Reading is much faster than listening.

Neel Sus

So how many times today have you stopped what you were doing so you could pick up the phone, press 1, and then one by one listen to the 5 or 10 voicemails that piled up when you were in your last sales meeting or project discussion? Did you have to listen to any of the messages a few times to write down that number they told you to call back on?

It can be a very frustrating experience, to say the least, but now you can get away from voicemail entirely. Imagine this: someone calls you and gets sent to voicemail to leave a message. Instead of getting that dreaded icon on your phone telling you that there is a voicemail, you’ll get an email which contains their caller ID, an attached sound file of their message, and most importantly, a transcription of what they said.

There are many benefits from using a voicemail transcription service, including:
1. The time savings associated with reading vs. listening to the message
2. The ability to file the voice mail permanently in your email system
3. The ability to easily forward the message to anyone

There are two steps involved in doing this. First, you have to choose a transcription service provider. Then you have to set your phone to “Call forward on No answer” to the phone number the provider gives you. There may or may not be a fee for this depending on your carrier.

Voicemail transcription providers generally charge between $20 – $40/mth. PhoneTag.com and YouMail.com are two good ones.  We’ve used PhoneTag.com are quite impressed with the quality of the transcriptions.

Recently, we’ve switched from PhoneTag.com to a free provider… Google Voice. Google Voice does a lot more than voicemail transcription if you’re willing to give all of your contacts a new number to call you on. If you want to keep your current number, you can just set the Google Voice account to “do not disturb”, which sends calls straight to it’s voicemail. These can be sent to you as text messages or emails.  Be aware that currently the transcription quality isn’t as good as the paid services and it tends to take more rings to make it to voicemail (but free is free).

Try it out. And after a few weeks of massive productivity gains, feel free to take some of your cost savings and invest in some custom software development to make your business run more efficiently.

http://www.suscosolutions.com/SuscoServices.html

Have a great week!

Tags: process improvement, save time

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Process Improvement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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