Monday, February 04, 2008

Leaving Voice Messages

Conversationware makes a great point today about leaving voicemail. Matt makes the point that if you think about it before hand, write a few notes down, you can leave a message that has some real impact. He follows up by saying "I hate it when people leave a message that just says, Call me". Exactly, it says "hey guess what, my time is more valuable than yours, so why don't you waste more of your time ringing me back, trying to find me, and then finding out what I wanted to talk to you about in the first place. So, I have to agree with you there Matt. Here are a few rules I picked up a while ago about leaving good voicemail: - Start by saying who you are (no, I don't recognise your voice!) - Tell me what the message is in relation to (need to organise a meeting time) - Tell me what I am expected to do (decide, ring someone, suggest) One of the things VoiceSage does really well is to automatically detect whether you are about to leave a message with a live person or a machine. If you are getting through to a machine, we recommend that you leave a different message, structured as per points above. You don't have to leave a "teaser", leave a valuable message. If you are wondering how you might measure the effectiveness of your message, leave a different contact number or email address for the return enquiry. That way, you can track would called you back. Simple.

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Sinéad said...

Saying your telephone number too fast is a huge pet-peeve of mine, especially considering my work phone does not have caller ID. Thus I often have to listen to the same message two or three times.

Very annoying.

Paul Sweeney said...

Sinead, again that's a thing that annoys the hell out of me. I think that some "modern systems" send you a text saying you have a message on Voicemail, but it would be neat to be able to do some voice recognition and pick up the callers number as they say it as a default (i.e. listen out for this combination as it's probably a phone number).... in the mean time, SpinVox will have to do !

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