It’s time to disable voicemail. We’re not kidding.
Turn it off. Get rid of it. If you can’t, at least stop using it the way you do today.
It kills your productivity and it makes you unresponsive.
A bit of a provocative start of a post, perhaps. But to illustrate the point, let’s look at how our current voicemail system works and draw the parallel with another tool we use often – email.
Imagine using a version of Outlook for email that would work as follows:
No skipping messages, no preview pane. No quick delete or dragging a message to an archive folder. In fact, it wouldn’t even show you what message 5 was about until you had worked your way through the queue first.
Pretty sophisticated, don’t you think? No, we really didn’t think so either. And we’re pretty sure you wouldn’t even consider using it.
But that’s how voicemail works today. Except the average sales- or business person doesn’t get 5 voicemail messages a day we mentioned in our example, but rather 10, 20 or even more.
Critical information from your contract department that you needed before entering a prospect account got stuck behind a 30 second message from an ex-colleague who wanted to catch up, without you knowing it.
Your cellphone provider leaving a message to try and sign you up for contract renewal claimed priority over a call from your customer that required immediate action.
A call from your boss, on his or her way to join you on a call and asking for some last minute directions, ended up behind all of the calls described above. By the time you got to it, he was already late for the call.
So here’s what happens often.
You either spend an inordinate amount of time continuously catching up with voicemail, making notes, writing down phone numbers and reminders or you just don’t get to those messages – not in time or not at all.
And because people that leave a voicemail are well aware of that, they’ll call you with the well-known “hey, did you get my voicemail?” question. Now, how productive is that?
We have a few thoughts on how you could solve some of these issues but we’d love to hear from you first.
How do you “manage” voicemail? How do you stay responsive?
How do you make sure that messages that require immediate action, those that can wait and those messages that do not need your response at all get processed in a timely manner?
Do you have a “system” – or do you use different tools?
Post your thoughts in the comments.
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Voice Mail (like E Mail) is probably a necessity for any business person. Here’s how to make Voice Mail “behave”….
Some phone companies will “translate” and forward the information to your email.
Vonage does this for a small charge per message. This solves most of
the very valid issues you cover in the article.
I love that option, catmentor. More companies ought to provide it.
And regarding voicemail and productivity? My personal favorite are people who call you back after you leave a detailed message, and when you ask, “Did you hear my message?”, they say “No.” And you’ve got to tell the story again.
THAT is when voicemail is a total productivity killer.
I like the email forwarding option as well – that’s probably not uncommon for providers of Voice Over IP (VOIP) services like Vonage and a dozen others.
The problem, though – how the heck are you going to do this when you don’t have VOIP? Or while you’re on the road with your “traditional” cellphone?
Does anyone use SMS/Text Messaging as an alternative to voicemail?
Jan.. fyi… Vonage has a $15/mo. plan with 500 minutes… so it’s affordable.
And if you’re “on the road”… use the internet services available at most hotels to get your forwarded voicemail on your email account.
Awesome point!
So if my phone service won’t translate voice mails as mentioned above, how about I stop leaving voice mails when I call – just hang up and send an email. That way the back and forth is steared to a more efficient medium… then on my phone system have my message say “I’m not available right now. So that I can respond more quickly to, you can send me an email at this address…”
That’s a pretty intriguing idea, Craig. I might give that a shot.
I’ve also got an unwritten rule with my people that if we call each other via cell phones, we’ll just check our call logs to see the missed calls regularly. If we missed a call from each other, we’ll call back. Rather than have to call voicemail, listen in, then call back.
Jan & Brandon – your viewpoint is straight up and a common one! I won’t mention my company name here, don’t want to self promote.
However, I thought it would be valid to offer an opinion from the perspective of a Voicemail Communication company itself, which we are.
One way we personally have provided a solution to this concern is through Message Notification.
On our systems, whenever a voice message is left we provide instant e-mail notification to the subscriber. We capture the callers phone number (ALWAYS) as well as standard date/time/message legth/extension etc and provide it within the e-mail notification itself.
If the caller is listed in the White or Yellow pages we also provide the name AND address of the caller.
Messages (and faxes) can be played, saved or deleted instantly by pressing the appropriate button within the e-mail itself.
With these features our subscribers are able to get some ‘up front’ info on the caller before even retreiving the message. In addition they can click on whichever of the e-mails/messages they want to, in whatever order they want to. No need to even dial into the system.
The same info is accessible from within a web-based back office as well.
This eliminates the need to wade through all messages, listen to an entire ‘junk’ message before being able to delete it and more.
It also eliminates the transcription glitches often encountered with voice to text translation systems.
So basically the power of Outlook is available for Voice messaging, to an extent.
Just thought you should know that as an Industry we are trying to find solutions to credible issues like the one you presented.
PS: Thanks to one of our subscribers who was prompted to contact us after reading this Post, it is nice to see people taking an active interest in improving technology!
iPhone may not be the most corporate phone, but this is actually one of the iPhones best features. You can select between your voicemail in a list without listening to them first.