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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."
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
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.
If voice mail is gone then people might expect me to answer my phone. I'd much rather deal with voice mail than having to talk to people on the phone when it isn't necessary.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Voice mail etiquette.
(speak slowly and distinctly here) Hi. This is (your name). My number is (your number).
(speak normally here) Now state the situation as clearly as you can. But be brief. This is a message. Not exposition.
End with repeating your name (slowly and clearly) and your phone number.
Thank you.
The easiest way to do this is to realize that you MIGHT run into voice mail before you pick up the phone. Go through the message in your head before dialing. This will cut down on the uh and um and huh and em and other noises.
And smartphones are worse, some giving you the date and time that the phone call was made before playing the message.
That's not something specific to smartphones - that's something that comes from phone companies and voice mail (compared to answering machines of the past) in general. My smartphone has a voice mail app now that lets me just select the message and click "play" - a large improvement.
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.
Of course, if my mom knew what voicemail etiquette was, I would probably have missed out on the most hilarious "I am surrounded by furbies and I have no idea what is going on, please call me" (that's the much abridged version) when she found her self downtown during the same weekend as the furry convention.
XDInd
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?