Ever been in voice-mail jail?
Most of us have been there once or twice. The way things are going, we`ll all do time there in the future. For those who do business by telephone, it could turn into a life sentence.
By now the road to imprisonment is familiar. Let`s say you pick up the telephone to call your bank about stopping payment on a check. Instead of a switchboard operator, you get a pleasant but flat tape-recorded voice, usually female, that goes something like this:
”Thank you for calling First Chicago. For personal accounts, including checking, savings, Cash Station and credit cards, press 1. For our 24-hour Bank by Phone Service, including branch locations and hours, press 2. For student loans …”
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The electronic menu drones on for a full minute-press 3 for loans, 4 for shareholder services, 5 for bondholder services, 6 if you know your party`s extension-until you are told to ”press 9” for a repeat.
Instead you press 1, hoping to reach a live person who can troubleshoot your stop-payment problem.
You fool.
Pressing 1 only moves you into another tape-recorded menu. This time you press 2, the option for your type of account. But that just trips you into a third tape-recorded message, a male voice this time, that greets you with:
”Welcome to First Chicago`s Bank by Phone Service. If you are calling from a Touch-Tone phone, press 1 followed by the star.”
Like Pavlov`s dog, you follow the cue. But it turns out, after you punch in your Social Security number, that you don`t have the required bank-by-phone code number. Yours is a regular checking account, so you feel misled, confused, frustrated. You hang up, redial and try again: ”Thank you for calling First Chicago …”
This is hard time in voice-mail jail, an electronic stockade from which there is no parole and rarely any time off for good behavior.
Sometimes you can escape, by pressing zero.
But in systems such as First Chicago`s (or those used by the Chicago Association of Commerce & Industry, the Metropolitan Pier & Exposition Authority and numerous others) you don`t get that opportunity until you`ve heard all the other options.
Even if you get past the electronic switchboard, there`s no guarantee you`ll connect with the human being you`re trying to reach.
He or she might have a personal voice-mail mailbox switched on, which means you`ll have to leave a message. With voice mail you don`t get to talk to a secretary. So you don`t know whether your party has stepped out for lunch or left the country on a two-week vacation.
All of this would be laughable if it weren`t becoming so pervasive.
Voice mail and automated call-routing systems are among the fastest-selling office technologies in America. Sales have risen an average of 30 percent a year since the mid-80s. Last year U.S. firms installed $810 million worth of the stuff, and this year the figure will approach $1 billion.
The problem, of course, is that the system is not always the solution.
Companies who buy into automated call-routing undoubtedly save thousands of dollars in salaries for switchboard operators and secretaries. But they surely are losing thousands more in revenue by turning off customers-diverting them not to the next electronic menu but to the Yellow Pages in search of a competitor who still offers human contact.
Customers appreciate a savvy switchboard operator who knows what department takes care of what or a wise secretary who knows who is filling in for whom during vacation season.
Voice mail knows only how to flip a caller to the next menu of options or take a message.
But there is hope. As more of us suffer the indignity of voice-mail jail- and as the inevitable backlash grows-some of America`s best business minds are having second thoughts.
Tom Peters, the author and management guru, recently slammed call-routing systems as counterproductive. ”It makes a human being happy to hear the live voice of another human being,” he explained, as if that needed explaining.
Even the purveyors of voice-mail and call-routing gear are becoming concerned that their customers are poisoning the market through indiscriminate use.
”It`s beginning to work to the detriment of most companies,” said Jill Boeschenstein, corporate spokeswoman for Tigon Corp., the Ameritech subsidiary that markets voice mail.
”When your customers get a cold voice that steers them into an electronic maze, that`s not good. They get the feeling that there`s nobody home, that they had better go someplace else.”
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No wonder the major makers of this gear don`t use it. Dial Rolm or Octel Communications in California or V.M.X. Inc. in Texas and you will be answered by a cheerful switchboard operator.
That`s also the way they answer the phone at Ameritech in Chicago, where the greeting is ”Mrs. Smith, may I help you,” and at Motorola in Schaumburg, where they say ”Good morning. Motorola.”
Then again, you may be one of those techno-boosters who don`t agree with me. In that case, press 1 for more options.