Voice mails area almost as antiquated as landlines.
I like my new client. When I noted that I prefer text or email vs. voice mail, she asked, “why would anyone ever leave a voice mail?”
I heard from quite a few people offline how much they detest voice mails as well.
When I mentioned to a friend how I’d thought about changing my voice mail message from, “This is Jim Duncan with Nest Realty, please leave a succinct message, or, text or email me” to “This is Jim Duncan with Nest Realty, please, for the love of God, text or email me, but please, please, please, don’t leave a voice mail, even with Google Voice transcripts that I can skim and laugh at, actually checking voice mail is a remarkable hassle.” He agreed.
Yes, this is a stupid first-world problem, but having to listen to a voice mail two or three times to get a phone number to write down is a pain, and one I’d like to avoid.
But, sometimes, a non-succinct voice mail is called for, and I appreciate the opportunity to share a voice mail with a client or a colleague thanks to google voice. Choose wisely.
Question – voice mails – useful or no?
I generally don’t mind voice mails if the person leaving it doesn’t ramble. And, for heavens sake, why do they save their quickest voice for the phone number? It’s not unusual for me to never be able to decipher the number at all, even on business calls. But what I hate even more is people who don’t change their voice mail greeting from the default robot-voice reciting the phone number I’ve reached. I have no way of telling whether or not I’m actually calling the person I intended to. Even if they don’t want to leave just their first name for some reason, simply recording in their own voice gives me a clue.
My voicemail is currently set to “If you would like me to get back to you, please send me an email at … or text me at … have a great day!” I’m seriously over voicemail service, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I still sort of need it, for the people in my life who don’t text (Mom and Dad) I wouldn’t even have one. For business though, I love the new online chat tools on websites, so much easier to communicate. You can set them up to do directly to text message stream, or to an app. These are the way of the future, and I feel like even one day email will cease to exist (not for a while though). The live chat tool I use for my websites and businesses is on readychat.com. I highly recommend that you check them out, especially if you’re an agent!