NGMsGhost wrote on Nov 16
th, 2008 at 8:49pm:
You seem not to have allowed for people who do not wish to speak to an answerphone at all on principal but are still made to pay for having a call answered by a machine on which they do not wish to leave a mesage.
If I did not think that my voicemail provided an acceptable replacement for me answering the phone in person, when I was unable to do so, then I would not use it. If for any reason, e.g. a holiday, I would not be able to attend to messages for some days, then I would turn the service off. I would consider it to be a great discourtesy to allow messages to collect up unattanded for several days.
Whilst I respect the reluctance of some callers to contact me via message when I am unavailable, I decide to use a voicemail service. I see this situation as being little different to that where a family member answered the phone whilst I was out, and offered to provide the same service in person.
As things stand it is left to the caller to decide how to deal with a voicemail service, if the called party chooses to deploy one, just as they must decide about whether or not to leave a message with a person. I trust that those who do not wish to give messages instruct those they call not to allow family members, colleagues or assistants to answer their calls.
If telephone service providers were to be able to advise callers when a call was being answered by voicemail rather than a person picking up the phone, then we would have been able to eliminate one of the major causes of Silent Calls many years ago.
Where an automated calling device is used it is often desired to detect cases where an answering service has taken a call, so as to avoid deploying an agent. There is no facility provided to support this approach, so call centres have been using seriously inaccurate Answering Machine Detection technnology. Every time that this registers a "false positive", it results in a Silent Call.
I have often argued that the fact that a call is being answered by a machine rather than a person should be declared in advance so that the caller can decide whether or not to proceed. This would be of great benefit for outbound calls from call centres, as it would enable accurate AMD. It would also be valuable for inbound calls to call centres. Such a facility would enable callers to a) avoid waiting in a queue if we did not wish to, b) to take advantage of an array of menu options only when this was of benefit and c) connect to those who announced in advance that they offered the facility of a callback at the first opportunity when the person required became available.
The telephone service providers in general have not yet responded to this need, so it is left to telephone users to deal with the reality of the present situation responsibly. (Ofcom has recently at last declared that "false positive AMD calls" will henceforward be classed as Silent Calls. With AMD thereby effectively outlawed the outbound call centre industry should be allied with the objectives of those pursuing the points in this thread.)
I fully appreciate the desire to press telephone companies to extend their service offerings, and it seems that some are starting to respond. I support such pressure, but cannot agree that they should be compelled to offer this feature by regulatory imposition, no matter how beneficial it may be.
My only point is that the present situation should not be used as an excuse by telephone users not to accept responsibility for the way in which they use the services that are available. This applies to use of AMD by call centres, as well as a failure to turn off an answering service that may be enabled by default, by those unprepared to use it properly.
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