The days of a secretary taking your messages and returning your calls are so over. But now there's something better: Tools to make dealing with the ever growing volume of voice-mail messages simple and quick, saving smaller businesses lots of precious time. Now you can read your voice mail, e-mail it, reply with a text, and, best of all, you can do much of this for free.
The volume of voice-mail messages that businesspeople receive is ever increasing. At the recent Mobile User Experience conference, it was noted that 350 billion voice-mail messages are left globally per year. And as the volume increases, the time it takes to deal with those messages increases, too. But there are tools to help businesspeople manage their voice mail easily and efficiently. Alex Quilici, CEO of voice-mail services provider YouMail, told bMighty all about them. Those tools let users read their voice mails, access them on the Web, listen to them in any order, and have them e-mailed. Messages can be forwarded to a colleague or replied to with a text. Quilici emphasizes that the key here is saving time, and for anyone involved in a small or midsize business, that's what it's all about.
bMighty: What does the future of voice mail look like?
Quilici: It's becoming a trend for people to want this functionality. It will get refined and easier to use. Now, you have to sync up when entering your contacts.
Eventually, it will be pulled automatically. It's all very user driven. Users make suggestions and we put them in. Now, when someone calls, [the system] automatically meets callers with personal greetings. That personalizes interactions with clients and customers like that. It also helps the perception of a business. The goal of smaller businesses is to appear like a big one and callers think they must be big if they have that kind of greeting. These features will continue to get more sophisticated.
People are using cell phones to be more accessible so they get many more calls that they have to deal with and personalize. There are no more secretaries. Taking calls is over.
bMighty: Why is voice mail such an essential part of small and midsize businesses?
Alex Quilici: The really interesting thing now is that a big part of small and midsize businesses is specifically cell phones. They transact a lot of work, and are dealing constantly with cell phones, so people are always dealing with voice mail.
People get 40, 60, 80, even 100 messages a month. It takes a lot of time to listen and respond. There are new tools that are trying to deal with the growing volume of messages. They allow users to more efficiently deal with the volume.
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bMighty: What kind of tools are available to help small and midsize businesses contend wit this ever-increasing volume of voice-mail messages?
Quilici: There are tools that pick up voice mail and go through it sequentially, and then you can get voice mail on a computer or you can hear it or you can see a transcription. You can go to a Web site and play them in any order. You can have them e-mailed to you.
bMighty: How can this help users?
Quilici: If I see a message from my wife, I'll probably want to hear that first. A real estate agent that is waiting to hear from an important client can see a caller ID and go right to that message. On a computer, you can see the list of calls in the voice-mail in-box and you can pick one. With a smartphone, you can do that there through a Web browser, so it's visual voice mail on the phone. They can also have voice mail e-mailed to their smartphone or cell phone.
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bMighty: How can these tools save time?
Quilici: What do you do with voice mail after you play it? Used to be, you had to call back. Now, you can forward the message to colleague with a few clicks. Or let's say you get a message and you are in a meeting. With a click, you can reply with a text message or an e-mail. These tools let you get through voice mail more quickly. It gets rid of phone tags and you don't have to get trapped in a conversation.
We are also starting to see transcription of voice mail. Visual voice mail means you get a list of voice mails and transcription is an extension of that. You get an e-mail to your phone and the transcription of the message is in the e-mail. It's very popular feature.
bMighty:What about archiving? How can users save and retrieve their voice mails?
Quilici: The way YouMail works is we save voice mails on our Web site/servers, unless users explicitly move them to the trash, where they're deleted after 30 days. Users can create their own folders for voice mail and organize them, just like they do e-mail. We also let users download any voice mail to their PC -- so they have the ability to save and organize them there if they so choose.
bMighty:How much should users expect to pay for these services?
Quilici: Services range in prices from free in YouMail -- it's completely free now but we will eventually add premium features to other offerings that go up to $20 to $30 a month.
There is a barrier to people trusting a new telco so being free helps. It takes a while to get comfortable.
bMighty: How are voice-mail messages secured in smaller companies providing voice-mail services?
Quilici: Voice-mail services have the same sort of security that e-mail services have. Voice mail is just digital content, stored in secure servers -- it's just that it's created when people call a number and leave a message. After that, you can think of it as being stored just like how companies like Yahoo or AOL would store e-mail using standard security technology.
At YouMail, we have a bank of server computers and a call comes in and gets routed with voice mail to our servers. Everyone gets an individual service on their cell phones. There is no limit to numbers.
Next Page: Voice Mail You Can Read: Options for Smaller Businesses
