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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.
...will be when they realize not everyone tht spelz lyk dis is a teenager.
On the upside, they could use that as a way to lay off people too lazy to spell "what", "are", "you" and other amazingly difficult words.
"Dear Mr. Smith,
GTFO, lol.
kthxbai,
Management" ... I'm stuck on 2007, aren't I?
All glory to Arstotzka!
Obviously, submitter doesn't work in healthcare or legal fields. As much as I'd like to see that antiquated technology finally die, it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
How do you know whether a phone number that you are calling is actually a cellphone which can accept IMs? When I call someone, I usually ask them if it's a good time to talk before getting into the conversation. If they are in a meeting, I'd prefer it if they ignored the call and sent me to their voice mail, where I could have more time to tell them exactly what you would say in the IM. Your solution would only make sense the day land lines are extinct, or that every phone has IM capability - cellular or cordless.
There are tens of thousands of fax machines and fax systems still in use today because, despite all of our technological advances, the fax machine is still the most secure way of delivering medical and legal documents between locations in a compact time frame.
E-mail? Right out unless you're configured for encryption and getting all the companies you deal with to agree on, utilize, and understand how the encrypt/decrypt works is ... beyond Herculean in scope. In the medical field alone that would require suppliers, doctor's offices, HME/DME companies, hospitals, hospices, quick care/walk-in style facilities, pharmacies, and so on to all have a system that worked easily that everyone agreed on. Of course, that doesn't begin to take into account the MILLIONS of patients that just might want to communicate with you via e-mail.
The legal field is just as bad - judges, courts, lawyers, public defenders, police departments, fire departments, etc, and clients of course.
So, yeah, technology that has supposedly died usually is alive and well and the people who think it has died just work somewhere they don't have to deal with it.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
There's this amazing etiquette change going on in America today, the idea that you need to contact someone first before you can have a real-time interaction with them. You can't just show up at someone's door, you have to call first. You can't just call, you need to text first. Someday soon, it'll be rude to text without first checking someone's Weibo status or some damn thing. Our great-grandparents would be baffled.
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
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.
Because prospective clients are harder and more expensive to attain than retaining current clients. Obviously, you're not in sales.
You can totally fuck off the VoIP phones by misconfiguring the switches and routers in your network, no problem, and then their voices sounds as shitty as the software client. And you can install the software client correctly, and threat the VoIP packets accordingly also in the Desktop LAN, and suddenly the voice quality will be as good as with the hardware phones.
Except when the majority of people you get a voicemail from has a sufficiently thick accent that transcription leaves an indecipherable jumble of words.
"My car hill devil cream pewter shakes dawn under noticable with. Read line on palestine." is an actual transcription of a single sentence of a voicemail I received from a client. Allow me to relay what the customer actually said in the recording:
"My goddamn computer shut down without notice and there's a red light on the power brick." (This turned out to be from a short that developed in the client's $3 powered USB hub that he got off ebay, for those interested.)
My voicemail gets full of these types of transcriptions daily, and I frankly find them useless. Sometime's they'll be closer to where there's enough context that makes it through to decipher the message. Unfortunately, more often than not, the transcriptions are worse than the example I used. I've used both Sprint's offering for Visual Voicemail (on promo only...it wasn't worth paying for), and Google hangouts VV. Neither are worth having.
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
Because prospective clients are harder and more expensive to attain than retaining current clients. Obviously, you're not in sales.
;)
If I call to buy some product or service from you, and get voicemail... I don't leave a message, I just move on to your competitors.
Obviously, you're not in sales either.
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?