Voice Mail--Posting It Over the Telephone
Just before dawn, telephones rang simultaneously in the homes of the dozen employees of California Realtors’ office in the San Bernardino County town of Hesperia. Each awoke to the cheerful voice of office manager Larry D. Barrick reminding them of an early morning meeting. But Barrick himself was not on the line.
“I made just one call the night before,” he explained. “It was simple.”
On that call to his local phone company, Barrick recorded a message with a geniality he would have found hard to muster right after getting out of bed. Prompted by a synthesized voice, he used his phone’s key pad to enter his colleagues’ phone numbers, followed by the hour the message was to be sent.
That procedure is likely to become familiar to legions of telephone users over the next few years. It’s part of using what’s known as voice or phone mail, an emerging high-tech phone-answering and message-sending system.
So far, voice mail turns up mainly at a relatively few big companies. Their systems can record messages when phones are tied up or unattended, route calls when operators are busy and speed internal communications. Soon, voice mail is expected to become widely available to homes and small businesses as well.
The main catalyst is a federal court ruling last March that freed Pacific Bell and the nation’s six other big regional phone companies to carry voice mail and other electronic information services.
Voice mail promises to bring yet another dose of technology--sometimes unwanted--into the lives of virtually everyone who uses telephones. People who only recently grew accustomed to talking to answering machines will likely have to adjust to getting programmed calls like Barrick’s and following instructions from automated operators.
Must ‘Transcend Medium’
But the new services also open new possibilities. Callers, for example, will be able to dial up restaurant menus, movie screening times and resort information.
At companies that have set up voice mail systems, the initial reaction from some employees often has been lukewarm or worse. “Any new medium or way of communication is going to run into resistance,” said Fred Massarik, a UCLA professor of behavioral science and industrial relations. “It’s a matter of getting used to it. People can learn to transcend the medium and deal with what’s behind it.”
Some dealers of Goodyear Tire & Rubber products, for instance, initially objected to talking to voice mail systems after the company installed a system last October. But before long the dealers changed their tune, said Vincent C. Bond, manager of the company’s district office in City of Commerce.
“They quickly saw how much more efficient it is to be able to leave their own messages instead of trusting them to a secretary or someone,” Bond said.
Added Phil Gaspar, an executive with Young’s Market, a Los Angeles food and liquor wholesaler: “You do run into people who say they don’t like to talk to machines, but even they leave messages you can act on.”
Even for those who embrace the idea and subscribe to voice mail networks, however, there will be privacy issues to consider. Computer hackers have already infiltrated the message systems at some companies.
There are major business implications, too. Phone companies and other concerns that serve voice mail customers are expected to find a fast-expanding market, but many of their gains will likely come at the expense of firms that provide “live” answering services or make answering machines.
Whatever the effects, the greatest value of voice mail probably lies in the uses that imaginative subscribers can dream up. Some examples:
- In the East Texas community of Crockett, there are plans to use phone mail to expand a “crime-watch” program, now staffed only from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., to a 24-hour-a-day operation. Residents will be able to phone in suspicious incidents at any hour, and police will pick up the calls periodically through the night.
- Starting this month, the Blue Valley School District in Kansas City, Mo., plans to use voice mail to keep its faculty and administrators in touch with the families of the district’s 1,650 students. The hope is to make it easier for teachers to communicate with parents about their children’s progress in class by, for example, recording messages during school hours that can be sent later when working parents are at home.
- And one food company recently used phone mail to recall a product, using just six calls to reach 176 scattered agents who were then able to do in two hours a job that otherwise would have taken two days.
Certain voice mail applications are likely to catch on more quickly than others, said Lisa French, an industry analyst with Dataquest in San Jose. Among the forthcoming applications, she said, is one that adapts pay phones at airports and other high-traffic locations so that customers unable to complete a call can record a message to be forwarded later.
So far, small firms have dominated the voice mail business. That is likely to change fast, however, as the Baby Bells--the regional phone companies formed four years ago when AT&T; shucked its local operations--jump into the market.
San Francisco-based Pacific Bell will test voice mail early next year in two limited markets--the Los Angeles port community of San Pedro and Milpitas in Silicon Valley. The company hopes to begin offering the service to most of its 9 million business and residential customers in California by the end of 1990. GTE California, the state’s second-largest local phone company, expects to offer voice mail to 2.5 million more Californians by then, too.
