The voicemail no one listened to

The phone at Clima Sureste rang in a particular way: three tones, and if nobody picked up, a recorded voice came on. The owner's son had recorded it in 2019, when he was twenty-two. He now lived in Germany. "You've reached Clima Sureste. Please leave your message after the tone."

Mari Carmen had been answering that phone for nine years. In winter, eight or ten calls a day came in and there was no problem. In July, sixty came in. She picked up the ones she could. The rest went to voicemail.

One Tuesday in August, at half past two, she sat down with her sandwich and looked at the display on the desk phone. It said: 41 new messages.

That number had been there for days. Maybe weeks. She didn't know.

What was inside the voicemail

We listened to them together, with a notebook in front of us. It took an hour and forty minutes, because some people leave a two-minute message to say please call me back on this number.

Of the forty-one: eighteen were breakdowns. Nine were people asking for a quote on an installation. Six were sales calls. Four were suppliers. Three were the same man, an Emilio, who called on the Monday, the Wednesday and the Friday of the same week, each time sounding slightly less friendly, asking whether anyone was going to call him back about the air conditioning in his wife's hairdressing salon.

Emilio's last message lasted eleven seconds. It said: "Never mind, I've sorted it out."

And one was from a residents' association in La Alberca. Five units. That message was sixteen days old.

Mari Carmen wrote the numbers in the notebook and started calling. Of the eighteen breakdowns, fourteen had already been fixed by another company. Of the nine quotes, seven were no longer needed either.

What they asked for and what they needed

Paco, the owner, put it to me like this in our first meeting:

—What I need is a proper phone system. One that spreads the calls out. If Mari Carmen is busy, it rings someone else's mobile.

—And who is someone else?

Paco thought about it.

—Well... the lads are out on jobs. With their hands inside a unit. They can't answer the phone.

—Then the call is still going to end up in the voicemail.

—Fair enough. But at least I'd have tried to spread it.

The problem wasn't the spreading. The problem was that in that company a voice message didn't exist until somebody put on a headset and listened to the whole thing. You couldn't skim it. You couldn't search it. You couldn't tell whether it was urgent without spending forty seconds finding out. And when there are forty-one of them, those forty seconds turn into half a morning, and nobody has half a morning free in August.

Paco wanted fewer calls to reach the voicemail. What he needed was for the ones that did to be readable.

How it works, no smoke

We built something small. The voicemail stopped being a voicemail and became a list.

When someone leaves a message, the audio is transcribed to text automatically. The transcript is stored alongside the phone number, the time and the original audio, in case anyone needs to hear it. Then a classifier reads that text and tags it: breakdown, quote, supplier or sales call. If the text mentions no cold air, a leak, or a shop that has had to close, it gets flagged as urgent.

All of it shows up on a single screen, sorted by time, with the number, the tag and the first three lines of what the person said. You read it at a glance. Each line has one button: called back.

It's worth saying what this does not do, because it's easy to sell the opposite. It doesn't answer anyone. It doesn't send an automatic message. It doesn't decide who gets served first. And the transcription isn't perfect: with drilling in the background and an unusual surname, it gets things wrong. That's why the original audio is still there, one click away.

All it does is turn forty-one audio files into forty-one lines of text. It sounds like very little. It's the difference between a job that takes an hour and a half and one that takes four minutes.

What changed

The first figure is silly and it's the most important one: the unheard-message counter stopped existing. Not because fewer come in, but because they all get read, every day, over the first coffee.

Over the following four months, 91% of messages were returned the same day. Before, measured against the history we could reconstruct, fewer than half were returned within the day.

Of those nine lost quotes from the August voicemail, seven had gone to another company. Over the following four months, fourteen installations were won that, with the old setup, would have stayed inside the answering machine. Paco worked out what they added up to. I won't put the figure here, but it was several times what all of this cost to build.

And there was a side effect nobody had asked for. With the messages in text, you could search them. A customer called in October saying he had already reported the same problem in the summer. Mari Carmen typed his number into the search box and there it was, the message from 3 August, with its transcript. The customer was right.

The morning list

Mari Carmen prints the list every morning. We told her she didn't need to, that she could keep it on screen. She prints it anyway. She crosses off the ones she has called with a blue biro, and at the end of the day she throws the paper in the bin.

One day I asked her why she printed it if the called back button did exactly the same thing.

—Because this way I can see what's left, she said. Before, I didn't know who I hadn't called yet. That's what kept me awake. Not the work. The not knowing.

She presses the button too, by the way. Both things.