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Ask a manager: Our callers hate voicemail
I answer the main phone line for our division. I’ve noticed that no one wants to leave voicemails anymore. I’ll transfer the line to someone and the person will just call back to tell me they got voicemail. Okay? I tell them to leave a message and they fight me on it. They will call back multiple times instead of just leaving a voicemail. This isn’t just one or two people. This is a majority of the callers I get. Even when I let people know they might get voicemail and just to leave one (we are a smaller division with only 1-2 people handling each program) they still call back and harass me about getting a voicemail. I think they either want me to hunt the person down or make them magically appear out of thin air. Most of the time they just call back and tell me that they got a voicemail and are upset about it. I normally just say, “Well, then the best thing to do is to leave them a message and they’ll get back to you.”Then I get some more huffs and puffs and I transfer them right back to the line. Is this just how people are now or can I use different language? I sometimes offer to take a message for people and will just email the person to call them back, but I don’t like doing that because it makes me feel like I’m people’s personal assistant and that’s not the case. Yeah, people do not like voicemail anymore! It’s super interesting. A lot of people have stopped using it entirely in their personal lives, instead assuming the other person will see the missed call from them and call back, or they’ll text instead, or they’ve almost entirely cut out phone calls in their non-work life anyway so voicemail feels like a strange relic of the past. But whether or not people like it, voicemail is still very much a normal business tool — in most offices, anyway.
Is it possible that people think that if you take the message for them, they’ll be more likely to get a call back? A lot of people don’t listen to their voicemail as much as they used to, even at work, and it’s possible that these callers know from experience that their chances of a return call anytime soon are low. If it’s definitely not your job to pass messages on, another option would be to say, “I can give you her email address if you’d like to try emailing instead.” (And maybe pass on to someone with some power to address it that people need to deal with their voicemail messages more often.)
But if none of that solves it and people just want to tell you how much they dislike voicemail, all you can really do is what you’ve been doing. You could try adding, “I know she checks voicemail regularly so she should get back to you soon” and that might be the reassurance they need … but obviously only say that if you know it to be true.
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But I wanted to see what folks thought here. I know when I was interviewing people to work with me in my new position I specifically asked: how do you prefer to communicate? Do you answer phone calls? Do you answer voicemails? Bc if I was going to be working with them and they never ever answered when i called but only answered by email I wanted to know upfront.
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(the other big phone-related hassle is when a caller returns a call without knowing who called them, because they just hit redial instead of listening to the message. even with some folks working from home, there are too many people for me to magically guess who might have called)
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Oh yes and since I'm complaining--also people who leave a long, slow, rambling message all about their circumstances and personal life and particular problem, for 2-3 minutes, and then in the last five seconds gabble off their phone number so fast it's like they're competing to become an auctioneer! Then I have to re-listen to the whole damn thing to get the number again.
Ahem. Neither here nor there, just my strong VM opinions.
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Horrid memories of my days back dealing with enquiries in the archives - if they even left a number, they didn't always. Oh, and then they would ring again, and maybe they would get the person who was already dealing with their query, or maybe they would speak to somebody else, and get them dealing with it, duplicating everybody's effort....
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I always leave my name and my number, but I have (sadly) learned that not describing the issue is often a better way to get people to call you back - especially if its an issue that is their responsibility but that they are trying to dodge
*looks grumpily at several public hospitals and several government departments*
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If the company is providing only a phone number and not an email address or web-based contact portal for customers or business contacts, I can understand why the callers are frustrated. Forcing them to call is not quite like telling them to send a fax, but it's an imposition.
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At my work we get a ton of phone calls for the stupidest stuff that you could find in two seconds by looking at the website. We are a supermarket so there is not a bunch of dedicated office staff sitting just waiting for phonecalls. People are at the register or on the floor, so when it's busy, we may not be able to get to the phone. But people just love calling to ask for directions or store hours or whatever. And it's not just elderly people, which I do understand.
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Also gotta say I would find it odd these days to call a place, have the main line immediately picked up by what is apparently a live receptionist, and then be transferred directly to somebody's voicemail. Either this place doesn't have a way to connect directly to an employee's line without going through LW, or these are people who have skipped the method of calling directly to the correct line because they want to talk to a 'real person', in which case I'm not surprised they're not using voicemail.
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I can guarantee you exactly 0 of us are checking it regularly. If someone calls on the main line for an employee who's not in, we offer to send them to somebody else who is in, or help them ourself, or take a message, or suggest email. Sending someone to voicemail would seem super weird and unfriendly if there was another option. At other jobs though that would be SOP.
LW, if you are getting a lot of calls from people who are upset about being transferred to voicemail, there is clearly some disconnect between the people who are calling and the people who assigned you your phone-answering job and you. You should probably talk to you supervisor about expectations for how the division phone line is being answered and what you're meant to do.
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In this situation, I would probably give them an email address instead, and let them know that that's the alternative.
Or I'd probably be polite and blunt if they persist:
"I'm afraid I'm not X's personal assistant, so I don't know where they are." And if they pester to leave a message, I'd tell them "I can take a message but it will sit on my desk (in this other division) until they come to pick it up, because I have my own set of tasks to complete and it doesn't include playing messenger girl. They come past once every couple of weeks and I am not always here when they do. As a result, I cannot guarantee that they will receive it in a timely manner. Your best option is to leave a voice mail or email them."
I think people have outdated ideas of how offices are set up (particularly in larger corporations with multiple divisions) and think that The Person Who Answers The Phone is actually the general dogsbody for the office.
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Word. The assumption that the person is in the same city/suburb/building and thus able to get a message through! Mind you, everything goes via email, and I don't deal with the general public, but I don't think we actually have receptions staff any more, but even when they were, our experts are distributed across a Very Large State.
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