Voice Mail

Now this is where you get into specialized technology. Not all voice mail systems are alike. And they have not (yet) been completely subsumed into larger boxes (though this is happening at a rapid clip).

A voice mail system answers telephone calls to individual phone numbers or phone system extensions, plays a greeting from the mail box owner and records the callers message.

At the mailbox owner’s prompting it plays back messages, forwards them to other extensions, saves them or deletes them.

Voicemail has a different role in the call center than anywhere else. While it can be used in the traditional sense for call center managers or upper management, it’s most often used to give callers an option to leave a voice mail message as opposed to waiting in queue for an agent when integrated with your ACD.

A voice mail system appropriate for the special needs of a call center should alert agents when there is a message in waiting. If the voice mail system you choose cannot do this, it’s important to create a system designating certain agents to return voice mail calls when call volume falls below a pre-determined level.

Voice mail is a critical tool for the small center that cannot afford to staff agents after-hours. A voice mail system won’t shut out any callers. It keeps your center open 24 hours a day.

Not long ago voice mail was the classic voice processing application and usually came in a standalone system that was sometimes bundled with an automated attendant. Today voice mail is usually a part of a complete voice processing system.

The latest thing in voice mail is “screen-based” voice mail that lets you call up messages of many kinds on your computer screen including your voice mail, email and fax messages. More and more vendors are jumping on the bandwagon to offer computer/telephony interfaces that put voice mail on your desktop PC. With this kind of interface you can get information not only about your voice mail messages, but also view email messages or faxes from your PC. This “unified messaging” gives you one mailbox combining voice, fax and email messages. Unified messaging gives you an easier interface than the telephone keypad. Most unified messaging runs across a LAN and integrates with your phone system. The object is to have desktop control over all of your messages, with the ability to retrieve them, read email messages or listen to voice mail and store and forward them through your computer or phone.

Some benefits:

  • Users can view messages that come in even if they are on the phone.

  • There’s no need for dedicated voice mail hardware.

  • The user can do all the configuring.

  • You can move voice, data and email from site to site across networks.

  • It eliminates the need to use the phone pad to issue commands.

Previously, telephone-oriented software had to run on systems connected to ISDN or proprietary digital phone lines to control features like hold, transfer and conferencing through TAPI.

Active Voice was one of the first companies to put voice mail on the user’s desktop. Their original TeLANphony product bridged local area networks, telephone systems, voice processing and desktop computing.

With a unified messaging app, when a call comes in, a window on your PC pops up and gives you information about the call. With the click of the mouse you can ask callers to identify themselves, hold, play a greeting, transfer the call to another extension or ask the caller to leave a message without picking up the receiver.

As call centers change (and as the Web becomes more of a customer input channel), combining different types of messaging will be more important, we will probably see the next generation of unified messaging applications focus more on serving the needs of the center.

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