The Death of Voicemail
Image via PSFK
Interesting post from PSFK this week about the demise of phone messages. I started to drastically cut down on voicemails – both listening to and leaving them – over a year ago. It just doesn’t really make sense anymore with its inherent lack of efficiency.
Whoever I’ve just called can see the missed call, and if I do leave a message, I always end up re-capping it anyway. I’ve changed my voicemail message to say that the fastest way to reach me is via email or text (I’m tempted to add a 3rd option – Twitter).
One of the biggest problems with any audio format is that is takes considerably longer to hear the information than it does to read it – this is one of the reasons I don’t like audio books.
Another issue I have is that companies like Jott will provide you with audio recordings of all your RSS feeds as one of their features. So, for example, let’s say it is going to “read me” a recent post from noahbrier.com. Initially, I thought this feature sounded great (pun not intended), but I’m not able to:
1) share the with anyone if I like it
2) take notes
3) comment
4) bookmark it to Delicious (or Read It Later on Firefox) if I want it as a reference
5) check the links in the post
A service that I was testing out last year, YouMail, offered transcribed voicemails, which help me navigate and scan through my messages more quickly, but unfortunately, the quality of the transcrptions was very poor and I wasn’t willing to pay for better transcriptions.
My biggest problem today isn’t getting messages (I have everything practically synced up to go through my email and/or my phone), it’s knowing WHERE to contact people.
Seriously, it used to be not that long ago that if you wanted to get a hold of someone you would just call them (and leave a voicemail) or email them. Now, I don’t always know whether I should call the cell, Skype call, Skype video chat, IM (AOL, GChat, Facebook, Skype), text, Blackberry Messenger, email, email through Facebook, Tweet, etc.
The future of communication isn’t have enough opportunities to connect with people, it’s knowing WHERE to connect with them. As some point, I suspect we’ll have a centralized source (like Google Voice), but for now, this also poses the obvious challenge for marketers to understand their targets’ communications habits.
Further info:
PSFK.com: Death of Voicemail
NYTimes.com: You’ve Got Voicemail, but Do You Care?
