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.

Comments

Umm, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Umm, what?

[Mariner28]

The US mortgage industry single-handedly is keeping facsimile alive and well. Anyone who's bought a house lately can attest that they have no clue about PII in unencrypted e-mails, and think nothing of asking you to print out, sign and initial a 60 page document, then fax it back to them. And then they have the gall to complain when you reduce their 8.5 x 14 legal size documents to 8.5 x 11 because your $99 inkjet printer/scanner can't handle legal size.

With throwback companies like that, you'd never know that the mortgage industry is the major backer behind DocuSign. Another reason why banks should issue you a digital certificate when you open an account. If the US Government can implement PKI for their own use, surely the more nimble private marketplace can do the same... /s

Re:Umm, what?

[Nukenbar]

An interesting side note to this. A buddy of mine in venture capital use a fax machines all of the time to send documents back and forth because email and any "store communications" they are required to keep copies of for regulators and other review. Since the fax machines don't "store" information, at least not long term enough to count, they are not required to keep copies of info sent or received over fax.

The most significant loss

[Dreth]

...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?

Fax Machines gone?

[fallen1]

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.

Re:Makes sense

[goodmanj]

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.

It's the interface, not the technology.

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Coming next ... Office desk telephones

[Sique]

As someone who does VoIP for a living: Software VoIP clients work as well as the underlying network allows -- same as with hardware phones like the Cisco Callmanager. Normally the hardware phones are in a special VLAN, often using layer-2-priorizing (class 3 and class 5) to the next switch, and they sending their packes with DiffServ information (e.g. the signalling with AF31, and the payload packets with EF), thus they get threated in priorized queues through the network. Desktop computers on the other hand are mostly in VLANs that either ignore the DiffServ information, or even actively strip them off, and often the software VoIP client isn't installed in a way to even add DiffServ information.

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.

Re:I stopped using it 5 years ago

[pla]

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. ;)

Re:I stopped using it 5 years ago

[unixisc]

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?