I recently read about voicemail-to-email services and like the idea. I function better when I have fewer inboxes to monitor. I signed up at phonetag.com because they offer a seven-day free trial. They sent me instructions to start using the service the next day, which led me down a small rabbithole.
PhoneTag.com works as you might expect: you forward your unanswered calls to their service, your caller leaves voicemail with them instead of your current phone service, someone or something transcribes the voicemail to text, then they email the text to you and can send you a text message, if you like. It sounds great: no more phoning in to retrieve messages, since they can easily push those messages to me.
Unfortunately, it didn’t go as smoothly as I’d like.
I tried to forward unanswered calls to PhoneTag.com’s phone number. My phone responded with “Request not completed”. After a few attempts, I called Rogers Wireless and they forwarded all my calls for me, which allowed me to test the PhoneTag.com service. It worked. Sadly, the Rogers customer service representative told me that I had to choose between Rogers voicemail and trying out PhoneTag.com. Wait… what?!
As long as I subscribe to Rogers voicemail, I can only forward all calls or none. This means that I cannot forward only unanswered calls to PhoneTag.com unless I first remove the Rogers voicemail service from my account. I imagine eliminating Rogers voicemail will increase (!) my monthly fee, because service packages tend to work that way, and I didn’t want to deal with that possibility at that moment, so I had to abandon my PhoneTag.com experiment for the moment.
If you subscribe to Rogers Wireless and have used or still use PhoneTag.com, then please share your experience with us. I’d like to know whether you find it worthwhile.