Call-Forwarding Option
Subscribers get voice mail service without having to acquire new equipment. All that’s needed is a push-button phone that generates tones. Customers pay for telephone access to a computerized “voice mailbox” that takes calls and electronically records and plays messages.
While voice mailboxes have their own access numbers, subscribers can link them to other phones by using the phone company’s call-forwarding service. For example, people who want their phone mail system to operate only when they are away can flip on call forwarding on departing and have incoming calls to their home or office numbers routed directly to their voice mailbox instead.
On the other hand, people who work out of their homes and don’t want to give out their residential number can advertise a voice mail number for their businesses. The voice mailbox then can either take a message or forward the call.
During marketing tests, Pacific Bell intends to invite customers to initiate phone mail service free of charge, thereafter paying about 25 cents a call to retrieve messages. More typical is Rochester Telephone in Upstate New York, which charges $7 a month for its call-answering service.
This basic service allows callers to the voice mailbox to leave a 60-second message, and the system will hold up to 10 messages for up to a week. An upgraded service, costing $14, allows subscribers to send messages and to receive more and longer messages that are stored for up to two weeks.
Robert Cohn, president of Octel Communications in Milpitas, which supplies some of the voice mail equipment to be used by Pacific Bell, warned that the new technology may hurt live answering services, suppliers of answering machines and even voice mail agencies like Alert Communications in Los Angeles and the present market leader, Atlanta-based Async, which rents voice mail services in 17 major cities.
“There’s a place for answering machines,” said Gary K. Blasiar, president of Alert Communications, which operates call-answering services and sells voice mail service and equipment in the Los Angeles basin. “They’re not going to go away.” For one thing, he said, answering machines enable people at home to avoid unwanted calls.
Despite the expected expansion of voice mail, PhoneMate of Torrance, the leading manufacturer of telephone answering machines with a 19% share of the U.S. market, expects the number of machines to continue to proliferate--from 4.6 million in 1986 to 6.7 million units this year and to 8 million in 1989.
“It’s not going to be without impact,” acknowledged Jim Oblak, PhoneMate’s marketing director. “The phone company will capture a certain number of people, but it’s a very large market.
“But mitigating it is the issue of privacy,” Oblak maintained. “With a machine at home you control it. But with the phone company, all those messages go into a central data bank downtown or wherever they place it. We feel there will be some concern by consumers.”
Some Vulnerability
But Barrick, the realty office manager with voice mail service provided by Contel of California, the state’s third largest local phone company, played down that concern. Once collected, calls normally are erased, he pointed out, and unerased messages automatically expire after 30 days. “But if I had something very important, like a real estate offer,” he added, “I wouldn’t put it on the computer any more than I’d leave it on someone’s answering machine. I’d ask for a call back.”
Computer-crime expert Donn B. Parker of SRI International, a consulting firm in Menlo Park, said both voice mail services and answering machines offering remote pickup of messages are vulnerable to intruders. Moreover, Parker said, computer hackers have already successfully penetrated the internal voice mail systems of several companies.
“In one case,” he said, “once they got in and got supervisory control they attacked the system by leaving (false) voice messages for employees throughout the company and picking up their messages and a lot of personal information.” One gang terrorized company employees by leaving messages threatening them and their children, Parker said.
Some of the companies responded by improving security by adding digits to access numbers and having employees use less obvious passwords, he said.
In any case, said Dataquest analyst Lisa French, it will likely take some time before voice mail’s full impact is felt on answering services and machines. “Eventually, it will definitely hurt,” she said, “but I’m one who believes that the residential market will become hooked on voice mail.”
French forecast that the voice mail market, including sales of equipment and revenue from services, will increase from $307.8 million in 1987 to about $512.7 million this year and nearly $1 billion by 1992.
To Heidi Harris of Pacific Bell, this sharp growth rate makes sense. “The service has the potential to do for our telecommunications marketplace what VCRs did for movie buffs and ATMs did for banking customers.
“With a VCR,” Harris explained, “you’re not dependent on the schedules of movie theaters. With an ATM, you don’t have to wait for the bank to open. With voice mail, you won’t have to wait for business hours or until people are off the phone or whatever.”
