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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.
Fax machines are still widely used. They are hardly obscure.
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.
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?