Voice-mail - Message Centers

Message Centers

The conventional solution to efficient handling of telephone communication in businesses was the "message center." A message center or "message desk" was a centralized, manual answering service inside a company staffed by a few operators who answered all incoming phone calls. Extensions that were busy or rang "no answer" would forward to the message center using a device called a "call director". The call director had a button for each extension in the company which would flash when that person's extension forwarded to the message center. A little label next to the button told the operator the person being called.

While it was an improvement over basic multi-line systems, the message center had many disadvantages. Many calls would come in simultaneously at peak periods, such as lunch time, and operators were often busy. This left message attendants with little time to take each message accurately. Often, they were not familiar with employees' names and "buzzwords" and how to spell or pronounce them. Messages were scribbled on pink slips and distributed by the internal mail system and messages, often arrived at people's desks after lengthy delays, contained little content other than the caller's name and number, and were often inaccurate, with misspelled names and wrong phone numbers.

Tape-based telephone answering machines had come into the residential telephone market, but they weren't used much in the corporate environment due to physical limitations of the technology. One answering machine was needed for each telephone; messages couldn't be recorded if the user was using the phone; messages had to be retrieved in sequential order; and messages couldn't be retrieved remotely, selectively discarded, saved, or forwarded to others. Further, the manufacturers of PBXs (private branch exchanges — the name for corporate phone systems) used proprietary digital phone sets in order to increase the functionality and value of the PBX. These phone sets were, by design, incompatible with answering machines.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the cost of long distance calling decreased and more business communications were conducted by telephone. As corporations grew and labor rates increased, the ratio of secretaries to employees decreased. With multiple time zones, fewer secretaries and more communication by phone, real-time phone communications were hampered by callers being unable to reach people. Some early studies showed that only 1 in 4 phone calls resulted in a completed call and half the calls were one-way in nature (that is, they did not require a conversation). This happened because people were either not at work (due to time zone differences, being away on business, etc.), or if they were at work, they were on the phone, away from their desks in meetings, on breaks, etc. This bottleneck hindered the effectiveness of business activities and decreased both individual and group productivity. It also wasted the caller's time and created delays in resolving time-critical issues.