Please press 5 if you’d like to leave a callback number, or leave a message after the tone. After you are finished recording, you can blah, etc"
These annoying long voicemail recordings…I read somewhere that they’re like that purposely, intended by celphone carriers to help people use up their minutes.
Is this true? Anyone know?
Meh. Sounds a bit tinfoil-hat to me. Is there a shorter way to convey those instructions? Especially given how inept the general population is at those kind of things…
If that was true, how come most of them include a shortcut to bypass the blah-blah?
Vocemail systems (any voice prompt system actually) has to be usable & understandable both by somebody who’s never used any voice prompt system before in their life, and somebody who uses that particular voicemail system 50x / day and has for years.
David Pogue, computer columnist for the New York Times, thought that the lengthy voicemail instructions were intended to use up cellphone minutes.
Apparently when he wrote the article Mr Pogue had not ever heard of the * or # keys. Depending on the carrier, they will bypass the message and allow you to immediately being recording your message
He did mention those keys in the original blog posting and column about this issue. But he pointed out that the key that needs to be pressed varies depending on the carrier used (* for Verizon, 1 for Sprint, # for AT&T or # for T-Mobile). Plus it’s dependent on the carrier used by the party you call not your carrier, and how are you going to know that in advance?
You’re asking the wrong question, though. It’s not whether there’s a shorter way to list all the crap that you can do when you call someone’s cell phone and they don’t answer. The question is whether it needs to be listed at all.
“Press ‘#’ for more options. Beep.”
The vast majority of people calling cell phones understand that you start leaving a message after the beep, and have absolutely no need for any of the other options.
“Press 5 to leave a call-back number” - like the one that’ll have appeared in the phone’s caller ID?
“To send a numeric page…” - as in, to leave the number that’ll have appeared in the phone’s caller ID?
“when you are finished recording, hang up, or press # for more delivery options” - Myself, I’ve never left a message using ‘delivery options’, I’ve never received a message that’s been delivered uh…optionally, and I don’t think many need reminding that they can hang up once they’re done leaving a message.
15 seconds may not seem like a long time at first, but when the alternative is “Press ‘#’ for more options. Beep.”, it can seem like a lifetime.
It’s the absolute pointlessness of these messages that make me think there’s got to be an alternative reason for them existing rather than for anything resembling “convenience”.
Thanks for the link, Dewey!
The calling number will appear in caller ID *only *if the callee’s phone rings. If the callee’s phone is off or out of coverage, then the callee will never know you called. if you don’t do something more.
*If *you leave voicemail they’ll get a [voicemail pending] indication when they rejoin the network. Then they can call and here you tell them what ever message you had or what number to call back.
An alternative that will be quicker for some use cases is to leave the callback number or a “page”. Which ends up as either a text message or synthetic voicemail. And with most systems that can be donr in fewer seconds than waiting for the caller’s recorded greeting to play, then the beep, then saying “Hey Bob, it’s Jehosaphet. Call 123-456-7890. Bye.”
I agree that at some point we need to get past providing instructions aimed at someone who’s never encountered voicemail before. I don’t think the telco’s audience is quite there yet.
Wait a minute, you mean I’m getting charged by the minute for someone to leave me a voicemail? I thought I was charged minutes only for calls that actually involve using my phone. After all, I get charged minutes *again *when I *listen *to my voicemail messagse.
I better call Verizon to ask about this.
Well it seems like your post introduces the need for people to become better educated about the merits of using the ‘paging’ system, when an even better alternative would be, in my opinion, to just shorten the message and allow people to more easily do what 99% of them want to do - leave a voicemail.
I often find that a voicemail is great for passing along a quick message that I don’t really need a reply to, or to find out how urgent it is that I return a particular call, and I imagine that most greetings wouldn’t take more than a couple seconds if the system were set up with some efficiency:
“Hi I’m not available right now, please leave a message. BEEP”
“Hey Joe it’s Mark, listen, make sure and file those TPS reports, k? Take care.”
DONE…with no muss or fuss, just BAM! Mission accomplished!
I really don’t think so…
I think the idea is that it’s the caller’s mobile minutes that are being used up.
And wouldn’t you only get the long preamble if the mailbox’s owner hadn’t recorded their own greeting?
“Hi, it’s John here. Leave me a message and I’ll call you back” Beep.
Well that’s part of what’s frustrating. If you have your own greeting, you’re just cutting off the “The number you have dialed X-X-X etc is not available (or whatever it says)” part of the canned message.
You still get the rest of the recording at the end of the callee’s personalized voicemail (press 5 to page, hang up when you’ve finished etc).
There’s really no way around the canned message unless you know what carrier the person you’re calling uses, so you can use the shortcut that’s appropriate for that carrier.
You could get that done even faster with a text message. You dont have to wait for “RING…RING…RING…RING…Hi I’m not available right now, please leave a message. BEEP”
Voicemail is ideal when you want to talk to someone but they are not available. Text messaging is ideal when you just need to deliver a message.
It might be nice if there was a voice-MMS message… Select a contact, tap a button, speak your message, hit send, and viola! Dispense with the whole phone call ritual and get back to work.