Three examples of what not to do with your office voice mail:
1. Sally Hartman, vice president of communications at the Norfolk Foundation, heard a "happy holidays" message on a local organization's voice mail - in February.
2. Ruby Weber, who owns a corporate gift and promotions business in Virginia Beach, called a saleswoman and got an excerpt of a rap song - with profanity. "I don't want to go quite so strong as to say that it offended me," Weber said, "but I believe it would have offended other people."
3. Bobbi Phillips, a Verizon Communications executive in New Jersey, once got someone's message saying he'd be out for a couple of weeks. Fine. Then he announced he was in the Himalayas on vacation.
"I don't care," Phillips said. "I'm jealous now. I'm stuck in the United States."
Gordon Matthews, a former IBM scientist, is usually credited with inventing voice mail in the late '70s. The office tool took off during the following decade. But even a quarter-century later, too many workers haven't caught on to the simple rules of recording outgoing messages. Keep them short, professional and timely, say businesspeople, callers, voice-mail installers and workplace consultants.
How short? Phillips, director of business product strategy for Verizon, figures 15 to 20 seconds tops. Bill Collins, vice president of BCS Voice & Data Solutions in Virginia Beach, which installs and programs voice-mail systems, suggests you can do it in 10 to 12.
That should be enough, they say, to offer the basics - the name and department of the person being called and an alternate phone number for immediate service. All, of course, delivered in an unhurried cadence.
There's no room for an "um" or a pause. "If you can't record something and speak intelligently, why should I trust you with my business?" asked Marti Craver, a music teacher who lives in Portsmouth.
Some voice-mail decisions are judgment calls:
Change the message daily? Sure, said Weber, who runs Please and Thankyou, and Rozanne "Roze" Worrell, a local workplace consultant.
When a caller phones on a Wednesday and gets a message beginning "This is Wednesday," that provides reassurance, said Worrell, whose syndicated column appears on WVEC-TV's Web site. "You at least know that that person is in," she said. "That is very sensitive to the caller."
Collins doesn't see it as necessary. It also adds a daily chore: You have to update the message or you'll lose credibility.
Do it yourself? Weber said she doesn't mind if she hears a female voice when she calls a man. But it irked Hartman: "This made me think he was either technologically incompetent or too self-important to record his own message."
Worrell said you should record your own message "if you want to appear approachable."
Music or humor? It's best, generally, to avoid them. "I don't want my loan officer to be funny, because we've gotten into some trouble with that already," Craver said.
But they might play well if the business is creative or they relate to the person's line of work. For instance, a wedding song playing in the background of a bridal consultant's message could provide a nice touch, Weber said.
Rebecca Thurston, project manager for BCS, remembered recording a voice-mail message for an entertainment company that ended: "That's a rap. Cut." Corny, yes, but it worked, she said.
Sixteen years ago, Charles Thomas wrote an article warning that the outgoing voice-mail message provides a powerful first impression to callers. In the article, and still today, Thomas laments that few companies provide guidelines for employees on their recordings.
"I think it's actually getting worse," said Thomas, a senior consultant in Chicago for the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. With uniform standards, "you'll have a consistent answer when you call in and it'll make a better first impression."
Officials from Bank of Hampton Roads, Norfolk Southern Corp. and Northrop Grumman Newport News said they do not have voice-mail rules for workers. The bank, however, asks employees to indicate when they are out sick or on vacation, senior vice president Tiffany Glenn said.
Bosses should remember, too, that employees' voice mails live on after they've left the company. That was the problem with the holiday message that Hartman heard: The person who recorded it had quit.
Another reason to monitor departed workers' voice mails: Thurston has found that some record new messages before they leave. She's encountered one disparaging his former boss. Another began: "You've reached Captain Fantastic."
Philip Walzer, (757) 222-3864, phil.walzer@pilotonline.com
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Read the Greeting while Recording
I recommend that my users write out their greeting and then read it while recording. That way you get away from the "UMs" and pauses. Most still don't change it when they need to anyway.
Personally, I leave pretty
Personally, I leave pretty detailed voice mail messages that way when people complain that I wasn't answering the phone I can say, "Well if you remember, my voicemail said I was in a meeting in northern Virginia all day" or something like that.
In college we used to change
In college we used to change student's voicemail messages all the time. It was pretty funny. How bad did they get? If you can think of something to put as a greeting, we probably did it.
Not so much at work though.
And don't forget
And don't forget to set the passcode to the same number as your extension, or 0000, or the year... that way your callers can change your outgoing greeting, and then lock you out. With e-mail integration it's possible for employees to forget about the actual prompts, as their voice mails are delivered to their email inboxes. The rap song could be an employee that forwards their work extension to their mobile phone, forgetting about their inappropriate greeting (your IT person can often restrict outside forwarding of inside extensions). And lastly, before you drop $20,000 on that Lucent or Nortel voice mail system, don't forget Asterisk is 100% free and features capabilities of the highest systems for free (if you've got staff or consultants with enough experience).