JULY 30, 2009, 12:27 PM
'Take Back the Beep' Campaign
Update | 11:17 p.m. AT&T's Mark Seigel has asked that complaint messages be sent to a different e-mail address, provided below.
Update | 7:50 p.m. Will England of Sprint says the company has now created a brand-new customer forum dedicated to this topic.
Update | 5:19 p.m. T-Mobile had deleted hundreds of complaints on this topic from its forum, and even blocked any new messages containing the word "beep." But it has now created a new forum just for complaints on this topic, linked below.
Over the past week, in The New York Times and on my blog, I've been ranting about one particularly blatant money-grab by American cellphone carriers: the mandatory 15-second voicemail instructions.
Suppose you call my cell to leave me a message. First you hear my own voice: "Hi, it's David Pogue. Leave a message, and I'll get back to you"-and THEN you hear a 15-second canned carrier message.
- Sprint: "[Phone number] is not available right now. Please leave a detailed message after the tone. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press pound for more options."
- Verizon: "At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press 1 for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5. (Beep)"
- AT&T: "To page this person, press five now. At the tone, please record your message. When you are finished, you may hang up, or press one for more options."
- T-Mobile: "Record your message after the tone. To send a numeric page, press five. When you are finished recording, hang up, or for delivery options, press pound."
(You hear a similar message when you call in to hear your own messages. "You. Have. 15. Messages. To listen to your messages, press
1." WHY ELSE WOULD I BE CALLING?)I, the voicemailbox owner, cannot turn off this additional greeting message. You, the caller, can bypass it, but only if you know the secret keypress-and it's different for each carrier. So you'd have to know which cellphone carrier I use, and that of every person you'll ever call; in other words, this trick is no solution.
[UPDATE: Apple iPhone owners don't hear these instructions--Apple insisted that AT&T remove them. And Sprint already DOES let you turn off the instructions message, although it's a buried, multi-step procedure, which you can read in the comments below.]These messages are outrageous for two reasons. First, they waste your time. Good heavens: it's 2009. WE KNOW WHAT TO DO AT THE BEEP.
Do we really need to be told to hang up when we're finished!? Would anyone, ever, want to "send a numeric page?" Who still carries a pager, for heaven's sake? Or what about "leave a callback number?" We can SEE the callback number right on our phones!
Second, we're PAYING for these messages. These little 15-second waits add up-bigtime. If Verizon's 70 million customers leave or check messages twice a weekday, Verizon rakes in about $620 million a year. That's your money. And your time: three hours of your time a year, just sitting there listening to the same message over and over again every year.
In 2007, I spoke at an international cellular conference in Italy. The big buzzword was ARPU-Average Revenue Per User. The seminars all had titles like, "Maximizing ARPU In a Digital Age." And yes, several attendees (cell executives) admitted to me, point-blank, that the voicemail instructions exist primarily to make you use up airtime, thereby maximizing ARPU.
Right now, the carriers continue to enjoy their billion-dollar scam only because we're not organized enough to do anything about it. But it doesn't have to be this way. You don't have to sit there, waiting to leave your message, listening to a speech recorded by a third-grade teacher on Ambien.
Let's push back, and hard. We want those time-wasting, money-leaking messages eliminated, or at least made optional.
...
Let's all do our part: just as soon as I find out what the "magic" keypress is, I'm modifying my voicemail message to say "This is Bill Horne, press to record, or wait for the useless message that puts on here to eat up your time."
Bill Horne Moderator