Does your Regular ITSP Transcribe your Voicemail?

Voicemail is one of those services that everyone knows they can’t live without but secretly hates. It’s true, voicemail allows you to leave messages for people even when they’re talking to someone else and so it’s useful. However, the process to retrieve and access your voice messages can be annoying.

When was the last time you are happy to check your voicemail inbox? Does the blinking light on your phone give you anxiety? You know you have to spend the next 10 minutes listening to messages, at least half of which are useless. But you can’t afford to not listen to them because some of them will be important. To be honest, voicemail hasn’t changed much since it was first launched. Granted, you don’t need a separate machine to use the feature but there hasn’t been much innovation happening in this space.

The Frustrations of Voicemail

Voicemail ensures that you don’t miss important messages from clients, colleagues, and other business partners when you’re in a meeting or otherwise busy. But the process to access, listen and retrieve information from voicemail messages is not streamlined or efficient.

From a user perspective, you have to dial a number and listen to voice prompts before listening to the voicemail messages. You might have to listen to the same message multiple times to get key pieces of information like the call back number. You might be in a noisy environment which makes it difficult to listen on the phone. If you don’t check your inbox regularly, messages can pile up and you have to waste even more time to separate the important ones from the rest.

The problems become worse in a business context. Voicemail messages are audio files that take up a lot of space while not providing useful data. Think about it, your employees get hundreds of voicemail messages every week. Some of them even have valuable information that could prove useful in the future. But how can you access them? Who has the time to listen to all those voicemails in the hope that a few might be useful?

It’s very easy to make mistakes with voicemail as well. Some messages slip through the cracks because the user forgot to retrieve them. Employees waste time when trying to write down relevant information and often make mistakes as they juggle multiple things at once. But small mistakes can add up, especially in certain departments like customer service and tech support.

Check out Voicemail Transcription with VoIP

Ever since VoIP technology entered the scene, enterprise phone systems have changed quite a bit in a short period of time. Service providers have launched innovative new features and transformed existing tools as well. Voicemail is one of those things that has become more convenient and easy to use with hosted VoIP services.

The first improvement to voicemail came in the form of being able to forward the messages to email inboxes. This solved the problem of inconvenient access. Users didn’t have to remember to call a dedicated number and retrieve voicemails. They could get voicemail notifications right in their inbox, something everyone keeps an eye on all the time. Not only does it mean that you never miss a voicemail, but you also get the notification immediately after someone has left a message. If it is a customer calling about a service problem or sales request, you don’t want to delay in getting back to them.

A recent innovation has changed the voicemail game even more. Now VoIP service providers offer voicemail transcription services for enterprise clients. What does this mean? Users can now opt to receive their voicemail messages in the form of text, via email or sent directly to their phone. Voicemail transcription saves you time – most people can read text faster than they can listen to audio files. It can also improve productivity, employees don’t mistakes trying to write down information because it is already there in text format.

Service providers even offer unlimited cloud storage for these transcribed messages, so you can keep them forever. Since they are converted to text, the entire archive is searchable and you can easily access it whenever you want. Need the call back number for that important client? A quick search of your voicemail gives you that information. Struggling to remember when your project leader wanted the latest report? You can get the date and time with a few clicks. Your staff doesn’t have to rely on their memory to get things done.

Any organization can reduce mistakes and boost efficiency by switching over to voicemail transcription. Unfortunately, not all service providers offer voicemail transcription services. You might want to ask your vendor if they have the feature and what – if any – you might have to pay for it. Check it out and it might just be the very thing your business needs!