At least here at the company I work for, you call someone’s extension and it rings 5 or 6 times, then you get a beep followed by three more rings. The beep means that the call is being forwarded to the voicemail system and it then takes three more rings for that system to start. You then get the person’s personal message followed by a beep at which time you can leave a message.
Probably typical, right?
How bout when the phone is ringing, and you’re sitting there tapping your fingers on the desk, there is a message played (over the ring) that gives the person’s optional contact information. Like during the 5 or 6 rings you could easily hear a computer generated voice give out the person’s cell number and/or e-mail address. If the person picks up during the message no big deal, you can talk directly to them at that point. If all you needed was their e-mail address to begin with you’ve got that, or their cell number. Or both.
This way the person wouldn’t have to burden their personal message with that information and a little time bit of time from everyone’s busy schedule could be given back.
Is this practical, easy, logical, profitable .
Have you ever heard of something like this?
Our phones have a text display that tells you who’s calling (if it’s an internal call) or the available caller-ID info if external. If I don’t want to answer it, I can press a button to forward the call to voicemail without picking it up.
Or I can put it in DND mode to forward all calls to voicemail when I’m busy.
Your idea assumes that the audio path from the called party to the caller is active when the phone is ringing. I don’t think this is true until the called party, which may be a PBX, answers the call.
Well, a ring is (or can be) just a computer generated sound right? If you call a business (by dialing a direct extension) you’re already into the part of the system that could play an audio over the ringing aren’t you?
I guess what I’m getting at is a ring is like wasted space. You could replace that ring with some other ‘sound’ that could be beneficial to the parties involved.
Sure, you can do all those things but the persons calling you still have to wait till the message plays to get your cell or pager number. These recordings could be the default ring instead of the ‘ring’ sound. This way, if you don’t answer and I really need to get ahold of you I already have your cell number and I can just call that without waiting to hear whether or not you left it on your personal message or not.
Some of the people here have rather long messages.
And sometimes we have to get ahold of someone rather quickly, but they may have stepped away from their desk for a bit.
I will personally fold, spindle, and mutilate the first techie that attempts to make my cell number available to any idiot calling my voice mail. The people that need to have my cell number have it. Those that don’t can leave voice mail.
From your description, the caller hears twelve rings before he can leave a message. That sounds like too much and some of this can be configured. In particular, the admin can change the number of rings before a call goes to voicemail. But it’s a balancing act between annoying the caller and the employees.
In other words, you might want to ask your employer if they can shorten the amount of time it takes for calls to go to voicemail.
Sure, this would only be for people that want to have their info on the message. If you want your e-mail address instead that’d be cool, or nothing at all, fine too.
Some people, in certain positions, need to reachable all day long.
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