ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604080049
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: FRANK GREVE KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
THIS TELEPHONE WIRE-CROSSING has led to a surge in the national frustration level that experts say didn't have to happen.
If you hate voice mail, press 1. If the mailbox is full, as it's likely to be, press 2 to reach an operator. If there isn't an operator, don't be surprised.
You're stuck - again - in one of electronic America's most overcrowded but unpopular destinations: voice-mail jail.
Officials of companies and government agencies have made voice-mail jails inescapable by slashing telephone answering staffs to the bone. Technerds made matters worse by assuming every caller could spell out last names on a phone's number pad nimbly and correctly, maybe standing up, without glasses.
Almost everyone seems to have presumed callers would know the difference between a sales and a marketing department, between billing and customer service. ``If you know exactly what you want, we can help,'' said Ernestine Fobb, a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service spokeswoman.
The result of all this telephone wire crossing has been a surge in the national frustration level that experts say didn't have to happen. While an advance by any objective measure over scrawled pink ``While You Were Out'' messages and busy signals, the answering devices also have become a symbol of corporate coldness.
``If companies really don't value their customers, they tend to use automated answering systems as a screen or a barrier, and that attitude seeps through to callers,'' said Martha Lindeman, of Columbus, Ohio, who makes a living humanizing voice-mail systems.
``That's a major reason why, when people complain about automated systems, their tone tends to be remarkably strong, as though the primacy of humanity in our culture is what the protester is really standing up for.''
The trouble began with Texas entrepreneur Gordon Matthews.
In the late 1970s, Matthews guessed - wrongly - that executives would jump at the chance to communicate via recorded voice memos. Not until the '80s, when the devices were rigged to answer phones, did they sell. Not until 1991 were computer capacity and reliability good enough to make automated voice-mail systems a real alternative to receptionists.
Since 1992, more than 50,000 telephone operators, about one in four, have lost their jobs, according to Commerce Department figures. Replacing them are sophisticated systems that as a rule cost about one-third of what human operators cost.
The lure of lower payrolls is what indirectly provokes most complaints. That's because even the best systems sometimes need live operators to help callers get around them. Standby operators during business hours are the top recommendation of the Voice Messaging Educational Committee, an industry panel formed in 1992.
Asking callers to spell out the names of people they're calling is one way of skimping on operators, but it's hardly perfect, hardly popular. ``It's very crazy. It doesn't work, and I hate it,'' sputtered Laura Maychruk, a Chicago Tribune office manager whose hard-to-spell name makes life harder.
And don't blame the system makers, says Daryle Gardner-Bonneau, a voice-mail trouble-shooter in Kalamazoo, Mich. More likely, Gardner-Bonneau says, frustrations are caused by skimping on operators or by flaws in the scripts telling callers what to do.
``Your power goes out. You call the power company. The recording asks you, `Is your problem between your house and the pole?' How are you supposed to know?''
LENGTH: Medium: 69 linesby CNB