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.
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.
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.
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.
My Cell transcribes all voicemail to text
let's set so double the killer delete select all
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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
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...
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.
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?
Land line providers charge extra for long distance.
This is one of the biggest differences between the US and most other places in the world. I'm 36, from the UK, and remember long distance charges on landlines, but only just. Now just about all national calls from a landline are essentially free.
Calling mobiles from landlines used to be horrendously expensive (almost 50p a minute IIRC). This is how mobile companies made a whole load of their money - charging others to phone them. Now it's a little better, but the mobile companies still massively profit from calls from landlines.
International landline calls used to be expensive... now they're cheap. It's cheaper to call Australia from your landline than it is to call the mobile next to you in the UK in most cases.
Finding out the exact charges is difficult.
People north of 40 are schizophrenic about voice mail?
Like... they hear voices when they listen to voice mails?