iPhone SpinVox Users: Visual vs Visible?

Recently, me and a couple of the guys here at SV HQ started thinking about Visual Voicemail on the iPhone.
Y’all know what Visual Voicemail is right?

That funky little feature that everyone raved about when it was first announced etc?
Yeah, that.

So we were talking about that and started to really unpick the whole idea behind it.
First of all, for the record:

I am not an iPhone user (shh!)

Which means that a lot of what I started kicking around was simply theory…
(at first anyway - but we’ll come to that later).

I do know mobile though and Visual Voicemail, as a proposition, is awesome –

I know this, several million iPhone users know this BUT our users are still opting out of using Visual Voicemail fantastic service and choosing SpinVox instead.

So this begs the question why?
I thought on this some more…

If visual voicemail *shows* you your mail – to me, it’s like having your post delivered to your doorstep. Literally.
Let me show you what I mean -

Closed envelopes fall into your inbox and you choose which ones you wish to open (and listen to) first.
Like so…

- Visual Voicemail -

And keeping with this old school mail analogy, SpinVox on the other hand shows you the contents of your post.
The envelopes arrive as letters and you can READ them.
Making your Voicemail visible: Ergo – Visible Voicemail.

- Visible Voicemail -

I suppose you could call it some kind of new naming convention we’re bandying around internally, but there’s only so much navel-gazing we can do before it gets opened out –
…If proved however, we could probably get a lot of mileage out of it
Your thoughts are very welcome.

We DELIVER Voicemail.

Whereas traditional voicemail is left in a box for you to go and retrieve/listen to.
Visual Voicemail allows you to see the post/mail in the box, and then you choose which to retrieve/listen to.
Visible Voicemail – SpinVox – DELIVERS the Voicemail direct to you, ready to read and with no retrieval necessary.

I mentioned earlier that this was merely theory and that it needed proving, what with me not being an iPhone user… well, it’d kinda help.

So - what do you think? Do you have an iPhone? Do you use SpinVox? I would love to see/read/hear your thoughts… I’m already lucky enough to get some opinions etc..

A couple of weeks back I was able to share these thoughts with some iPhone-owning, SpinVox using friends..

Here’s what they had to say:

“…I would say visual voicemail is and was really only aimed at North Americans who love to talk but only recently learnt how to text.

In Europe we now live in a text world so if there was any service Apple should have launched with the iphone it should have been a cloud app like SV.

Visual voicemail is really not visual in any real sense of the word at all since the content of the mail remains locked inside an envelope on the iphone’s screen.

It’s as useless as not seeing the list of voicemails at all…”

– Mike Butcher, TechCrunch UK

———————————–

“…I think you hit the nail on the head.
The two main benefits over visual voicemail for me are:

a) As you said, the fact that I can immediately see the contents of a message rather than having to take the time to call a number or even click a button (as the iphone shows texts on the home screen before you’ve even clicked to see them).

b) Secondly, with visual voicemail, there’s no way to save the contents of the message in text format (therefore searchable) for ever. There are details of people (both friends & clients) that I have recovered thanks to that and so it’s undeniably invaluable to me…”

– Zee @ We Do Creative:

———————————–

“I have my Spinvox voicemail come through to my MobileMe email address. This way I can receive voicemail notifications instantly (push email) but still have them accessible on my laptop (unlike SMS).

So, in a visual voicemail style, I browse my Spinvox voicemail using the iPhone’s email client. The only difference is, I don’t have to listen to them in order to receive the message.”

– Simon Maddox

———————————–

“It means the power / imperative / control of managing voicemail is in my hands – not in the hands of my MNO (am I in coverage to make the call?) or the person calling (I have forced you to dial in and listen to my message).

Having used SV for a year, I now cringe when leaving VM for others – I feel like I’m imposing on their time, making them check my message. I now don’t leave VM on mobiles – If it goes to VM, I send an SMS instead…”

– Mike @ INQ Mobile

———————————–

“…the convenience that comes from just getting a text from that person with the contents of the message is still way too much to overlook. I love being able to just look at a text message that tells me what the person said and respond with a text. People are more likely these days to return a text message promptly than a voicemail message.”

– Mark Burstiner

———————————–

So - what do you think?

Leave a comment,
Write a post yourself,
Email me: james dot whatley at spinvox dot com
Or even call and SpinVox me a message +447825798998

Looking forward to your feedback - fingers crossed there’ll be enough to do a follow up post next week.

Cheers,

James.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Information, SpinVox .
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