Rules for Leaving Effective, Useful Voice Mail by Ellen Simon



Be brief, be concise and, most of all, don't waste people's time, experts warn

By ELLEN SIMON
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

If you would like to leave a long, rambling message with no apparent point, please hang up now.

If you are calling to verify that your e-mail has been received, please go outside and do five laps around the block.


If you'd like to leave five numbers and the different hours of the day you might be reached at those numbers, please quit your job, begin taking daily Bikram yoga classes and move to Santa Fe.

If you are Alec Baldwin, please hang up and call your attorney.

Voice mail used to be so useful. But somewhere along the line it drifted from brief messages saying, "Hello, it's Jordan. We have reservations at 6:30 at Savoy for dinner. See you there," to painful, musing, hard-to-comprehend monologues.

And we're not just talking about Baldwin's voice-mail-heard-round-the-world to his 11-year-old daughter, calling her a "thoughtless little pig." We're talking about the business world.

Greg Brown, editorial director of the financial publishing group at Newsmax Media Inc. based in West Palm Beach, Fla., said he follows specific rules when leaving a voice mail, saying his number twice, slowly, then his name with a brief message, then his number, plus an e-mail option.

Why?

"Because I am so annoyed at this message, which I get 15 times a day," he said. " 'Hiiiii, Greg, this is Allan, well, I was thinking about our, uh, conversation, and I think that maybe a good way to do the next step might be uh (long pause while he fiddles with a door, or something) get together and talk about it, maybe get a drink, I dunno ... hey, maybe we could involve the people in marketing, too, well, maybe, it's a thought. Anyway, give me a call. ..."

Then, there are the mystery callers.

"People leave a message saying, 'Hey, it's me. I can't wait to tell you something. Call me back,' " said Honoree Corpron, an executive coach based in Las Vegas. "And I play it over and over, wondering,
 'Who is this?' "

In the age of caller ID, it's somewhat easier to figure out, but not always.

"I had a woman call recently, saying, 'Hi. It's Cathy.' We had a bad connection, I called her back and got her outgoing voice mail that said: 'Hi. It's Cathy.' There are days when I talk to 200 people. Cathy is not an uncommon name. Is it Cathy my neighbor? Cathy the Realtor? I still don't know who she is," Corpron said.

As we clean our desks and promise to start the new year fresh, perhaps it's time to rethink how we handle voice mail. Some tips:
  • Nix the list of alternate numbers when you leave a message. "Forward your phone instead," said Caroline Ceniza-Levine, who co-owns a New York-based career coaching company called Sixfigurestart.com. "Don't ask the caller to hunt you down. It's disrespectful of their time. They already tried to reach you once."
  • If you can't keep your outgoing voice mail short, give callers a way to bypass a long message. "There are people who, when I call them, I make sure I have five minutes: Three minutes to listen to their outgoing message, two minutes to leave a message," Corpron said.
  • Leave brief messages. "Never leave voice mail longer than 30 seconds," said Chris Carpinello, a software engineer at Lancope, a network operations company based in Atlanta. "If you can't convey why we need to chat in that time, you are not communicating effectively, which is tantamount to wasting my time. Think of voice mail like a resume. Efficiently 'sell' yourself to me and provide a compelling reason to follow up with you."
  • If you have vast amounts of information to convey, send it another way, like e-mail.
Finally, if you're not in a job in which doing so could get you fired or indicted, you might want to have some fun with your voice mail.

National Discount Brokers was well known around 2000 for its voice-mail instructions, which ended with, "If you'd like to hear a duck quack, press seven." So many people did that it became part of the company's marketing.

Corpron said she's left an outgoing message saying: "Hi, it's Honoree. I'm out doing my Christmas shopping and I need some additional cash. Please leave your name and your American Express card number."

"People do it!" she said.

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