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So Long Voicemail, Give My Regards To the Fax Machine
itwbennett writes: Yes, it was just a matter of time before voicemail, the old office relic, the technology The Guardian's Chitra Ramaswamy called "as pointless as a pigeon with a pager," finally followed the fax machine into obscurity. Last week JPMorgan Chase announced it was turning off voicemail service for tens of thousands of workers (a move that CocaCola made last December). And if Bloomberg's Ramy Inocencio has the numbers right, the cost savings are significant: JPMorgan, for example, will save $3.2 million by cutting voicemail for about 136,000. As great as this sounds, David Lazarus, writing in the LA Times, warns that customer service will suffer.
I would cancel office phones alltogether. All those proprieatry systems costing thousands of dollars
Fax machines are still widely used. They are hardly obscure.
There's no customer service anyways, in reality most corporations just cheat and or steal from the consumer.
Why would you prioritize an unknown caller over someone with whom you're already having a conversation? Just as interrupting a conversation is rude, call waiting should be banned (just as voicemail!) and emergency calls routed $SOMEWHERE that guarantees a live immediate response (or perhaps keep the sole instance of voicemail in organizations).
Great job at drawing retarded conclusions guys.
Turning off desktop phone voicemail BECAUSE EVERYONE USES A CELL PHONE and has their office number forwarded to that anyway does not mean people aren't using voicemail.
But hey, don't take the extra three seconds to ask why they were not using it or anything.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
There's nothing more that I hate than coming into my cube & seeing the red light on my phone, which means I have a voice mail message. You have to call, enter your pin, and go through a menu to select listen to new messages, and then type/write down their number. I'd rather have people send me an e-mail instead. One good thing about Comcast phone service when we had it at home was it would convert it to text and send it to you via e-mail. I'd rather have that than deal with a voice mail message.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The idea that voicemail is dead is asinine.
I only have your phone number, and you don't answer (yes, I'm over 25, I actually call people on the phone), now what?
Dumb fucking emo hipsters, the rest of the world doesn't live on Instagram.
-Styopa
You'd hear the sound of my laughter but I am on VoIP so it isn't coming through. VoIP can work well. It often doesn't. I am on calls with other companies - some of the software giants - who use VoIP for their calls. They often have to hang up and run down the hall to find a real phone because they break up so badly you can't understand them. Now my desk phone is VoIP internally on our network with a separate VLAN and all. But it goes to POTS externally and internally uses a Cisco (expensive) system. That works well. But the computer based ones just suck too often to use them for any business where professional phone calls need to be made. Eventually this may be viable. Today it is laughable - if you can even hear the laugh.
Voicemail isn't really a problem. The problem is the traditional dial in interface for voicemail sucks sour frog ass. It's time consuming, irritating, badly designed and frankly from a bygone era. Dialing in to listen to a voicemail message is technology that we no longer need. Getting messages via voice is useful but the format and interface need to update to modern technology.
I've been using a pair of systems (Google voice and one at work) which transcribe the voicemail, send it to you in an email with a recording and you can manage the calls though your computer or cell phone. I pretty much never actually listen to the voicemail because what I really care about is who called and roughly the topic of their call. Occasionally I listen to the actual message because the transcriptions usually read like a Mad-Lib but I can usually figure out the gist of the message.
Fax machines on the other hand are just pointless. They need to go away. My company doesn't have one anymore and we don't miss it a bit.
Actually, our great-grandparents often tended to be meticulous about sending (and acknowledging) invitations.
But that's why Voice Mail is useful in the first place - third caller then knows that you are unavailable, and leaves a message. You get to him at the next possible opportunity
I myself got 2 lines from Verizon. One I use exclusively for work related stuff. Other I use exclusively for family related stuff, such as FaceTime and WhatsApp. None of my family members know the first number, and none of my colleagues or clients or customers know the second. So any employer w/ a BYOD policy could take the first phone and do anything w/ it, and I'd be able to accommodate that.
I have always taken a dim view of people who use work equipment for personal stuff. Yesterday, I left my company, and I just cleanly handed over my laptop, w/o needing to change anything, since I did nothing personal there. Similarly, in a past job, I used my company provided cellphone ONLY for work related purposes. Never did any personal banking, for instance, on that phone.
From an ethical standpoint, if a company provides you w/ any equipment - be it a laptop, cellphone, printer, or whatever, they have the right to write the rules of its use however they like. One would also be stupid to use that for personal stuff just b'cos one is too cheap to buy a laptop/tablet/phone of their own. However, if the company has a BYOD policy, they don't have that right - you can use that phone for anything, and the day you leave, you take it w/ you, instead of handing it over. Which is why BYOD just makes no sense to me - not to mention the administrative nightmare in managing different company policies.
GP seemed to be implying that the recipient of the call - who was w/o voicemail - was in sales, talking to one customer Charlie while the other customer Chris called (maybe returned a call). With voicemail, Chris just quickly tells him what he was calling about, and maybe when to get back to him.
If Chris gets a dead end - no voice mail, he'd indeed do what you mentioned - move on to the competitors.
Not everybody is an asshole - most people realize that when they call a person, that recipient may already be on another call, or in a meeting, or actually busy w/ something else, like lunch. Just having the ability to let him know that he called, about what and when to return the call is the minimum etiquette that can be expected. Or can't it?
Sure, because they cost so much less than voicemail.
Just another day in Paradise