Voicemail answers a call nobody can take, plays a greeting and records the caller's message. In a business phone system it is usually the last step of a routing plan: outside opening hours, when every agent is busy, or when a caller chooses it in an IVR menu.
What makes voicemail useful for a team:
- Clear greetings: say who the caller has reached, when someone will call back and what to leave in the message. Use separate greetings for opening hours, closed hours and holidays.
- Shared mailboxes: voicemail on a team number goes to a shared inbox rather than one person's phone, so anyone can pick it up.
- Fast callbacks: a message is a customer waiting. Track voicemails like any other request and call back quickly.
In outbound calling, voicemail is the other side of the problem: an answered call can reach a machine instead of a person. Answering-machine detection sorts these calls so agents do not spend their day listening to greetings.
In OVOKY, voicemail is an IVR step and one of the overflow actions of call queues. Voicemails arrive in the shared omnichannel inbox with the contact's history, and bulk numbers have a voicemail on every number from day one, with greetings uploaded or generated from text.