Ever notice how freaking long it takes to get to your messages? You’re told three times in a row that a message is about to play. “You have one unheard message. The following message has not been heard. First unheard message.”
Do people really need to be warned that much that they’re about to hear a message? Will people otherwise forget they’re listening to their messages, and think that someone is talking to them and try to reply ,and then get mad at the cellphone company when the other person can’t hear them, and chew up precious customer service time demanding refunds?
Or is it that checking voicemail uses up your minutes…
(in-network free calling be damned (unless it’s T-mobile)). So, if the cellphone company can increase the time you’re listening to your voicemail by four seconds every time, that has the potential to add up to mucho dollars of revenue when you multiply that across their entire subscriber base. Sneaky.
Red Tape Chronicles offers these no-duh suggestions for staunching the attrition:
- “If you retrieve voicemail during the day, access it “remotely” from your office phone as often as possible. That will save you cell phone minutes.”
- “Get to know shortcuts that allow you to bypass voicemail menu trees as quickly as possible. Saving one minute per call could really add up by the end of the month.”
Voicemail calls, and no calls, can be costly [Red Tape Chronicles]
(Photo: Getty)
There should be an autoban for dweebs that post two or three “slow news day” or other non-informative comments. No warning, announcement, anything. Just quiet, gratifying death.
T-Mobile and Sprint both have “Expert Mode”. This is an option you turn on that reduces the prompts, usually to one word instead of one sentence. For example, it will say “Listen 1, Send 2, Options 3″ instead of “To listen to your messages, press 1. To send a message to another user on the same network, press 2…”.
As for the caller hearing messages, they can also be turned off from the options. On Sprint, I turned all three prompts off so it just says my recording and beeps instantly instead of saying “Record the message, press # or hang up” and “To send a numeric page” and “Please wait for the beep” and all that. You just have to look for it. Whoever wrote this article apparently didn’t even bother to read the brochure/pamphlet about voicemail, let alone listen to the options menu. It’s all pretty much self-explanatory if you just listen…
I’ve felt the same thing is true. Fortunately I now have an iPhone, and if there’s one benefit of the device it’s the “visual voicemail” feature that lets me listen to a message immediately without having to dial in and wait.
Verizon was a bitch with that stuff. If you dig through your VM options, you’ll find there is an option to abbreviate the entire process. Ironically all this does is make the voice cut out a couple words. So instead of saying “You have 1 new message,” she’ll say “1 new message.” Nice.
Last time I checked, on Cingular-AT&T, even checking voicemail from a non-cellphone uses your minutes.
@Buran: Yes.. I could just keep scrolling by but I believe that constructive criticism keeps Ben on his toes so that the quality of this site stays high like it normally is. If I didn’t like Ben’s site so much I would probably be more productive in my day. I like Consumerist for the useful tips and real stories, not for his Andy Rooney impression.
“Have you ever noticed that..”
Verizon Wireless disabled the press-1-bypass, at least for everybody I call. Now you’re forced to listen to the whole spiel. And wouldn’t you know it, sitting through the entire greeting process and leaving a five-second message now takes… one minute and two seconds. So they get to double the number of minutes spent by everyone leaving voicemails across their entire network.
T-Mobile says something like… “You have X new messages. To check messages, press 1″.
So you press 1 (at any time during the message – it can be truncated) and the messages play. If you immediately press 1, you get the next message, if you press 7 it deletes the message and if you press 2 (I think – I never actually save messages) it saves the message.
Pretty straight & to the point.
You already ran this story on this: [consumerist.com]
You should at least link to it!
@trai_dep: Not all of us live on the cutting edge: old news is new news to someone who hasn’t heard it already. And if the main body of the message isn’t particularly informative, it has spawned an interesting conversation about voicemail (I hadn’t thought of including instructions in my own voicemail greeting, for example.)
So drop the chip off your shoulder and eat some prunes already.
My stupid voicemail will not let me delete an “unheard” message. When my mother calls and leaves a long message and I know all I have to do is call her back, the stupid voicemail won’t just let me hit delete when I hear, “Hi, it’s your mom.”
It tells me, “Unable to delete unheard message.”
What about some jerk who won’t stop calling you? I should be able to decide whether or not I want to listen to a message.
