Mobile phone customers want visual experience: Survey

January 9, 2008

More than two-thirds of the surveyed would pay extra for advanced voice features

A survey of Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile and Sprint customers shows that consumers want a more visual mobile phone experience. 

The survey was conducted for U.S. wireless carriers that are considering deploying SpinVox, which converts voicemail into text and sends it to a user as an SMS text message or email. SpinVox cited the iPhone’s presence in the market as a factor in the new attention on visual voicemail.

“While voicemail is the second-greatest form of communication in the office behind email, it has gone largely unimproved for decades,” said Tony Carter, spokesman for SpinVox, Atlanta. “The survey shows a pent-up demand for something more intuitive, more dynamic and brings a real-time environment to voicemail.”

The survey used service demonstrations, an Internet-based survey engine and open feedback tools to investigate what consumers like and dislike about current voicemail services.

Participants were able to test SpinVox and have their impressions measured. During each trial, in addition to receiving their converted voicemails in text format on their mobile devices, respondents also received conversions in the form of emails.

More than 78 percent of respondents would buy the service if offered by their carrier network

The survey revealed that while most U.S. consumers get their current voicemail service for free, more than two-thirds said they would pay extra for the type of advanced features that they were able to experience during the survey.

Most participants were keen on the ability to avoid dialing into voicemail to retrieve messages; not having to write down details within a voicemail; being able to discreetly read messages without having to listen; and being able to respond to messages with a single click to call, SMS or send email.

More than 3,300 SpinVox voicemail-to-text trial users were surveyed about their experience via an Internet based survey engine. Of that number, about 1,050 responded.

Out of the participants who tested SpinVox, more than 90 percent were sufficiently impressed with the capabilities demonstrated to them and said they would be likely to recommend SpinVox to a friend.

More than 78 percent of respondents said they were "very" or "somewhat likely" to buy the service if it was offered by their carrier network.

SpinVox brings together voice and text for a new category of messaging called voice-to-screen. The service is powered by a voice message conversion system, which works by combining speech technologies with a live-learning language process.

“From a marketing standpoint, it’s not a big leap to expect consumers to embrace other value-added enhancements to voicemail,” Mr. Carter said. “In the not-so-distant future, we will have the technology to add intelligent marketing components to conversions.”