Anyone who has the occasion to call me on my mobile knows that I'm a big fan of SpinVox (best value subscription I fork out for every month).
I reckon that SpinVox has saved me hours of time because I can quickly scan voicemails that have been converted to text and sent to my phone rather than having to make a call and listen to them. It means that if someone leaves a number, I can return the call within seconds (just as if they'd sent a text message).
A few people, however, have grumbled that they've been cut off before they'd finished leaving a message.
Now, I've been tempted to direct complainants to Gary Kawasaki's blog post this time last year when he wrote (scroll to point number twelve):
Two power tips: First, slowly say your telephone number once at the beginning of your message and again at the end. You don’t want to make people playback your message to get your phone number, and if either of you are using Cingular, you may not hear all the digits. Second (and this applies to email too), always make progress. Never leave a voicemail or send an email that says, “Call me back, and I’ll tell you what time we can meet.” Just say, “Tuesday, 10:00 am, at your office.”
Unfortunately, at least two people who were mildly annoyed are esteemed clients and since I'm not in the habit of intentionally pissing off my beloved clients, I decided to take a look under the bonnet of my SpinVox account, hence my apology...
... whereas I was fairly certain that SpinVox was set up to accept voicemails of up to a minute, it was in fact only set to 30 seconds.
Sorry folks!
I've now set it to accept messages up to two minutes longs, which I hope will be enough for everyone (personally, I always try to keep the ones I leave down to less than one minute, so 2 strikes me as pretty generous).
Interestingly, I've just noticed that SpinVox have a couple of new products; I've just signed up to Spin-my-Memo, 'cos that strikes me as something I could use, but they've also got Spin-my-Blog and Spin-my-Broadcast...
Posted by dompannell at July 29, 2007 1:19 PM