phone plans without talking minutes and a base rate for SMS/text
Pay as you go plans are like that. Or try Ting, a Sprint MVNO operated by Tucows that separates talk, text, and data billing into three independent bins. But good luck sending text messages to or from a land line.
It's more difficult to spoof voicemail than e-mail or text messages. Particularly if you know the sender. And generated spam robo calls aren't very convincing. So I'm going to trust voicemail a bit more than a text based message.
Have gnu, will travel.
When you send somebody an email you're doing them the courtesy of pre-organizing your thoughts
Not everybody pays for a $500 per year smartphone plan. For example, sometimes it might be hours before I can get to an open Wi-Fi connection through which to send an e-mail from my laptop, but I can leave a voice mail from my $80/year flip phone. What would be the most polite way for someone like me to call you?
Google Voice's transcription feature has changed me from 'never bothering' to always getting my voicemail. I'm very happy with it. And Voice does allow you to reduce or eliminate the call in delays, which I also like.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
1. Nobody "likes" voicemail. It isn't the point.
I'm a customer of yours and I call you expecting to speak with you.... I've already wasted my time with your IVR and now your not there... you bet I'm going to bleepin leave a message AND expect callback. Fuck you if you don't like it...perhaps you would enjoy having no customers or being unemployed better.
2. VM is the most efficient way to get spam callers out of your face. They know if they are transferred to voice mail there is no hope of getting a callback so 9 out of 10 times they just hang up and save you the trouble.
What really irks me about our "modern" world is the often stunning lack of ability to effectively communicate. Everything out there is shit...
Telephones used to be better until everyone started using Internet gateways to bypass LD/international rates... between the heavy accents, packet loss and latency your lucky if your able to understand a single word out of any given spoken sentence.
Email would be awesome if it at least tried to be secure and there was at least some vague assurance when you clicked 'send' your message would not be randomly disappeared by a rogue bayesian algorithm no human understands.
Mobile SMS is too slow, unstructured and interrupt driven to be a viable alternative.
What we are left with to fill gaps are one-off piecemeal solutions we must expect to not be common to any given pair of communication partners.... so much for "progress"....
Comical article. The only reason that an article like this is written is due to the ignorance of the technology. Voice Mail is never used as a single message medium in advanced comm systems. It is a single entity in Unified Communications that all current equipment supports in addition to social media aggregation. Voice mail is a valuable component of messaging that will only die to those that are uninformed.
If I don't have voice mail, who is going to answer the phone? I don't want to sit there listening to it ring all day.
A call log gets that point across with no message at all.
There are still carriers that charge $100 per year extra for a call log. And these carriers still have customers.
Why leave a message when the only relevant message is "call me back". They already told you that by the "missed call" entry in your phone.
Because calling a land line doesn't always leave a "missed call" entry. Caller ID costs $100 per year extra on my home town's ILEC.
For as many anti-social people there are in IT I thought the /. crowd would be fans of voicemail. Keeps my email inbox clean as well. I don't like talking on the phone, so most of the time voicemail gets my calls and I do followup in person or via email. Guess I'm one of the only ones that likes voicemail.
I read the headline as "The Slow Voice of Darth Maul".
/. and get out of the office.
Time to stop reading
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
[Instant messaging services] So are tablets/smartphones. Laptops, desktops, etc are here to stay and I can't think of a single person who has a tablet or smartphone and doesn't have a laptop/desktop of some sort.
I can. For example, see this comment from someone complaining that he can't provide a environment in which his children can learn to program because all he has are tablets.
"People north of 40 are schizophrenic about voice mail," says Michael Schrage.
"Schizophrenic"? Meaning ... what?
They hear voicemail messages that aren't there?
The voicemail commands them to kill the dog?
May I introduce you to another ancient technology called a "dictionary" ...
... every other technology, from your car to your toaster, must now speak aloud to you.
the ability to connect to 4G networks
For an extra $500 per year on top of what you already pay for Internet at home. And no, you can't cancel your Internet at home and just use the 4G if you use any sort of video on demand (Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, or even just ads on web pages nowadays) because of the single digit GB/mo cap.
I'm hi it's me I'm just well I thought that I would give you a call because I'm we we kind of need to talk well first of all I should say that I don't normally do this but I thought that perhaps I could call you back and talk to you sometime...
5 minutes later...
(Typing) yes, I read your email, and if you had bothered to check yours, you'd know I've already addressed your concerns in the reply.
Good riddance.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I still listen to voicemail on my Vonage phone. Doctors office leaves messages when I am not home. No, I don't have a cell phone.
