Leaving messages for 20 years!

It’s been 20 years since we launched voicemail on the O2 network. It’s been a great 20 years and here’s a lowdown on one of our longest running services.

Voicemail’s one of our most popular services and has been there for all our customers ever since 1989. Business customers describe it as the most important service for them, while consumer customers rank it second behind text messaging.

To celebrate voicemail’s 20th birthday, here are a few facts and figures you may not have realised.

• Over 11 million O2 customers have voicemail
• 1 in 5 calls to an O2 customer are diverted to voicemail
• More than 2 million voicemail messages are left every day

With those numbers, it’s fair to say that if you’ve used a mobile in the UK you may well have used our voicemail service, either by leaving a message or using it yourself! You may also have seen voicemail’s latest evolution, Visual Voicemail, on the iPhone.

Of course, we’ve been bringing new useful features to voicemail over the years. We’re doing it right now in fact – we’re changing the system that runs our voicemail to a brand new one to help us keep going in the future. Don’t worry though, you won’t notice any difference and it’ll be a seamless transfer from our current system to the new one.

Here’s to another 20 years! We’d love to know your favourite memories of the last twenty years or your hopes for the next 20 – leave us a comment below or drop us a line on Twitter.

Comments

[Andrew Johnson]

I have been using my iPhone with o2 for about 8 months now and I just love the visual voicemail. I can pick and choose who I listen to first and as a relaxation coach who simply can't have his phone on during a days training, believe you me, this is a blessing.

[Dave]

I remember when I had a mobile phone and a pager in the early 90's. Weird to believe but many people like me at the time kept their mobile swiched off most of the time and used it mainly for outgoing calls. This was partly down to the relateively short battery life of the mobiles at the time. In the office, we all used fixed lines. With my mobile switched off, a caller would leave a message on my voicemail which in turn would trigger my pager, prompting me to dial in and pick up the message. Unthinkable now!