Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it.
When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems - which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Even though email was around, people were still unsure how to use it. Letters went on letterhead and were formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email etiquette was still being developed. It was good for mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files around, but it took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out of the workplace or got with the program.
But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.
Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally - let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.
How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”
Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message - “Just left you a VM, it’s important” - just so you know it’s there.
There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks.
The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert voicemail into text and then send it to you via email or SMS (Spinvox, PhoneTag Yap and Jott, for example).
More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion).
For now most people don’t have voicemail transcription services. So think before you voicemail, more and more people just find it annoying.
Good Bye VoiceMail
Once a year, I can find something to agree on Arrington with. This is one of them.
“It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it.” Doesn’t the exact same reasoning apply to video comments à la Seesmic?
Yup, right on.
The only voicemail I get at the office is from solicitors. Nothing worth listening to (except for a few Irish outsourcing reps with really cool accents)
To add, office phone equipment is way outdated compared to even the cheapest cellphone. At my workplace, only managers get phones with displays for caller IDs. Setting up a voicemail prompt, dialing shortcuts (sic), retrieving messages is an esoteric dance of punching number sequences and passcodes and voice menus. THAT’s what keeps me off touching the phone.
Voicemail you are guaranteed the person will listen to, the person won’t be able to use “oh I didn’t get it as an excuse”
No, the excuse has evolved into “Oh, I don’t listen to my voicemail.” Most messaging services are better than 99% reliable, but people can still ignore emails, IMs, text messages, telegrams, snail mail, etc etc etc.
more of mike’s rants..
head up your proverbial ass..
for my $0.02 worth, voice mail/menu systems are not something i want to experience if i’m calling a company for an issue resolution. if i’m trying to sell you something as a comapny, i sure as hell don’t want you as a customer to have your 1st contact with me to be a voice mail/menu system.
if i’ve already established a connect with you, then leaving voice mail is perfectly cool. (but maybe not to mike!) you see, i fully think you can say alot more, and a lot faster than you can type.. not only that, but i’d rather listen to it as well…
mike, from my un-scientific survey, we believe that your assessments are formed by your group, which appears to be different from my tech group…
but hey, we don’t get our panties in a tizzy over twitter or yahoo either.. so i’ll stick with my group!!
peace…
Agree with Bill, Seesmic takes too much time.
Voicemail..what’s that?
Just wondering which voice to text service you use Mike?
(if at all)
I prefer to keep my email and other accounts for the folks who know me and/or are resourceful enough to track them down.
Voicemail is a perfect place for the rest of the folks, thankyouverymuch.
I’m not using voicemail on the office phone, because the whole setup/listening process there is pure PITA. However, I’m a big fan of cell phone voice mail. I spent my entire life in the Eastern-European country where most people — while having an ability — never setup their voice mail on cell phones, and situations when the one I need to reach in business matters is unavailable and no voice mail is configured drives me crazy! And please don’t tell me about SMS — it a pain to type lenghtly messages, when I can just pick up the phone and SAY whatever I want with minimum effort.
I never leave a Voicemail and I never listen to my voicemail. In fact I use Spinvox since Day 1 and it works great for me.
Whatever is not converted is not important to me and I just call back using caller ID.
I think VM is changing but so are we. In Eurpoe most VM are not taking messages and instead the greeting message will say : ‘i’m not able to take your call. Please send me a TXT message or call back later’.
Not bad!
Now that my company has converted to a VoIP system, everything goes to my e-mail in-box anyway. Voice-mails aren’t converted to text, but at least I don’t have to use the arcane menuing system to listen to them. I, like most of the others here, prefer e-mail.
your an idiot. think about your argument… then think about seesmic… then think about comments and o o o! you might have a light bulb moment… moron
You mean “You’re an idiot.”
I agree for professional contacts, but less so for personal ones. Sometimes it takes a while to find a good time to chat with friends (different time zones, different work schedules) and in the meantime it’s nice to get a voice update. But I agree that it is not a good method for urgent messages even in that case.
