English: Original Caller Identification receiver installed at Boeing/PEC facility in Huntsville Alabama (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I just read another blog that asked why businesses bother paying for voice mail any longer. And it got me to thinking. Why are companies still offering and charging a lot for telephone features in general?

Let’s face it, traditional TDM voice is dying. It may take a few decades for people like my mother to give up her home phone but, but residential voice is going to continue to shrink and shrink until it becomes a pretty marginal product. Don’t get me wrong about the need to still offer voice – 60% of homes and most businesses still have voice – so a full-service carrier needs to have a voice product.

But a lot of homes only carry a phone line to have a 911 phone or to be able to fax. And more and more businesses are going mobile instead of pouring big dollars into fixed phone systems.

What no longer makes sense is to have a large pile of very expensive features and options that people must add to basic telephone service. You are going to drive your voice customers away even faster than they are already leaving if you are still selling voice mail and caller ID as expensive additives to a voice line.

The blog I read asks why any businessman even bothers to use voice mail today, and it’s a great question. The people who know you can always find you some other way to reach you like text or email. I know for myself that the very last and worst way to find me is to leave me a voice mail. And when I get somebody else’s voice mail I rarely leave a message any more, but instead hang up and send them an email or sometimes a text (I am slow with my thumbs). And so voice mail is turning into the way that you communicate with strangers. Unless you are a salesperson, you are not going to find this all that useful.

The cell phone companies have it right. They don’t even offer features and everything they have is included in the basic phone. Granted they have convinced people to pay a huge dollar premium for mobility, but the line they sell you includes all the features. And with smart phones people can easily customize their calling all they want by adding phone apps.

I have been advising for over a decade for my clients to include most features automatically in their base product. Telephone carriers are competing against cell phones or the cable company, both of which give away most features.  The goal today with a voice product is to keep your customers as long as possible – not to nickel and dime them to death with features prices from $1 to $5 each per month. So look at your product line in terms of being customer friendly and competitive – and stop thinking that features are a way to make money.

There might be one feature package that might still make sense as a standalone product – a robust unified messaging platform. But this can’t just be glorified voice mail or nobody is going to pay extra for it. It needs to include the whole suite of tools that make voice usable across all platforms – follow-me service, voice to text, text to voice.

And rather than charge extra for features for your business customers you should be offering them IP Centrex that has all of the traditional features plus all of the features of cell phones built-in. If you can’t give your customers a business line that will do everything they want they will eventually bypass you in favor of somebody who will give them what they want. Note that there are now a few dozen companies that are selling IP Centrex lines over any web connection. So you cannot count on keeping your business customers just because they have always used you.