Tuesday 1 May 2007

SpinVox service performance, update and thought

SpinVox have confirmed that there have been 2-3 occasions when the message delay leaving their systems has exceeded 5 minutes. Given the quantity of voice mails I have received then that is probably reasonable, although not desirable. I wonder if the problem is more around expectation.

I'm on Vodafone and if anyone has used their voice mail system, they'll know it's nothing if not insistent. Before I enabled SMS message alerting from Vodafone it's insistent, repetitive calls to me whenever someone left a message was extremely irritating. You daren't bounce the call because you know it's going to be calling you back in 5 minutes demanding that you LISTEN TO THE MESSAGE.

Look sunshine someone's gone to all that trouble to leave you a message, you can jolly well listen to it right now and see what they wanted.

The text message alerts to call in, made life bearable. The real benefit was when you just missed a call. The message arrival was the signal that the other person that called had left their message and you could just call them straight back.

We used to be with Orange and they have the fantastic call waiting facility so you could callback straight away. The other person would be alerted that you we're trying to call and would hang up on the voice mail system and speak to you.

With Vodafone you just get their voicemail because they're tied up leaving you a voicemail, infuriating.

Now with SpinVox, I find myself waiting for the message to come because it's my signal that they've called but now it can tell me what they've said without me calling into the voicemail. The problem is that this adds time, 3-5 mins, between them putting the phone down and me receiving the message. When you're used to seconds, 3-5 mins feels like an eternity.

Now I know I'm comparing apples and pears. All Vodafone is doing is sending me a dumb SMS message telling me to call the voicemail service. SpinVox on the other hand gives me some really valuable information in that SMS message.

Patience is never something I've had in abundance but I guess there are very few voice mails that can't wait 3-5 mins. Good things come and all that.

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