More Than A Number

Voicemail has been an invaluable resource for many a call center solution for decades. But where did this technology come from? In terms of the “inventor” of voicemail, there is no real answer for that. It is, of course, impossible to prove who first came up with the concept that made the inbound call center system viable. If you are going by terms of who made a commercially useful product, invention of voicemail could be considered something of a tie between Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and IBM. However, commercially viable and commercialized aren’t the same thing. Voicemail became popular in the corporate sphere thanks to the efforts of Octel Communications. The first manufacturer to integrate voicemail with a PBX system was ROLM Corporation; this also played a major role in the commercialization of the technology. Now a corporate and call center staple, there were many “cooks” involved in voicemail’s invention.