How Voice Mail Works
When Contel of California pioneered residential “voice mail” in the high desert area surrounding Victorville last year, the phone company discovered a problem: Potential customers didn’t know what it was. Many still don’t, apparently.
“We’ve found that they don’t understand what voice mail is and they don’t know what ‘voice mailbox’ means,” said Alice Camuti, Contel marketing coordinator. “One big obstacle is this low level of awareness.”
Still, “voice mail” is a relatively simple concept. It is basically a way of getting messages through your phone system at work or at home without installing additional equipment, such as a telephone answering machine, or hiring an answering service.
The technology is built into the telephone network--a software program hooked up to the phone company’s switch serving a community (such as San Pedro, where Pacific Bell began offering the service this month). All the customer needs is a push-button phone that emits tones enabling it to communicate with computers.
Voice mail allows customers to have their phones “answered” automatically in their absence or even while on another call. Calls are routed automatically to an electronic “mailbox” or “message center.”
On reaching the center, the caller hears the customer’s own recorded greeting, or a generic one provided by the system, followed by an invitation to leave a message. Customers know that a message has been left when they get a stuttering dial tone upon lifting the receiver.
If both callers are in the same community and both have voice mail, they can also send messages to each other through the system. The messaging capability lets a user send the same message to a number of people all with one call. Someone in charge of a car pool, for instance, might call in a message to the voice mail system and then have it transmitted to everyone involved in the pool. Or if inspiration strikes at midnight, you can record a message then and have it sent out during business hours.
In its two test markets--the other being Milpitas in Silicon Valley--Pacific Bell is inviting its customers to open a “message box” to receive messages at no charge as an inducement to build a broadly based community messaging network. For a modest monthly charge, additional boxes can be assigned to other members of a household, offering private message storage not available on a single answering machine.
For those who want to be able to send messages as well--in other words, to have more than just an answering machine--the charge is $6 a month for residential customers and $12 for small businesses. (This month only, the company is waiving a one-time installation fee of $7 for residential customers and $15 for small businesses.)
Residential and small-business customers alike pay 25 cents for each message that they send to another message box in their community. If one message is sent to more than one party, the additional, automatically routed transmissions cost 15 cents each.
There’s one thing that voice mail doesn’t have, however, that answering machines feature: the ability to screen calls, listening to incoming messages without picking up the phone.