Oh hey! I accidentally ... my voicemails
I think that's the third time you've made that excuse. You really need to get that fixed. Perhaps after I finish explaining everything again, we can schedule a date to go into the cell phone shop.
The main use I've found for an answering machine is I'll leave home and go to the movies or something when the power goes out. I call home and if the answering machine picks up, I know the power is back on!
If I had a dollar for every time I played "phone tag" with someone...well, you get the idea. If someone wants to get a hold of me then send me a text or an IM. Just tell me briefly what you need and I'll get back with you as soon as I'm available. Depending on what you need we might even be able to accomplish it without a phone call at all. If it requires a phone call then tell me when to call and we can avoid VM altogether.
My landline doesn't have text - how are you going to get my information or money for your service?
From what I see in the responses - If I don't have text, than the place you work for is useless to me.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
People north of 40 are schizophrenic about voice mail?
Like... they hear voices when they listen to voice mails?
Who is here just befor xmas - white, socialy inept males. These are exactly those people that are great at communicating especially by speech, correct? Top it with - one/my solution fits all line of thought, that nerds usually have and we are ready to go. US telecom market being customer hostile aberration is of course just cause yet there are people that still use vm. I use it for communicating with family and neighbours for instance. Then again I did not give my pre teenage kids phones to have a chance of not raising stupidified assholes I see the whole working day. I am not that desperate tho. If I find telecom institutions failing me murican way I go bravik on them. That is very comforting thought on xmas eve.
Being cheap is no excuse for annoying people.
So where should someone who's underemployed come up with the money to pay for all these recurring expenses to keep up with the Joneses? One has to buy a cell phone and cell phone service because voice mail users are annoying, one has to buy a car, insurance, maintenance, and fuel because cyclists are annoying, etc.
I work in finance, commonly dealing with payroll systems and data. There's a lot of stuff you can't or discuss in a standard email, and the secure stuff I do send, I only provide the password verbally to the recipient. On top of this, most agencies I need to interact with (state gov'ts/IRS/unions/EBAs) don't have anything available except voice discussion or snailmail.
It take a long time to fetch voicemails. I don't care about what time they called, unless I need too. Get it?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
... transcribes speech, and presents both media - interleaved - in real-time.
The recipient can now skip between listening and reading, alter playback rate, even 'catchup' with, and interrupt the caller to speak directly.
Google Voice for my cell phone, Microsoft Lync for my work phone. My home phone # I don't even give out - and what we do get is crap anyway... in fact it doesn't even ring... just goes straight to voice mail which I can retrieve by e-mail - but since most of that voice mail is telemarketing crap, it ends up in my e-mail SPAM folder anyway (I need a landline to dial into remote sites, send out the rare fax, etc... as I work from home).
Speech to text is reasonably OK on either platform - I get the gist of the message from it. Rarely ever listen to VM anymore unless the transcription is indecipherable.
Can we combine txt and email already in the United States? The Asian markets got this right a decade ago because their phones were not locked to carriers by the corrupt simi-monopoly granting senators. Free market. The right way to do it, is in email phone apps hide header data. Hiding header data in email=txt messages without size limits.
I think it all depends on the reason/environment. If you are at home versus at work. If it is family/friend or a coworker. I like voice .. and I call for anything that requires a back and forth conversation. If a text chain is more than 3 messages it becomes a call. If an email chain becomes a back and forth, I make it a call. You will get a voicemail from me, always when I call. I will clearly outlay why I am calling, and what I expect in return from you. I don't call to ask about the email I just sent, or something that is a status. I read though most of this thread and people bitch because they think their time is more important than others. "I am too busy to answer voicemail" "Put it in an email" "Just text me". There is very good reason to use a phone, and that is to get a back and forth conversation. I call people 3-4 times a day when I need to have a conversation (I said conversation, not IM, as that is not a conversation). I also use the drop-by to get what I want as well. If you are dodging my emails, and voice calls, I drop by. There is a reason I ask you a question, and am trying to get a hold of you - I need a response.
While voicemail can go away in my book, used properly, it is a very effective tool. People don't use it effectively and that is why it is an issue.
The last thing, it is hard to type an email or text when you are driving, and you need to talk to someone. However to call, leave a voicemail and then let them get back to you when they can, works just as well.
Voice mail is easy to leave, but difficult to retrieve. The fact is when something is very important we still turn to the phone. New technology that transcribes voice messages to text and sends you an SMS or email gives companies the best option to serve their callers while making it easier for their employees to get the messages on their Smartphones. There are over a million and half business users using giSTT voice to text and they report it helps increase responsiveness and customer satisfaction. Asking a customer to hang up and send a text is just a bad business decision. Companies need to focus on communicating smarter by making it easier to connect and engage with customers.