I hate voice mail. While voice mail sounds like a good idea, in practice it suffers from several problems:

The Problems With Voice Mail

• People have to wait through your greeting
• When they finally get to leave a message, they usually either just leave their name and number (if you’re lucky) or their name and “you know my number” because they are too flustered to compose a message and leave it after the beep.
• Half the time you have to play a message back more than once if there’s something important
• If they actually leave a message it’s usually a long rambling message that could have been summarized in a note that would have taken you a few seconds to read
• If 10 people each take a minute to leave their message, and you have to play back half of them a second time to get the message right, that’s 15 minutes just to get your messages, and most of the time you have to call the people back because they didn’t leave more than their name and, if you’re lucky, their number.

The Better Alternative to Voice Mail
Having a 24 hour receptionist answer your phone and take a message has got to be better than sitting through a bunch of usually content-free messages trying to catch the sometimes-mumbled messages and then follow up with all the ones who just told you to call them back. What’s better than that?

• Get a live operator service to answer your phone, take a message, and send it to your alpha pager or cell phone.

• Go one step better and have a copy of your messages sent to an email account so you have a record of your messages without the need to write them – it also means you can forward the message to someone to delegate handling the message without the need to write it out.
• Set your home, cellular, and office number to forward to your service when you are away, or after 3 or4 rings.

Talk to your paging company to see if they can do all of the above, and be sure to call your own number every few days to be sure it is answered promptly and courteously, and be sure to leave a message to see that it is accurately transcribed and sent immediately.

I get unlimited messages for lest than a dollar a day. It doesn’t really cost much to get the service you deserve.