Web Business by Ken Burbary

Is Voicemail Dead?

A recent article by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch made me stop to think about my own approach and attitude towards voicemail, the long time King of office communication.

The article’s premise is that voicemail is inefficient, out of favor, andhas been downright abandoned by some folks.

Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at [email protected]” 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?”

I notice that I rely on voicemail much less too. In fact, I prefer to not use it unless in required to. There are simply too many better alternatives.  E-mail, Text Message/SMS, Twitter, or Instant Message. Text Messaging has become the defacto standard for team communication in my organization. It’s pretty common to receive messages from team members throughout the day, in and out of meetings, and even during the same meeting (ala the Twitter backchannel at conferences).

Why? Because it’s a heck of a lot faster for me to read a message than muddle my way through an ancient enterprise voicemail system until I am able to retreive the desired voicemail.  Besides, abandoning voicemail means one less password to remember and constantly change due to forced password rotation policies.

Are you still using voicemail as an everday business tool or has something replaced it? If so, what?