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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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.