As a Time Warner digital phone (VoIP) subscriber, I've been relatively happy. The phone does what it's supposed to, gives me the features I want, and I get a price break since I'm already a TW cable and internet subscriber. It's not the price of something like Vonage, but then again, security alarm companies won't allow you to use Vonage for their alarm phone-home services (too unreliable) — but they will let you use TWC digital phone.
I received an email today from TW inviting me to take a survey about the digital phone service with a chance to win $500 in a drawing for completing the survey. Never one to turn down a free chance to win money, I went ahead and took the survey.
About 5 questions into the 68 question survey, they start asking questions about their Digital Voicemail service, which is one of the things I choose not to use. As the questions go on and on ("Do you use Digital Voicemail?" "Why do you not use Digital Voicemail?" "What can we do to get you to use Digital Voicemail?") I start to laugh at the survey.
There were about 45 or so questions asked related to rating new features of Digital Voicemail and how interested I would be to see them implemented. I answered honestly, but in most cases, my rating was "1 – Not interested at all". I mean, if I'm not interested in the product, why would I be interested in adding features to it?
Oh, and for the record, it appears that TW is investigating a push into the cell-phone service provider market (partnering with Sprint). Sounds like they figured out that some people are with AT&T because they can get everything from one place, and are trying to poach customers from them, or at least convince others to join the flock with a similar mantra.
In case one of YOU is interested in what they're looking into, here are some of the various things they are considering, based on what they were asking me to rate:
- One voicemail box between your cell phone and home phone
- One number that would ring all of your phones (including cell phones) so you could choose which to answer on
- One bill for all your services (woo, now I can finally see exactly how much out the butt I'm paying in one lump sum!)
- Being able to access your voicemail through your TV
- Having a Digital Voicemail guide available off the internet for you to download and print out
- Having a Digital Voicemail guide available in hard copy format (I guess mailed to you, so you don't have to print it out)
- Having voicemail notifications sent to you in various forms (email, text message, instant message, TV, etc.)
- Having voicemails transcribed and sent to you in various forms (email, text message, instant message, etc.)
- Having your voicemail menu system mimic your current work/cell voicemail menu options (because it is so hard to figure out whether you should press '3' or '7' to delete a message)
- Being able to screen your calls by listening to people leaving their message (much like you can do with a hardware answering machine today)
Any of that make YOU want to become a Time Warner Digital Voicemail subscriber?