Oddly enough, right before I read this post, I called a local appliance repair company because my dryer stopped working. Since it’s a Saturday, outside of office hours, I left them a voicemail. Are you suggesting that the hundreds of thousands of small businesses stop using voicemail as a way to keep in touch with their customers? Frankly, even if they had an online presence (which most of them don’t), a contact form or email address would probably result in so much spam as to render it nearly unusable.
Get over yourself.
Voicemail is alive and well outside of silicon valley.
Suffice it to say that most of the comments come from younger people with no social skills at all. E-mail is just another way to avoid human contact and hide like a coward behind a computer, distance, and anonymity. E-mail is actually less productive because effective human communication requires inflection and the ability to discern inflection - a static e-mail cannot convey inflection. I feel sorry for this generation of lost dregs that have no interpersonal skills.
@joe your stupid to. i use email all the time for time purposes and im young but i still leave voicemails to communicate with friends and family. lord we should rid the world of idiot bloggers who disprove there own arguments and commenters that make cast assumptions.
I thought Gillmor was the only one allowed to call things dead.
You, Sir, are badly constricted in the techie/geeky world. Voicemail is perhaps losing traction in your little clique. The real world, the world of the 99.9% of the people, still uses voicemail pretty often. And there are few signs of it fading away.
But I have to admit, email is gaining popularity. But that does not mean that since some geeks in Silicon Valley are using gadgets like iPhones and email excessively, voicemails are losing popularity. Come to the real world for a moment.
V-mail is “old news” and listening to it takes longer than scanning text. Talk to me or send a text msg somehow. Besides, v-mail records a message as it is being composed; text may be rambling but the “uh, uh, well, er, I mean,” verbal ticks used to allow the brain to compose is at least compressed.
I, too, leave the voice mailbox full to thwart “voicers” (as opposed to “texters”). These lovers of the audio message alert me with true alarm, “Hey, did you know your mailbox is full?” Yep; it’s on purpose. Then their head spins. I tell them the wonders of Caller-ID and the ability I have of returning a missed call on my terms to get the latest information interactively.
My favorite twist on this issue is the message a friend has on his voice-mail prompt. Instead of, “I am away from the phone or with a client” he says, “I’m not answering my phone right now…”. Much to like about that truthful statement.
Holden, you’ve proved my point - bad spelling, bad grammar, and no capitalization. You can’t communicate properly. Also, your second sentence is a non sequitur. You probably don’t know what that means, which further proves my point.
rjamestaylor, you must really be important. I agree with Joe Bowers - “get over yourself.” Here’s my take on you faux techies, you’re not important enough to leave a message for.
iPhone voicemail has spoied me. Since getting the visual voicemail feature on my phone, I have completely lost the patience to ever again deal with the voicemail system my employer uses. Navigating a list of messages by pressing number keys requires a lot of listening, and it requires remembering the commands to navigate the system. I simply changed the message about eight months ago to suggest better ways to reach me, and have not checked it since.
Once again the Geek Elite look at their habits and fail to realize that the majority of the 303 mil Americans are not tethered to the computer 24/7.
I’ll run out and tell all my relatives, don’t leave me voice mail anymore when I’m in a 4 hour meeting. Hey Doc, I don’t listen to voicemail so don’t bother leaving me a message to confirm my appointment, just send me an email (and hope you don’t break any HIPAA regulations on the way).
Let’s see this week I’ve heard:
1) Voice mail is dead
2) Newspapers will be gone within the next 10 years
3) Twitter is dead
4) Firefox is the #1 browser most used browser
As far as unscientific research…. asking folks on Friendfeed for opinions is definitely a bit skewed. Here’s a reality check. I work at a major hospital. The IT staff is over 400 employees. At our annual staff meeting during a presentation by a show of hands folks were asked the following:
1) How many people had a personal blog
2) How many people were on a social network
3) How many bought an iPhone
The response was 10 or less people for every question. These are the day to day folks keeping computers running, setting up servers and networks, installing applications, troubleshooting computer issues. Most of them go to their job, work their 8-12 hours day, finish their 2-4 hour commute and never look at a computer again.
