Ask HN: Improving Voicemail
I have been calling a lot of dental offices lately to schedule an appointment for my daughter and realized that most of them just leave me hanging with a "leave a message and pray that we get back to you" mode.
I wonder if there are any meaningful ways to improve this experience? I guess having a "bot" answer my questions would be one way but beyond that could it provide some smart knowledge from just transcribing my voicemail and understanding the request and updating the CRM or something.
PS: Just a Saturday evening thought. Usually some kind of web/mobile app or online form fit the scenario better, since using "bot" or speech-to-text to extract customer's inquiry might be excessive for brick-and-mortar businesses. However, some customer engagement platforms like Twilio have a feature that fit what you described, I think it's called Programmable voice. Online booking for starters. If I had to schedule a haircut over the phone, I’d find a new stylist. Yep, trying to improve voicemail is the wrong product approach, it’s like trying to improve the fax machine. You can, and some people still do for a variety of reasons that shouldn’t really exist, but it’s time has come and gone a long time again and we don’t need it anymore. You can do almost everything without it. On a personal level, I don’t leave them or even have access to my own. For businesses, table stakes should be online schedulers and ways to contact and get help (such as putting yourself on a queue for a callback). Having worked on “voice bots” and chat bots many of them, such as this use case, are a bandaid over existing tech interface issues imho instead of a real improvement since they introduce transcription and natural language processing errors that wouldn’t be needed if the business just had a simple app or website.