Please don’t leave a message after the beep

When’s the last time you listened to a voicemail message?

Well if you work for Coca-Cola, you might never have to listen to a voicemail again. The soft drink giant announced it’s eliminating its voicemail system. Bloomberg Businessweek reported that the company would save about $100,000 a year by getting rid of it.

How quickly things change, laments Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

“It's astonishing how behavioral norms have evolved, because it used to be that if you got voicemail you were upset and you hung up on the person," Schrage says. "Then, a few months later, … you were upset if a live person actually answered the phone because you’d prefer just to leave a message,” Schrage says.

Voicemail has taken a 180-degree turn since the answering machine was first introduced in the early 1980s and touted as a miracle invention — a godsend for the house and a windfall for office productivity. So what happened?

Today we have so many ways to communicate with one another and with so many ways to connect, voicemail has become a pain rather than a problem-solver, Schrage says.

“As those options have expanded voicemail hasn’t become more desirable. It’s become less desirable up to the point of eradicating it from your life,” he adds.

So perhaps the demise of the answer machine is a collective moment to say goodriddens. So how will Coca-Cola, and other companies that follow them, deal with customers and colleagues whose calls can't be answered in real time?

“What they’re doing is outsourcing customer engagement to employees and their mobile phones and their mobile devices,” Schrage argues.

Even though voicemail may be a thing of the past, it doesn’t mean that the phone call is dead, according to Schrage.

“Just as there’s no substitute for face-to-face interaction, I don’t think for the majority of really interesting conversations and interactions there’s a substitute for 'v-to-v,'” Schrage says.

Sure, Schrage admits people under 35 are more likely to Tweet, Instagram, Facebook message or just plain text each other than pick up a phone and call.

“But, eventually, even adolescents grow up. That transcends any technological trends that I know,” he adds.

Time will be the judge. In the meantime if you want to get ahold of Professor Michael Schrage, don't leave message. Just text him and he'll call you right back.