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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."
Well, either way it's bad. When people are leaving messages, it is not rare you have to listen at them a half dozen times before you finally get correctly some critical information in it, like the name of the caller or the phone number which happen to not be the same as the caller id when you get one. 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. I hate phones.
I would like to see phone plans without talking minutes or an optional amount of minutes and a base rate for SMS/text. Currently, most plans include a fix amount of minutes and you have to buy minutes to which SMS are added. Why not the reverse? It would be much less expensive, I almost never talk over phone.
Achille Talon
Hop!
You're right! That's, um, the, uh, problem.
Bullshit. I'm old and I hate voice mail. No one knows how to leave a message and they're just going to follow up with an email or come see you in person anyway.
If you're just going to leave a message that says "call me back" then send an email or a text or an IM. Or use the scheduling function in email to set up an appointment with me.
The worst offender was a manager I worked with some years ago. He would do the stream-of-consciousness thing whenever he got voicemail and you'd end up with 10 sentences covering 10 different topics. Which I would then turn into 10 different email messages and send back to him.
It's communication! It is NOT the same as talking. Just because you're talking does NOT mean you're communicating.
You have to deal with the idiot regardless of whether he's leaving a voice mail, a text, or another email.
You don't always have an email or a cell number for the person/organization you're trying to contact. Voice mail doesn't require any contact info or line of communication beyond what was already used for the call.
The trouble with voice mail is that it painstakingly offers almost all the vices of the other options and few of the virtues. All of the inaccessibility of voice (yeah, you could cut and paste part of a VM into your reply, with some effort; but that would be highly unusual...) without any of the conversational or interactive qualities. All of the one-side's-rambling-monologue of email; but without any of the easy access, search, categorization, exchange of information where formatting or spelling count (Who doesn't love resorting to NATO phonetic alphabet just to get a serial number across a phone line?).
Then include the fact that most systems for retrieving them are so awful that somebody using an email client 25 years ago would assume that you were fucking with them, and it's just icing on the cake.
Exactly this! If you've got voicemail, take the courtesy to listen to it before calling someone back. If someone has voicemail, I'm going to assume it's for a purpose: so I can leave information of lower importance, assuming you'll get it eventually. If you're going to break this social contract, and you can't be bothered to check your own voicemail before calling someone back, then disable your voicemail already!
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein