Voicemail is dead, pass the message on…
A good article in The Guardian earlier this month called “Don’t leave a message after the beep: why voicemail deserves to die”, highlights an issue that’s become clearer and clearer in recent years, but that you might not have picked up on: the slow death of the answering machine or voice mail at the hands of the email or text message.
For younger readers, I should point out that the machine in the photograph is an automatic answering machine that I used between 1992 and 1996. It was a fairly popular model, I remember seeing it in many different friends’ houses: reliable, and with two cassettes, one for the outgoing message and another for incoming calls. It used to be part of our daily routine at home: checking if the little red light was blinking as soon as we got in the door, and then listening to the messages even before we kicked off our shoes.
When I went to live in the United States in 1996 I discovered that everybody there had been using automatic answering machines for decades, particularly for call screening: given the vast amount of telemarketing calls, people usually left the answering machine on even when at home, allowing it to pick up any unidentified calls.
Returning home to Spain in 2000, we no longer needed our answering machine, and it wasn’t even unpacked when we moved: the service was now cloud-based and was called voice mail, and was provided by our telecoms operator, free of charge with the line, cell or fixed. Aside from providing a useful service, it reduced the number of non-answered calls, which meant the company made more money. Today, with voice communication on the decline and most calls included in a one-off flat rate, there is little benefit to providing such a service.
Over time, the majority of people I know, including myself, have stopped using voicemail: it’s not worth it. If you come in at the end of a busy day and find a large number of messages on your phone, you know that it will probably be quicker just contact them by text or ring them up and find out what they wanted. It’s just not worth the hassle of listening to interminable garbled messages, or worse, that click at the other end followed by a busy tone. Life is too short.
So the message is: if I don’t pick up when you call me, just send an email or a text, or a Whatsapp. It’s going to be quicker for everybody. The only place I still get voice messages is at my office, and even they are fewer and fewer in number. Some companies, like Coca-Cola or JP Morgan, are closing down their employees’ voice mail, encouraging callers who get no answer to either contact people via their cellphone or to send an email, pointing out that this not only saves money, but time.
What we have here is a textbook example of media choice behavior: times change and new ways of communicating emerge. I’m still not sure if video really did kill the radio star, but emails and instant messaging have definitely done away with voice mail.
(En español, aquí)
