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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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.