Wake up geeks. We don’t rule the world…. yet!
on a mobile phone and this argument did not involve my grammar skills did they? stop spinning things around to your own purposes. focus on what the argument was about. and no i don’t but thank god for the dictionary ey?
I hate to say it but vonage has a pretty cool voice-to-text feature which takes voice mails left on the “answering machine” and send you an email notification with a full transcription. It works well enough most of the time - sometimes it can’t figure it out, but it still sends a notification. My parents use it in Australia on their “American” vonage phone line (the local number for me saves a ton in long distance and the quality is actually brilliant) and they seem to like it and my dad barely accepts that computers exist.
Also, in a previous job I was responsible for the voicemail and phone systems for about 1300 top-selling realtors and staff. We transitioned our phone systems to a Cisco Unity VoIP platform and that, in conjunction with exchange, allowed us to forward VMs to the agents email as MP3 attachments. This was a hit in making their voicemails more accesible. They could also play the voicemails from within outlook with a plugin.
So my take is that voicemail has its place at this point in time, but there are ways to make it less evil.
Holden, you’re full of excuses. The argument is about communication. I text, I IM, I Twitter, I e-mail; however, I’ve built assets by dealing with people directly, not hiding behind technology. And yes, in the real world you need to be able to spell, use proper grammar, annunciate, speak, etc. to succeed. If you can’t, you won’t be taken seriously and, unless you get really lucky, you will be a failure in life. Having the trappings of success built through debt is not success. Real assets with real liquid net worth is success. You need to build something of value - there are no shortcuts. Just some words of advice that I think you and others in this discussion need.
I agree.
Now if only we can eliminate the phone call altogether. It’s analogous to meetings — schedule phone calls if you need the face-to-face (or voice-to-voice). Other than that, it’s an extreme time waster, because people are stuck in the habit of having to say something (small talk and such) just to keep a conversation going.
Other than that, it should only be used for extremely urgent and timely purposes, or when constant IMing to solve a critical issue becomes too much typing.
Voicemail is 100% dead for sure. I Haven’t checked my voicemail on my cellphone in over 6 months.
I agree with the “drop voicemail” idea, but I am less than convinced e-mail is the solution. E-mail is a great medium, but it has been ruined by spam and the poor relationships between different e-mail providers.
There are e-mail blocks (due to spam lists, or even just ISPs firewalling each other on port 25) between all manner of e-mail providers, even from seemingly reputable providers like Google. E-mail is becoming only semi-reliable with delivery never guaranteed.
We need something that works as e-mail does in terms of a medium, but with a significantly improved delivery system. We don’t currently have that system ready to roll, so e-mail will continue to be non-guaranteed whereas, at least, voicemails and phone calls do tend to be reliable.
I could not agree more. I’m 25 and work for a web development Company in Dallas, TX. Our admin assistant IM’s me when people leave vm’s for me. There are too many other things on my desk, in my inbox, running programs on my computer, and requests across the hall that need attention to before I check my voicemail. If that person needs to get a hold of me, they’ll call back, or they should have my cell number if it’s not a sales call. I will take your advice and re-record my voicemail and instruct the caller to email me. Thank you for the great post and recommendation.
There are times when you dont have email access - also speaking is much easier than typing - and USUALLY more detailed.
Voicemails are not dead - if a matter is really urgent, you do both Voicemail and Email because an email could end up in the spam filter.
Incorrect Mike Arrington, You’re Wrong.
I still use voice mail, and would rather get a voice msg then some half-assed AOL Lolcat IM msg.
Saying Voice mail is dead based on a mikey mouse survey is like saying techcrunch is dead because the local paper added an extra page in their business tech section.
Thanks for trying mikey, better luck next time.
Voicemail will take a long time to die. There are a ton of benefits to it, and as we get more mobile, voicemail may even get bigger.
Jott, for example, is a voicemail to voicemail service with a kick - it also transcribes the messages into text. It doesn’t do a very good job at it, but it works.
