Visual voicemail

What is visual voicemail?

Visual voicemail (VVM) is a convenient and practical telephony feature that gives you greater control over your voicemail. It’s a useful feature of Dialpad’s VoIP phone service, allowing you to see a snapshot of all the voicemail messages you’ve received. Messages are transcribed so you can read them if listening to them isn’t practical.

How visual voicemail works in Dialpad

With a traditional voicemail system, when you receive a new message, you’ll get a voicemail notification, often via text.

From there, you need to call your voicemail inbox, possibly enter a voicemail password or PIN, and then listen to all your messages—in reverse chronological order.

Visual voicemail, which is a feature that usually comes included as part of a small business or enterprise phone system, is much more convenient.

With Dialpad, for instance, you’ll be able to see all the voicemail messages in your inbox as if they’d been received as SMS messages. Dialpad’s inbox is sorted into different tabs, helping you easily find what you’re looking for. Dialpad even emails both the audio and text versions of the voicemail transcription file to you for easy sharing or to forward it along in a messaging thread!

Simply navigate to the “Voicemails” tab, and you’ll be presented with a list of all your messages. You’ll see the identity of the caller, when the message was left and a brief preview of the message text. The audio file of the message can be easily played from here, too:

Get more than just visual voicemail software with Dialpad

The benefits of having visual voicemail

Access to a visual voicemail feature can benefit your organisation in many ways. Here are just a few of the perks visual voicemail provides:

It makes you more efficient and productive

Because visual voicemail allows you to see all your messages at a glance, it can save you a lot of time. There’s no need to listen to each message one by one—instead, you can quickly scan the most vital messages and deal with them first.

For sales teams, it means messages from prospects and leads can be responded to more quickly, allowing you to strike while the iron is hot, maximising your chances of securing a conversion.

Administration of your voicemail inbox also becomes much easier. Voicemails are stored in your inbox, alongside your other messages and call recordings. This means you can quickly cross-reference messages without switching between different phone apps or services.

It lets you document conversations

Voicemail transcription allows you to see a quick snippet of your voicemail messages as you scroll through your inbox, so you can easily identify messages by their content.

Dialpad Ai provides incredibly accurate transcription, not only of voicemails, but of live calls as well. Having an accurate transcription to refer back to ensures you never miss any of the important details in messages and gives you the confidence that what you’re reading is a good representation of what the caller said.

How to set up and manage your visual voicemail

Setting up visual voicemail on Dialpad is quick and easy, and you can change your voicemail settings anytime.

You can record a custom voicemail greeting which provides a more personalised experience for callers from the start, helping them feel like they’ve had a personal interaction even if you’ve not been able to answer their call.

To do this, navigate to Settings > Call Handling & Voicemail. From there, you can record a new greeting:

To access voicemail when you’ve received a message, you can check it in your inbox. Simply navigate to Mobile Inbox > Voicemails.

From your inbox, you can listen to the audio files of your voicemails, or read their transcripts. Other important details, such as Caller ID, date, time, and message length are also displayed prominently.

The drop-down menu next to each message gives you still further options. You can mark messages as read, flag important voicemails, delete old or unimportant messages, or forward them as emails.

Visual voicemail: A better way to handle voicemail messages

Visual voicemail is included as a feature in many of the best small business phone systems, because of how much it can streamline receiving and acting on voicemails.

The extra information provided as part of a visual voicemail service makes it quicker and easier to search through and respond to messages. It allows you to prioritise the most important messages and ensures you never miss an important detail, all while improving the privacy and security of your messages.

If you’re looking for a unified communications solution that gives you access to visual voicemail and other features like call forwarding and many more, look no further than Dialpad.