BT Call Minder

Someone left a message today on my BT answering service "BT Call Minder" and it reminded me how piss-poor their IVR messaging is.

"BT Call Minder. Thank you for calling. You've...ONE...new message. Main menu. To listen to your messages...press ONE or say ONE after the tone, to change your personal options..."
[1]
"FIRST...new message. Message. Received...TODAY at...NINE...FORTY-FOUR...A.M."

This is such a long-winded way of getting to your messages I'm amazed they aren't inundated with complaints. Let's just break it down:

BT Call Minder.
Yes, thanks I know who you are. I called you, remember?

Thank you for calling.
I'd like to say I appreciate your manners, but you're not real are you? You're a machine that has been programmed to thank me for calling. You don't really care if I call or not do you? You don't truly appreciate my call. So pretending you do is just another waste of my time. Get on with it.

You've...
If you thought the pauses at the end of the first two sentences were long, welcome to the variable part of the message, where the pauses are so long you can go away and make a cup of tea and still not miss anything meaningful. Really. I've used an ellipsis (...) to show where the pauses are, and variables are in uppercase. Full stops indicate shorter pauses. Wherever a spoken variable appears in the system - like the number of messages that is about to be revealed - you could grow a beard in the gaps. Come ON! Edit these pauses out!

ONE
Here's the first place where the 80/20 rule should be applied. 80% (at least!) of the users of this service will never acquire more than ten unread messages. So the quality of service for the majority of users could be vastly improved by recording these as specific messages rather than using a variable every time.
You've one new message
You've two new messages...etc
I can say "you've one new message" in less than a second and it's still easily intelligible. Instead we have to put up with TWO pauses - one each side - just so the system can pull out details of exactly how many messages are waiting.

Main menu.
What? I called up to hear my message FFS! Why are you presenting me with all these options? This is why this service appears SO bad at the side of, say, the Vodafone Recall service (which is essentially the same thing). BT have not designed their service quickly to deliver what the majority of users will call up for, while still retaining access to all the other features they might want to use once a year, or once only when they set the service up. Vodafone have got it right (never thought I'd say that) - when you call to retrieve a message, you get straight to your messages: "You've one new message" and you're straight into it. The time and date of the call are revealed at the end of the message, so in the majority of cases you never need to wait to hear that - you can suss out what it's all about during the message and deal with it much more quickly. If you take an option to listen to the message again, the Vodafone service simply adds "for the main menu, press 1" - snappy, quick, and it doesn't get in the way.

You can see where I'm going with this, so I'll skip the rest of the first part. The fact is that if you're not bothered to find out how many messages you're going to have to listen to, you can skip this part by pressing 'one' as soon as Call Minder connects. But this next bit you can't avoid:
FIRST...new message
Same rule as above. Record ten separate messages for the first ten messages
First new message
Second new message...
And then you only need to use a variable when there's more than ten messages - i.e. almost never.

Message.
This is just totally superfluous, and by now you're getting really annoyed with it. Or at least, I am. We already KNOW we're going to listen to a MESSAGE because you've just told us it's the first new MESSAGE for Chrissake! Jeez. Get on with it.

Received.
No! Really?

TODAY
Another 80/20 rule must surely apply here. I imagine 80% of messages will be retrieved the day they are left, or the next day. So the two messages
Received today
and
Received yesterday
should not use variables. If they were edited properly to remove pauses, then the whole of
"First new message received today at "
could be over in just short of two seconds instead of the six seconds it takes now.

And let's not even bother with the message timestamp. Hours and minutes as separate variables with associated pauses? AM and PM? God.

The Call Minder service has been in operation for at least twenty years. I don't think it's had a revamp in all that time. Other IVR systems have improved out of all recognition while BT have carried on oblivious to the march of technology with their massive long pauses and their "Thank you for calling." It can't be a lack of investment funds that drives this refusal to upgrade their service. At one point in the not-so-distant past BT were making £90 A SECOND profit. That's ninety quid every second of every day of the year. Would you MIND awfully spending some of that mountain of cash on a decent voicemail service?

BT - whose strapline should really be: "the most shit service we can possibly get away with before OfCom come down on us like a ton of bricks."