The problem with Voicemail in India
As I was catching up on my reading list of blogs, I noticed this post by Brian McConnell at Emerging Telephony:
A Poor Man's Hack For Improving Mobile Voicemail - O'Reilly Emerging Telephony
Reading the recent post about the poor state of voice mail, I realized that this is a perfect example of how bad the carriers are at innovation. This problem can be solved quite easily, without requiring a major overhaul of either voice mail systems or handsets.
There are several problems with voicemail, including:
- Voicemail access is currently sequential (remember the iPhone announcements from Steve regarding their breakthrough feature for random access to voicemails?)
- It is heavily dependent on Interactive Voice Response systems (IVRs)
Worse still, Indian service providers have major glitches in the way their systems are configured:
- BSNL (India's largest telecom company) Chennai's Voicemail system has been offline for over one year on their wireline network - no official reasons for why
- Airtel's voicemail system has a great feature where you get an sms with direct access to the voicemail in question. However, it has a retarded problem where when a caller attempts to leave a message, they hear: "after the beep <beep> thank you for using Airtel" - it doesn't even let you leave a message!!!
- Not yet sure about Hutch (soon to be Vodaphone), my voicemail service is yet to be activated
- Most of the service providers I have used (either as a customer or when leaving a message for one of their customers) have issues with the IVR system that handles voicemail being jammed
All this can be improved, with just a little bit of effort from the service provider:
- Use MMS to deliver the voicemail directly to the customer - no more IVR to retrieve voicemail - only for callers to leave messages
- Properly implement random access to voicemails via direct dialing to the voicemail in question
- Work with handset manufacturers (like the Apple - Cingular/AT&T effort) to integrate voicemail directly into the messaging interface
The benefits gained from acting on even one of these would be incredible! For one, I would stop ranting about this topic 
Customers and callers would actually begin to use voicemail (specially in India where the population is averse to talking to a machine - they would much rather hang up or leave one of those famous "missed calls"). Also, IVR systems would not be jammed as much, reducing the cost impact of maintaining and upgrading them.
Technorati Tags: voicemail, ivr, cellphones, iphone, india
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There's just a couple of issues with your suggestion on MMS to deliver voicemail to the customer. One, it'll flood the customers fone in no time [cause then it becomes dependent on the phone memory], and second becomes a whole new way to spam a person... as if they didn't have enough stuff to play with already...