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SEPTEMBER 1, 2000

TECHNOLOGY

Take a Message
A multitude of voice-mail systems can help you keep up with an active, mobile world

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So you've found the perfect phone system. The next question is: Who answers their own phone these days? People are on the road, or in meetings, or on another line. So voice mail has become a ubiquitous, indispensable, sometimes annoying fact of life. And a business that can't be sure it's getting its messages intact may not be a business for long.

These days, voice-mail systems have far outgrown the tape-based answering machine of a decade ago. Those worked, but barely. Tapes broke or skipped and required rewinding and fast-forwarding. Yet the concept remains pretty good: You buy a piece of hardware, plug it in, and get on with life.

TAPELESS TALK. These days, digital technology makes the tape obsolete. The AT&T 1725, for instance, has 24 minutes of tape-free recording time, four voice mailboxes (one for you, others for co-workers or family members), and three outgoing announcements (for business hours and after hours). Callers can bypass the announcement by pushing the * key. And you pay just $70 for the machine. For half that, Sony's TAM-100 gives you 15 minutes of recording time and three message boxes.

Of course, one drawback to an answering machine is that the caller must be able to reach it, hard to do if your lines are tied up. For that reason, voice-mail systems hosted by Verizon, Qwest, or any of the other constantly morphing Baby Bells have become enormously popular. They're reliable -- 99.8% reliability for capturing and storing messages, says Qwest -- and the telephone company has the headache of maintaining and upgrading the hardware. Prices vary but generally run between $6 to $10 a month.

Few people know about another option to the telco-provided service: Voice mail supplied by a third-party reseller. This service is essentially telco voice mail on steroids. Features include the ability to set up multiple mailboxes and give the caller the option of dialing in to different people or departments. If a call goes to the wrong mailbox, the recipient can transfer it to another. Such systems can also be set up to notify you by pager or wireless phone that you have a call waiting. The cost is usually about $15 per voice mailbox. Look up a communications consultant in the Yellow Pages, and call for information on such systems.

SKINFLINTS' OPTION. The drawback to telco voice mail, of course, is that it's a small but unending drain on cash, and the phone companies keep bumping up the price. Cheapskates, however, have an out: Free voice mail. Evoice, for example, offers its Web-based service gratis. Users sign up, tell Evoice a little about themselves, and get a personal identification number. After that, it works like telco voice mail. Messages can be retrieved from the Evoice Web site as a media file or by calling a toll-free number.

The catch? A big one for busy business owners: Before you get your messages, you have to listen to a 15-second advertisement for a product or service that Evoice thinks you'll be interested in. That might make those messy old tapes look pretty good.