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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."
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.
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.
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?
a) (lie) I didn't get your VM
b) (truth) I haven't listened to your VM
Maybe I'm old, but if I don't answer, leave a message. If it's not important enough for you to bother to say anything, it's not important enough for me to bother calling you back. And if you call my home number without leave a message, it may be weeks before I look at a phone and know anyone called. (with telemarketing bullshit, I rarely both looking at the call list unless the answering machine is flashing. [FTR, the phone on my desk is showing "110 missed calls"]) Calls to the cell (which goes to google voice for VM, which will *ding* on a dozen devices, get emailed to me, and transcribed to a text if Google can make any sense of it.) I'll notice in a day or two -- usually in the morning when I pick the phone up to go to work. [current count: 4 numbers I don't recognize] Texts I'll notice immediately if the phone's on me.
Bottom line... if you called me but didn't (a) leave a message, (b) send a text, or (c) follow up with an email, then you really didn't need to speak to me, did you?
Texting is no longer just for teenage girls, I hate to tell you...
I finally found a car dealership that gets it, I was shopping for a new truck this year and one dealership on their web site had a third option, finally...
How would you like us to contact you:
1. Call
2. E-mail
3. Text
I picked 3, and sure enough, they texted me and got back to me with answers to my questions without a long drawn out process. Short and sweet.
After a few back and fourth texts about model and details and trade, they asked me what time I'd like to see the truck. I gave them my time, they brought it to my house and left it with me for a few hours while they took my older truck to have it appraised. They then texted me and asked if I was happy with their number, and if so, the F&I guy would come to my house to finish the deal.
I never had to go to the dealership, ever. Not even for financing. All done at my kitchen table, no inconveniences for me.
More car dealerships would do well to learn that model, many people my age and younger would prefer to buy a car or truck that way.