Ringless voicemail is the ability to leave a voicemail without ringing the phone. We will be talking about ringless voicemail from the fundamental concepts. When talking to one of my clients, The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon’s famous catchphrase “Bazinga” came to my mind. My client Jonny (not his real name) wanted to implement Ringless VoiceMail or RVM to his phone system. He gave me the website www.drop.co which provides the RVM feature.  This feature can be a little expensive, but it is good for targeting people who are older than 50 years old. I’ll explain how it works, and include some technical details in the sections, below.  Add your stories and comments, too! 👇

Lets learn about Ringless Voicemail

As mentioned before, ringless voicemail is the ability to leave a voicemail without ringing the phone. Marketers use this feature to leave thousands of voicemail, especially for older people. It turns out older people always listen to their voicemail. Johnny thought that instead of doing voice broadcast, we can do ringless voicemail instead because voice broadcast is illegal. Bazinga! From my perspective ringless voicemail is a form of broadcast. 

I am sure that you most likely experience voice broadcasts if you live in the United States. It is one of those fake calls, trying to sell you something. Usually, the call comes in, and as soon as you pick up, a back end phone system plays an announcement, followed by some prompt option to connect to some agent to close the deal. Whoever uses voice broadcast needs to be TCPA compliant. Here is the basic operation of RVM: 

1. 🔕 The phone system will make two calls. After the initial call, the phone system follows with a second call, which will leave the voicemail.
2. 🔕 The phone system detects when the target phone answers the second call and hangs-up the initial call as soon as that happens. The initial call may also have a timer, in milliseconds, to hang-up if the second call does not get answered.
3. 🔕 The second call triggers the voicemail system to pick up. When the phone system hears a beep, it  starts playing Jonny’s pre-recorded message
4. 🔕 Lastly, the phone system hangs-up after playing the pre-recording.

Cell phone and landlines

It is important to note that the carrier identifies a phone number as a cell or landline. Ringless voicemail works very well with cell phone numbers because almost all cell numbers have voicemail and use similar voicemail system structure.  The non-cell number, on the other hand, is not standardized, and therefore unpredictable. Some numbers have no voicemail. When calling the number two time, the receiver may hear a small ring or pesky little beep, if they have call-waiting. If it is not clear to you yet, a ringless voicemail drop was discovered accidentally. Ringless voicemail is a true Bazinga in my opinion. 

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