Voice Mail's Next ActVoice Mail's Next Act

The real pressure isn't to find things to get rid of; it's to find ways to add new things without taking anything away.

No Jitter posts often hit a nerve when they deal with legacy technologies' impending--or not so impending--demise. The latest installment is a post by Andrew Prokop entitled, "The Death of Voice Mail".

Lots of Commenters weighed in on Andrew's piece, especially his piquant line about voice mail, "It just might be time to haul it off to the Goodwill." Folks came down on all different sides of the issue. When I first read Andrew's piece, his observation about Goodwill seemed reasonable enough when thinking about voice mail: How often do I use voice mail in my work? Not much. I prefer email as my asynchronous channel of choice. But I've still got a voice mail box.

Which brings us to one of the dilemmas about enterprise communications. The real pressure isn't to find things to get rid of; it's to find ways to add new things without taking anything away. Partly this is because there's always someone who's sure they can't live without that feature/application/device that nobody else cares about any more, and that person will be sure to let the communications staff know about their need.

But it's also because voice messaging is, in fact, not an outdated or unused technology. The example Andrew uses--that of his Millenial-aged sons--is valid as far as it goes. But I've seen no evidence that voice mail for mobile devices is a neglected feature across the board--plenty of people need it and use it, especially mobile workers. And while mobile devices have lots of features that landline office devices lack, I think it'd seem strange to people if they lost a feature that they used to have on their corporate system and also still have (and use) on their mobile.

The fact that voice mail isn't a marquee feature any more, like it was when it first came out, doesn't mean your users don't need it. As Marty Parker mentions in a Comment to Andrew's post, voice mail has become a kind of platform that now supports various access methods, such as speech-to-text renderings of your voice messages, so you can access them via email. And of course voice mail is a cornerstone element of unified messaging, which lets you pick up the recordings via your email, and is pretty standard nowadays in both public network and enterprise systems.

What I think we're trying to create--and what voice mail comprises a building block for--is a system that can deliver communications in whatever medium--voice, video, data--synchronously or asynchronously, mobile or wireline, with intelligence within the system that produces the interaction that the user wants. To do that, you've got to have the basic capabilities to mix and match these features/functions however the user wants them combined. And asynchronous voice--i.e., voice mail--is one of those building blocks. Andrew Prokop is right that it won't be a discrete channel that everyone uses in the same way. But it'll be an element of a service that works in the way each user wants it to.

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