Rumours of Voice Mail’s Death Greatly Exaggerated

If you listen to the tech pundits, it’s reasonable to wonder if anyone uses voicemail anymore. In a world that’s all about Now, cell phones, smart phones, text messaging and instant messaging offer ubiquity, immediacy, urgency. Voicemail requires more—effort, memory, access—and who has time for those hassles Now?

Think again. Despite the best efforts to bury voicemail as a relic of a slower, simpler time, the reality is that real people who work in organizations like yours continue to rely on voicemail as a means of communication—central to their work-flow. Much like fax machines and pagers, voicemail persists because it remains easy-to-use, familiar, intuitive. And now, thanks to advances in IP telephony, voicemail is evolving into a more dynamic medium that can deliver Now with the advent of unified messaging and communication-enabled business processes.

It may be a clunky name, but unified messaging offers a powerfully elegant idea—a single interface, accessible from the device of your choice, to consume, manage and store all of your communications media in one integrated system. You receive and process all of your communications—email, SMS, fax, video, voicemail—in the format that best fits into your version of Now.

Wow.

What does this mean for you and your organization? Your end users can receive and review voicemail messages in text form in their Inbox, rather than needing to remember to check and retrieve it. This form of delivery enables them to forward a voicemail or fax as easily as email. In addition, they can search for an old voicemail message that the phone company will otherwise purge automatically within a week or two.

We deliver unified messaging services driven by Voice over IP telephony. By managing all media in a digital format, unified messaging is scalable as communications technology changes. That means your unified messaging platform will grow and evolve with your company as its communication needs grow.

The rise of unified communications is fueling another wave of innovation with communication-enhanced business processes (CEBP). By capturing content within an intelligent unified communications platform, critical messages that must now await human review and action can automatically trigger a process that serves an important business need. To ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, for example, voicemail messages captured and delivered in text form become as easy to search and capture as email messages.

Why is the next big thing in communications a smarter version of something already used universally? Because most new technology is additive. TV didn’t replace radio and email didn’t replace the fax machine. RSS feeds did not replace websites either—they made it easier for an individual to isolate and retrieve specific online content. In the same fashion, unified messaging and CEBP leverage IP telephony to manage access and content more effectively. Your phone is becoming your most important business tool and new technologies are arriving quarterly. People love new technology, but they need to know how to use it in order to successfully adopt it. When new technology leverages pre-existing skills it gets adopted much faster. So be careful before you pronounce any technology over—because old technology is the shoulders on which successful new technology stands.