At one point in time, having business voicemail made the difference between making or losing a sale, getting or losing a new customer or even letting IT know that a bug is on the loose and causing problems internally, or at a customer location. You were able to leave a dedicated message for the person you’re trying to reach – no answering service, secretary or any other middle man interfering with the exact words and tone you want to convey. Voicemail’s rival has been email. But still, voicemail can feel more proactive. There’s something about leaving a message in your own voice that feels like you have control over your business-destiny.

Now fast forward to today’s multi-modal, on-the-go climate for business-communications. It’s not enough to know that you’ve done your duty and left a voicemail for that key person. You want assurance that leaving voicemail is in fact the best way of getting your message through. And you would actually like to know that your message will be considered a priority, which means it will be heard based on its contents, rather than based on where it sits in the queue (last message left = last message heard).

Voicemail is also a key perpetrator in that tedious-and-time-consuming game: telephone-tag. Leaving a message and waiting for a reply costs businesses time and money, especially when returned calls are repeatedly missed. The telephone tag game can go on and on, wasting an employee’s time and racking up costly cell minutes when those calls are placed from a cell-based mobile phone.

How can you ensure your message is viewed as a priority, and how can you avoid phone tag? Enter Unified Communications (and mobile VoIP) apps, Presence and visual voicemail.

With Presence, mobile workers can broadcast their availability, indicating the best way to be reached (voice & text, voice-only, text-only or unavailable.) By setting Presence according to availability, mobile workers indicate to colleagues which method of communication is the most likely to be answered on the first try. They eliminate the time-consuming and costly (cell minutes) game of phone-tag, and they will have the opportunity to answer a question immediately. This means problems can be resolved in as little time possible.

Adding visual voicemail to the equation, mobile workers are able to eyeball messages waiting in their inboxes. This often means they can identify priority-messages immediately and respond to those first. This is far preferable to listening to each message (and there can be many after a cross-Atlantic plane flight) before learning who left each message and what level of urgency is attached.

It’s not so much that the sun has set on the time of voicemail. But rather this unified communication tool has reached a new, more sophisticated era. One that will help streamline business the way voicemail originally set out to do. Presence and visual voicemail are two advances in communication that will make reaching mobile workers a more efficient, and less expensive, process. These are core capabilities of the DiVitas Mobile Unified Communications solution.