Dirty fuckers.
“You have three new messages. First message, sent Tuesday, August 21st at 9:03 AM. 30 seconds long. To listen to this message, press one.”
blech.
as bravo369, kilgore trout, nick2588, and liquisoft mentioned, there’s usually an “expert mode” that uses very abbreviated phrases. nick2588 mentioned T-mobile and Sprint. I’ve used it on Sprint and now Verizon. It’s worth wading through the menus the first time you set up your voicemail for the seconds and patience it saves you later.
as for us non-iPhoners, there’s GotVoice and the currently-invite-only GrandCentral for “visual voicemail”, both of which have implemented mobile web versions you can access if you have a data plan.
@Bryan Price: Oh, Cingu-erm, The New AT&T lies like a rug. I have the Cing-uh, The New AT&T minutes extension on Firefox, and I’ve seen those minutes go down when I check my voice mail. Not like I use them, but then again, I don’t think I have rollover anyway…
Umm, last time I checked it doesn’t use minutes to check your voicemail with ANY provider. It used to in the past, but I haven’t seen a charge for voicemail in over 10 years.
I really wish Consumerist would stop posting stories that are just that – stories. Do a little research! I’m slowly getting annoyed and may stop reading altogether.
When leaving messages, it varies by provider…
Sometimes 1 (verizon) will get you straight to recording, I think sprint is (1) as well.
Not sure with at&t or Tmobile.
Prompt level is what you want to change for faster shorter, less verbose voicemail
@textilesdiva
yeah it’s probably just because you are in college and are trying to think you are cooler than everyone else by using text more than voicemail. I personally think texting is actually a step backwards for technology, it takes f*cking forever on a non keyboard phone to send a text, speaking to leave a voicemail is much faster, and you don’t have to deal with stupid smiley’s and sh*t to convey emotion. You could leave a voicemail describing in detail everything you did all day long to your friend before you could even say “hey check out what i did tod–” with a text.
“kids” if you will, just like doing things different even if they don’t realize it’s actually slower and less efficient, just to be “cool”.
@VA_White:
Yes, I run into the same problem when I get a 10-minute voicemail from the inside of my sister’s purse or my brother-in-law’s pocket because they don’t know how to use their damn keylock.
I use YouMail, which for callers offers the classic BEEEEEEEEEP. No prompts. When checking your mail it just plays a 1.5 second login tone and you hear your messages, newest to oldest. After each message you hear a 2 second prompt to press 7 to delete 88 to block and something else (I think 87 or something) to make a custom greeting for the caller. Quick and simple… Only for ATT and T-Mobile tho I think…
And you get an email with it attached as a mp3…which means on my lovely sidekick (that is broken) I can get visual voicemail. YAY!
@waylonrobert:
Actually AT&T does count calls to voicemail against one’s minutes, at least in my plan. I for one was pretty happy to see this, because lately I get sick of going through all the “options” when I’d like to skip straight to the beep and leave someone a message. Thanks to a link provided by one of the other commenters, I saw that all I have to do is press #. It works, too!
Of course if you’ve made good on your threat, you might not even be reading Consumerist anymore by now…
How about trying to learn how the voicemail system works? How about not being such a stress queen that the 4 seconds doesn’t matter?
I use YouMail [youmail.com] and skip using AT&T’s voicemail altogether. You can check your voicemail online and save your minutes. It’s free, and the only ads that are shown are in your browser when you use the site. No ads in the voicemail itself.
Something that saves me alot of effort with voicemail is to change the preprogrammed number so it includes the security code and other options. For example when I speeddail voicemail it calls *86 Pause Pause Code 1. This calls the voicemail, waits until it’s ok to enter the code, enters it and then skips the intro stuff by pushing 1. So voicemail is literally a single button away for me. Sure, if someone steals my phone they can listen to my voicemail, but that’s not a huge concern for me.
What’s worse is leaving voicemail on carriers that don’t let you skip to the beep. That just kills me. Why can’t they all let you press a key to skip the message? What the hell does it mean when AT&T asks if I’d like to “page” the person? What? This really is a conspiracy.
“You have one unheard message. The following message has not been heard. First unheard message.”
