1 / 3

What you don’t know about AT

The 4 major cellular service providers, AT

serenathomson14
Download Presentation

What you don’t know about AT

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. What you don’t know about AT&T, Verizon, Sprint & T-Mobile and Voicemail In the 90’s, cell phones became rapidly adapted in the small business community. If you were around then you may remember that voicemail was something you had to dial a number to get your messages. There were no smart phones or apps. The 4 major cellular service providers, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint & T-Mobile, took notice of this and concocted a scheme to add 15-25 seconds of “instructions” to what previously had just been a recorded greeting and a beep. These instructions where in many cases a blatant scheme to add seconds to people that were sent to voicemail. They, for instance, give instructions to send a numeric page. And AT&T actually gave users the option to send a fax…though I am not sure how that would work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVQhqfgy8Fs

  2. David Pogue, a NY Times columnist and technology journalist, exposed this scheme. According to Dave, assuming every customer was sent to voicemail 2 times each day. The major cellular service providers are making close to a billion dollars annually off of this scheme. Fast forward to today. Small businesses, with less than 5 employees have increased from less than 20 million in the early nineties to over 40 million today. In this increasingly competitive environment and with Google dominating search, most people that are sent to voicemail when they call local small businesses simply hang up and call the next one on the search engine results page. So small businesses still depending on voicemail have two things impacting their acquisition of potential new customers. First, people hate voicemail thanks to the cellular carriers and second, purchasing is an emotional decision. When someone calls your business they are looking to talk to a live person and when get voicemail, according to Fortune, 80% of them hang up.

  3. The only available alternative for these small businesses is to use an answering service. Ironically, it was voicemail that inspired the exodus from answering services in the early nineties. Now, 20 years later, small businesses are poised to return to answering services as result of voicemail. Fortunately for them, there are emerging new cloud based answering services from companies like Main Virtual Office and US Answer. These companies are offering all kinds of functionality at a fraction of the cost of the old answering service companies. About Jim Plunkett Once lead engineer on the cleanup of the nations worst hazardous waste sites, Jim entered the digital world in 1999 as a cofounder of Vacation Harbor (think AirB&B1.0). Jim is presently Cofounder of Main Virtual Office and US Answer a cloud based answering service company and mobile app in Portland, Maine.

More Related