Coca-Cola Killed Their Voicemail & You Should Too
By Andrew Fairclough
In a recent memo, Coca-Cola’s Chief Information Officer, Ed Steinike, established that the world’s largest soft-drink maker would shut down voice mail “to simplify the way we work and increase productivity.” They’ve since changed their answering messages to encourage callers to try later or use an alternative method to contact the person.
In a piece titled “Time to Hang Up on Voice Mail,” author and research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, Michael Schrage, makes a compelling case for leaving nothing after the beep:
The truly productive have effectively abandoned voicemail, preferring to visually track who’s called them on their mobiles. Irritated office workers, by contrast, despair that their desk phones can’t display who’s called and when. They’d be far better off if office calls were forwarded to their devices with the relevant Caller IDs attached. Yes, unified communications protocols and technologies were supposed to address these gaps but they’re taking an inordinately long time to do so as other messaging alternatives improve. Google Voice and other audio-to-text transcription services could also obviate the aural inefficiencies but, frankly, few organizations have bothered to make that investment.
The result is the worst of both worlds: A legacy system drag on organizational productivity and individual confusion around the technology’s role and relevance in getting work done. That’s wasteful. What’s worse, it signals enterprise laziness and complacency. What’s the big deal? If people want to call, they’ll call; if the want to text, they’ll text; if they want to email, they’ll email. More choice is used as an excuse for not thinking through how individuals and teams should be productively communicating.
Smart inboxes, collaborative project management tools and instant messaging applications have all proven to be significantly more efficient and effective communication tools. If you haven’t already, consider disabling your voicemail or using a tool like Google Voice to transcribe audio messages.