You pressed “1″ and stopped, silly bear. “11″ skips all that nonsense and gets to those swwet sweet messages.
@VA_White: If they’re using the same s/w as mine, hit “33″ when you hear Mom, it’ll skip to the end of her msg and you can delete. But call her back, cuz, she loves you, eh?
@bravo369: Great, huh. It’s worth the time to investigate the system.
Try http://www.youmail.com its easy to use, free and cool. No worries with all the B.S. you go strait to your messages quickly. You can listen to your messages online & even save them as Mp3s. No, I’m not selling this either. Its sweet, check it.
Alternatively, I always call from my mobile phone but I dial my own number and since I have Unlimitd M2M, there is no minute usage. Try that to help save minutes.
@rakers:
If you know the person you’re calling is on AT&T, press pound as soon as you hear the computer voice. You should be able to skip right to the beep.
This is to backup Bravo369′s comment — I just did it myself — If you have AT&T you can change the type of voicemail “prompt” you use. If you go to your voicemail’s “administrative” options (it’s a sub-menu of “personal options”) You can change the prompt level from ‘Standard’ to ‘Rapid’ — the VoiceMail lady will be much more brief with you. Pretty sweet! Thanks Bravo369!
I always tell people not to leave me a voicemail because I will not listen to it. I’ve gone months with new VM’s that I didn’t feel like checking.
I always check my voice-mail from my work landline. Although now I don’t remember if Sprint counts calls to voice-mail as minutes off my total.
@martyz: @acambras:
THANKS DUDES!!! I had no idea.
@morsteen: You are a complete moron. Leave it to some smug over bearing ass to talk down to people just because he doesn’t see the benefit in something that he doesn’t use. Nope, never been stuck in a huge seminar and had to send a quick text to someone to get something done that I had forgotten to let them know about ahead of time. Nope, definitly wasn’t a big help in me being able to help my siblings prepare funeral arraingments while I was sitting through the week before finals in class (which i then flew in for the funeral, back out for finals, then back in to spend a couple weeks with my family.)
And of course, the ability to leave someone a msg that it takes them less time to check then it would for them to hold in the one button to call their voicemail?
Or how about, finally, being able to email all phones? Like, if you use verizon your phones address is xxxxxxxxxx@vtext.com ? So you can email shit to your phone and vice versa without any extra charge? Or did you not realize that the way cell phone companies send txt msgs cross carrier is through bulk email? (NO FLAMES: Notice i said cross carrier, not intra carrier. Nobody needs to explain again the difference between data and txting on different networks)
Oh well, I guess I could always hope that I could turn into someone like you. Or maybe someone who deserved life instead. Seems like a tossup.
While I do consider it an annoyance, esp when checking your OWN messages, you may want to double check and make sure you are charged for checking your messages. More of my friends on every network are saying that they are NOT being charged for checking their voicemail from their own cell phone, nor being charged minutes if they check it from a landlane. With my T-Mobile account, I am NOT charged for checking my VM from my phone, just lose battery power.
In fact, T-Mobile doesn’t burn your minutes for any method you may contact them, the Toll free number or 611. (One time I was on a call with them that lasted a couple hours. It was to help figure out why whenever I went in a certain area any calls I may have been on sounded like a modem noise on my end instead of the other person’s voice until that area was left again. I helped do a few tests and since I was the first person to report it and completed all the tests the tech WOULD have had to taken alot longer to do, all the fixes were completed within a day and everything was back to normal.)
I’ve noticed that with Verizon, lately unless you delete a message, it will still alert you there is a new one. Obviously a ruse to get you to burn more minutes.
@waylonrobert: This is incorrect. T-Mobile counts the call as a mobile-to-mobile — meaning it is only free if you have that feature as part of your plan. On Sprint, it always uses minutes (even if you have the mobile-to-mobile option). I’m sure Verizon, AT&T, and Alltel are similar.
@zyphbear: This is because you must have the mobile-to-mobile option as part of your plan. If, for example, you were to forgo mobile-to-mobile and nights and weekends for an additional 900 anytime minutes like I did, accessing your voicemail will take away minutes.
@aparsons: does that mean your name is Allan Parsons? you wouldnt happen to have any experiments going on, would you?