As a sales rep, I am on the road 90% of the time and either in meetings or on the phone. I fell IN LOVE with PhoneTag (formerly SimulScribe). Take a look at my review here:
http://clickjack.blogspot.com/.....netag.html
joe if you would like to continue this conversation please email holdenpage@gmail.com for i am using up to much bandwidth refreshing this page. lookin forward to continuing this conversation.
I used SimulScribe (now PhoneTag) at my old job. The transcriptions were amazingly accurate and a huge timesaver. Plus, I could just cut-and-paste the transcription into our trouble ticket system rather than transcribing it myself.
Right on Mike
I use PhoneTag (fka Simulscribe) and I love it. I have all my phones (home, office, cell) routed to my PhoneTag service and I get emails instead of voice mails.
Another nice effect is when people realize their VM is going to get turned into an email, many just hang up and send an email instead.
When tech starts impacting behavior, you’ve done something right.
Fred
Factual correction: YouMail (at least) offers transcriptions, for free. In addition, you can get an mp3 of the voicemail and the transcription in your email inbox, where it then enters the more productive email workflow. Indeed, services like YouMail are handy because they are a painless way to make voicemail more productive.
Subjective correction: voicemail is particularly useful for the sender - it is much easier to leave a voicemail than to text something on a mobile device. Additionally, some senders just don’t have the ability to give you anything more - believe it or not, there are some people in this world that don’t have a computer, or the ability to send SMS messages. Finally, sometimes it’s nice to get a voicemail from someone you love - a recording of their voice can be a lot nicer than a text!
Is there a way to let your Seesmic box get full too, that’s a great approach.
Mike,
Thanks for the great post on voicemail. As it exists today I hope that it will die. I started PhoneTag to rid myself of exactly what your post summarizes that voice mail is an dated, not efficient and sucks.
Transcription of voicemail, by my company PhoneTag, or even the others truly fixes voicemail and up-dates it to work just like email. Further with options that we offer such as contact book integration, when a caller leaves a message the transcription comes to your email from the callers email address allowing you to just reply back.
Hope this post does not sound too much like an advertisement but I have to say I was too excited to see your Saturday post on voicemail not to comment.
Jamie
James Siminoff, CEO
PhoneTag
Now that’s funny - I tried to leave a video comment with Seismic (which would be a rather ironic underscore to my argument, I think), but when I clicked publish, the Flash app just froze up on me. LOL - I guess “simplicity” is one argument in favor of text - in blog comments at least!
I, for one, like to hear others voices. You cant communicate tone in txt messages - and I receive funny voicemails from friends all the time.
Its also cheaper and faster than txting.
Maybe you’re just in love with your own voice?
I check my voicemail once or twice every week. And yes, I am accessible via email 24X7. So, I agree with michael’s assessment here.
Question for Michael and others:
Do you watch/listen to seesmic comments posted on this blog? So you prefer text comments over voice comments?
blogoxy - yeah, i watch the videos because i find them entertaining. I don’t think that has anything to do with this post, though. I also still listen to the radio sometimes.
I was going to say exactly what #47/blogoxy.com said, and I think your reply that the Seesmic comments don’t have anything to do with this post is too easily dismissive.
The rationales you advance for what is wrong with voicemail (”It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily”) apply with equal if not greater force to video comments. I can’t easily scan through it, I can’t find an interesting comment on the page like I can with text, and a video of a talking head is just as useless as a disembodied voice over a telephone, with the added distraction and bandwidth overhead of the video. And replying to a video comment–like replying to a voicemail–is a painful process, unlike responding to an email or a text comment.
While I don’t have to pick up the phone to watch a video comment, they certainly have more in common with voicemail than you believe.
I prefer reading the comments rather than watching them in a video. Simple reason: Its easier and faster to read than watch/listen to them.
Relation with this post: Voicemail vs sms/email (is similar to) video comments vs. text comments.
Voicemails could be entertaining as well. Remember the voicemail from that recruiter about some executive?