In an age of instant messaging and e-mail, some people still prefer to pick up a phone and leave a voicemail. But for the growing number of consumers who are voicemail-averse, Apple is testing out a new voice-text hybrid. [More]
voicemail
Don’t Leave A Message: JPMorgan Chase Scraps Voicemail For 65% Of Workers
By 6.3.15
When looking to trim billions of dollars from the budget, companies often look at eliminating wasteful spending, reducing workforce and automating some services. While those are all efforts undertaken by JPMorgan Chase, the financial institution also found a surprising amount of savings by cutting the cord on employees’ voicemail. [More]
Debt Collectors Real & Fake Top List Of Most-Blocked Phone Numbers
By 8.6.12
According to a new list of most-blocked telephone numbers, the only people more tenacious than debt collectors about making non-stop calls to consumers are bogus debt collectors possibly looking to steal your information or trick you into making a payment. [More]
Virgin Mobile, Sprint, And The Phantom Voicemail
By 7.27.12
Brian is haunted. No matter what he does, a phantom voicemail is always there on his Virgin Mobile phone. Notifying him of its existence every fifteen minutes, without actually existing. Making his phone vibrate and give audio alerts. Providing him with constant reminders of something that isn’t there. It’s incredibly frustrating, and all Virgin Mobile can do is bounce him back and forth between them and Sprint. [More]
Change In T-Mobile Plan Deletes Deceased Daughter's Last Voicemail To Parents
By 3.23.12
The parents of a teen girl who died last summer had been hoping to hold on to the last voicemail she recorded before losing her battle with cancer. Unfortunately, when T-Mobile pitched its voicemail-to-text service to them, no one mentioned that it would delete their late daughter’s message. [More]
Verizon Already Has Too Many Compliments, Doesn't Need Yours
By 3.25.10
Dave wanted to leave a compliment for a an especially helpful Verizon customer service representative. However, Verizon’s own system thwarted his good deed: Verizon’s customer service compliment line has a full voicemail box and can’t accept any more praise. [More]
Weird Auto-Dialer Scam Curses At You If No Operators Are Available
By 3.22.10
There’s a strange auto-dialer message going around right now that asks you to call back for important info. When you call back, you might end up being offered lower interest rates on your credit card… or you might get a voicemail inbox where a man yells at you, “You stupid f***ing b*tch!” [More]
Help Friends Conserve Cell Minutes By Changing Your Voicemail Greeting
By 8.2.09
David Pogue’s continuing crusade against useless voicemail instructions knocked loose an excellent suggestion for anyone willing to re-record their voicemail greeting. Too often the standard voicemail greeting is: “Hi, you’ve reached so-and-so. Leave a message, and I’ll get back to you.” Why not make it more useful, something like: “Hi, you’ve reached so-and-so. Please press star (or whichever command applies to your carrier) to leave a message.”
Comcast's Twitter Reps Save The Day (Again) From Ineffectual Customer Support
By 5.13.09
Comcast might want to slash the budget on its Live Chat service and devote more resources to Frank and Sherri over on the Twitter side of things. The only good stories we hear about Comcast customer service comes from encounters with them, it seems.
United's Lost And Found Sounds Like A Good Place To Score Free iPhones
By 3.19.09
Jason is one of those people who loses things all the time. He must be like Santa Claus to the people working for United at the San Francisco International Airport, because when he passes through their terminal, he leaves awesome presents behind. We can’t say for certain that a United employee stole his iPhone, but the last he heard of its whereabouts, it had been found by United crew members and was on its way to their Lost and Found—which won’t return his calls or emails.
"Free" SlyDial Service Sneaks Ads Into Your Voicemail Inbox
By 1.7.09
SlyDial lets you jump straight to voicemail to leave a message. You can pay a fee for the service, or agree to listen to an ad first before leaving a message. Glenn gave the service a trial run and it seemed to work as promised—he listened to an ad and then left a message. Today, however, the company “slydialed” him and left a second ad in his voicemail box. That’s certainly sly, but sounds to us like an abuse of the service as they’ve described it. You might want to avoid using them until we find out more about why they’re spamming previous customers, or check back on Glenn’s blog to see what develops.
By 2.9.08
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A ‘computer glitch’ has left 740,000 Verizon customers in California without access to their voicemail for the past two days. Messages left for affected customers after February 4 are gone forever. [Bloomberg]
Verizon Testing Longer, Inescapable Voicemail Greeting
By 3.3.07
Verizon’s latest attempt to needle customers comes as a longer, inescapable greeting that subscribers must endure each time they check their voicemail. Reader Ben, one of Verizon’s unwilling test subjects, writes in to share the ‘new and improved’ script.
“You have one message whose retention time is about to expire. You have two new voice messages. You have nine saved voice messages. First voice message.”
That’s almost three times longer than the current greeting. If you try to escape to your messages by pressing “1,” you’re rewarded with a one second pause… and the greeting continues.
This is a good 25 seconds wasted every time I call to get voicemail. A year ago, you could just hit “1” as soon as you called and it would play. But not any more. And of course, multiply that 25 seconds times millions of customers and they are simply stealing. It was an intentional feature being disabled to increase profit. It’s just wrong.
Recordings of the new message, and Ben’s correspondence with Verizon, after the jump…
Sprint Charges Customer For Calling His Own Voicemail
By 8.8.06
Everyone in America can call Chris’s Sprint voicemail for free, except for Chris. He gets charged for it, and in fact, doing so made him go over his airtime minutes.
