Voicemail MAX–More Craptastic Innovation From MNOs
Alltel Wireless, the largest of the regional CDMA mobile network operators (MNOs) announced they are now giving customers the ability to “personalize” their voicemail greetings with one of over 500 sound clips from various TV shows, comedians, and top-selling musicians.
The service, called Voicemail MAX, and is available with select handsets only. If you decide to purchase one of these audio snippets for your voicemail, it’s going to cost you $2.99 for the privilege.
Unfortunately, I am unimpressed. This is the kind of craptastic innovation we can expect from the carriers, though. They haven’t figured out how to be nothing more than a dumb pipe. And what’s wrong with that? Nothing, if you ask me. In fact, you need to make the pipe bigger AND dumb with five nines of reliability. That would be true innovation, if you ask me.
And one other thing–instead of paying lip service to the whole idea of being an open network, actually be open. Of course, if you’re really nothing more than a fat, dumb pipe, you’d actrally be open instead of just another 20th Century telco.
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Tags: alltel, mobile network operators, open networks Fnord
Comment by spg
do they think that we are idiots(maybe some of us are). how is this a service? i can play anything i like in the background while i recored my voice mail greeting on any VM system on this planet. what is the telecom world coming too?
Comment by PhoneBoy
@spg Ah, but the content is “licensed” this way. People make money on it, whereas your way, nobody makes money.
Still a stupid idea, but then again, this IS coming from an MNO.
Comment by spg
if any telecom company(particularly any small startup) wants to make money I suggest three things:
1. low pricing - if you are not called verizon or AT&T this is really the only thing that anyone looks at.
2. call quality - i am really thinking about VOIP service here; not enough companies are using exotic codecs and advanced techniques to provide quality that sets them apart from the competition. you can not charge extra for this; but it will help retain customers.
3. great customer service - this is seriously lacking with all but the smallest providers or the free open source services. take one look at the forums of skype, gizmo, or any other large VOIP provider that has such a forum and you find that the majority of comments are complaints about terrible customer service. again you probably can not charge extra for this but it should help attract and retain customers for the long term.
thats it. nothing else. only a tiny fraction of potential customers care about anything other than these three things. ok. gives us the basics like caller ID, etc. but forget about all the ‘innovative new features’ the other thing you find on VOIP forums(especially the grandcentral forum) is that everyone is frustratingly trying to turn of all the fancy features so there phone acts exactly as it always did. people are really happy with the way there phones work; you do not need to change anything there. just provide amazing price, quality, and service.
spg
p.s. if you are trying to attract silicon valley VC dollars I am sure that what i just suggested would be huge failure. but if you have the financing to startup. these are the things that have worked for centuries(since before the dawn of capitalism) in building customer satisfaction for any and all types of products and services.
Comment by PhoneBoy
spg I think you hit the nail on the head here.