By Alma Duffey 6/3/3035

Voicemail became popular in the 70s-80s out of necessity. The massive increase in telephone usage meant increased calls which led to increase missed calls. To avoid playing phone tag and to make sure your message was received by the caller, voicemail was created for business and personal use. It still does the job of leaving a message, but there have been many improvements over the past 40 years that make this technology antiquated. Here’s a few reasons why modern businesses need a better system to take messages.

The biggest pitfalls of having voicemail are not having it set up and not emptying it out. How many times have you called a business and gotten the “I’m sorry, but this voicemail hasn’t been setup” message? Equally as bad as this is a full voicemail box. Both of these are big red flags saying they don’t check their voicemail, so they won’t call you back. 80% of customers don’t leave voicemails so businesses are losing even more revenue if there isn’t even a way to leave a message in the first place.

Voicemail doesn’t sound like a professional business. In many cases, voicemail is the first impression of a business, and if it sounds the same as a generic voicemail from the 90s, you’re doing yourself a disservice. SMBs are more likely to have voicemail to manage their calls, and it can cost them big. It could hurt their brand if they are perceived as too small for more business. Sending someone to voicemail leaves a bad taste in their mouth, but there are times when it happens. When it does, SMBs don’t have the level of professionalism their larger competitors have which can make a caller move on to someone else. The luxury of a full suite of automated things is entirely out of their reach and hindering growth.

It takes too long to use. When someone is sent to voicemail and they actually leave a message, you have to listen to it play which takes time. What if you’re in a noisy area? What if it’s spam? What if you see a long one and wait until later to listen? Voicemails do have transcriptions now, but they aren’t very good. They only average about 60% accuracy which is too low to be good for business. If it’s long and you decide to wait until later to listen, you could miss a big sale! It’s a waste of time to call back every single call you missed, but how do you know which ones to call? The transcriptions can give you a good indication, but when 78% of sales goes to the business that responds to the customer first, is 60% accuracy good enough to trust with your business? Then you have to make sure you empty the mailbox. If it’s full and you can’t get messages, customers will lose trust in you before you’ve even had a chance to earn it. Sorting through the voicemails and listening to the ones with bad transcriptions takes up too much time for owner-operators who are hustling 24/7.

There are better ways to get messages for your business, We are one of them. Check out our Simon call answering service if you are interested.