I remember my first cell phone. It was winter 1996, I just turned 18 and bought a Philips Fizz so I could easier get hold of customers. The GSM network in Czech Republic was in operations since that summer and you were lucky to get signal in the center of a few large cities. There were 2 operators at that time and I chose the cheaper one, the one that had lower coverage and worst customer service since a few dollars of difference a month was a lot of money. Also, they offered voicemail for free, unlike the other operator that asked some 10 USD / month for that service and I needed voicemail badly.
At that time I was a college student and building computers from individual parts as a job to make money. It went very well actually since there wasn’t really any chance to buy a PC for a reasonable price on the shell — forget Best Buy or similar. Since more than half a day I was at school and I didn’t even dared to turn the phone on during brakes I needed voicemail to hear if there was any customer calling me for business.
Very few people had cell phone at that time, it was not possible to send SMS between the 2 different operators and web SMS portals did not exist for the next many years. So voicemail worked well.
When I fast-track 10 years to the future, even ZOOM made its own product — VoiceBOX — based on the fact that people want voicemail (we discontinued it about a year ago, putting all our energy in call recording and QM solutions) . At that time Cisco’s voicemail called Unity was just crazy expensive (well it contained some features like speech recognition that nobody wanted to use) and we saw a gap on the market. So we did a simple IVR script that did the prompt playback and message recording and build on top of the web-based GUI to manage users, groups, replay messages and even a little workflow when one mailbox has been shared with more users — like support number in afterhours.
If I look back, apart for maybe the first few years, I never liked voicemail. Visual voicemail (which we also implemented for VoiceBOX on Cisco IP phones XML interface) is better than the horrible IVR retrieving but still.. In Europe most people hate voicemail and I always hated when somebody left me a message saying “Hi, it’s me, call me back when you can”. If I see a missed call on my cell phone, I call back when available unless I really do not want to speak with you so leaving me a voicemail wouldn’t help. And the only people calling from hidden number are UK call centers offering me sure financial investment, better insurance or an amazing conference for my company with guaranteed 34 face to face meetings with CIOs of Fortune 100. No thanks.
About last 3 years I always used to alter my welcome message in voicemail before holidays. Something like “Till so and so I’m away from my phone, I do not read e-mails and call my colleagues for sales or support”. I always recorded this message at the airport some 10 minutes before I boarded the plane, then forgot after my return and then during the next x months got many mails saying I should update my welcome message.
So here I go, decided to bury my voicemail for good. I assume if someone has my mobile number and has an urgent message, SMS does the job very well or an e-mail message thanks to the great BlackBerry that my wife doesn’t really like. So I have two types of holidays now — with and without BlackBerry and I tend to enjoy the later much more.
BTW, the voicemail transcription service that Google Voice has looks really cool, that would probably make me stay. But still, SMS, Skype, IM, e-mail or BlackBerry chat where you actually see not only that the message was delivered but also when it was read make the job for me.
Tags: voicemail
