Josue Sierra

I had a conversation for an upcoming article about what technologies I love and which ones I hate with business technology writer Grace Tiscareno-Sato . As I went through the mental list, I realized how much I dislike voice mail! There is a huge opportunity here for AVAYA or some other competing company to start marketing better alternatives (that I’m sure are out there). Considering how important team communication is to most corporate environments, I’m surprised large companies are not investing more in voice mail innovation. This could translate into huge productivity gains.

To me, checking my voice mail is as annoying as calling my cable company’s 800 support number. As some of you have read here before, I’ve had some pretty annoying and lousy experiences with Comcast and Verizon customer support. When you dial in to check your voice mail, I end up having to key in my ID & PW, then go through 3 menu levels to just listen to recorded messages. So, checking a voice mail ends up taking 5 to 10 minutes or longer.

Another part of the negative usability experience of using voice mail is that it forces me to go to it on its own terms, instead of the voice mail coming to me on my terms. What if I want to listen to the voice mail of my wife first, to know if I need to stop for some milk, and ignore the voice mail from the vendor that can be dealt with tomorrow? On top of that, when I have voice mail messages, I get this red light on my phone that teases and taunts me all day. it’s a mystery indicator that provides little value and provides little information. I would love to have a phone that can tell me who’s called (by caller ID or just the number), when they called and left the voice mail, how many missed calls I have — basically, some of the features we see on cell phones. On top of that, I would love a web or PC based voice mail system that lets me search voice mails — something like what the iPhone has.

Listen to your fourth voicemail message without listening to the three before it. Visual Voicemail shows you a list of all your messages — and who they’re from — so you can play them in any order you please

In short, most of the times I check a voice mail, I find that I have already returned a call or dealt with the issue, so the voice mail is useless.

But besides the usability flaws, I think another major problem with voice mail is that most people don’t know how to leave a concise and effective voice mail message. For some reason, people feel the need to leave a complete message fully explaining the reason for the call, and providing all the background or contextual details needed. All I want to know is who called, and hear a 15 second summary of why they need to speak to me.

One of the things I love about blogs, Youtube and other online tools is the ability to stay connected to the causes I care about. Here is a perfect example:

I won’t give to many details because its personal, but its exciting to me to stay informed of such a great effort that I have been personally involved in. I had the opportunity to visit in person Choluteca Honduras last year, so I love being able to see videos and pictures of the great progress being done.

One of these is Casa Hogar Vida whose mission is to provide options for a better future for those infected with HIV/AIDS. A 64 Acre compound has been donated and will be used to create a large, self-contained community that will include the following:

· Houses for families caring for their HIV/AIDS members.
· Homes for orphan children
· A factory to make bricks
· A clinic
· A meeting place to worship God
· A food distribution center
· A separate area for sports and recreation
· Farmland to grow fruits and vegetable

Ultimately, this is what excites me about communication and technology — bringing people together (like the two recording artists, an American mega-church, and some small church in Honduras) to make a difference in people’s lives.

I came across a great question in LinkedIn Answers and I think I’ll share it here. The question from Ann Lacres was, “How can offline marketing support online marketing and vice versa?”

Here is my 2 cents:

Online marketing can serve as another way to better segment your marketing dollars. So, while you can do “email reminders” to reinforce direct mail drops, you can also allow customers to choose how you communicate with them, giving them more control over how they interact with your company. This will allow you to increase the relevance and the effectiveness of each channel.

Another approach is to use offline marketing to drive customers to an online “funnel” where you can identify the customer and serve-up targeted offers or content. The value of offline is that you can do mass-communication reaching millions, but the weakness is that it’s not interactive–the customer can’t respond to your offer on-the-spot. So, use offline marketing to drive to a micro site where you can provide more depth, as well as breadth, of information–and customer-unique targeted offer.

I’ll ad to my initial answer that another power of using online as a response tool for offline marketing is that by using an “opt-in” mechanism, you can actually measure your promo costs ahead of time and get more “intelligence” out of the whole campaign. At my current employer, we do opt-in promotions tied to a customer’s spending habits, so we are able to track ahead of time what the total max cost of the promo is going to be months ahead of when the rewards are delivered.

A couple other LinkedIn members had some good ideas, including this one from Ms. Jennifer Woodard:

If you have an brick and mortar store, your online marketing can support your offline marketing my including your address to your store and hours on your website. You can offer specials on your website that have to be presented in the store to be taken advantage of. You can offer in your store places to sign up for your company newsletter, refrigerator magnets with your company information and website address, etc.

I think the key here is to let the customer choose his/her preferred “channel” to shop, rather than having pre-conceived notions about what customers want. Otherwise, you won’t see the response rates you are hoping for.