VoiceMail 2.0: Coming soon to Latin America?

Voicemail has been a common service for both wireless and fixed network operators in Latin America for more than 10 years but it has remained essentially unchanged since its introduction. Calls on busy/unavailable/unreachable are transferred to Voicemail, where callers can leave a message. The called party receives a notification, usually by SMS and then dials in, enters a password and listens to recorded messages.

Even though vendors like Comverse and Glenayre have had multimedia voicemail solutions for a while now, it was not until AT&T launched the iPhone that services like Visual Voicemail started gaining traction in the end user's perception. This is prompting operators to look into bringing their Voicemail into the 21st century.

Even though it is a service that in many countries in Latin America has almost 100% penetration, operators have been slow in updating their Voicemail application. The iPhone's Visual Voicemail interface, however, is changing subscribers' perception of the service and operators will be forced to update this service.

The main driver here, however, is not necessarily a more attractive user interface and updating a service that has been around for a long time. Operators can leverage this opportunity to increase Voicemail usage and with this, improve their call completion rates, which in Latin America continue to be a big issue.

It is expected that voice revenues and wireless penetration will continue to grow in the region for the coming years (per Pyramid's estimate for 2007), ARPU continues to fall. Operators are looking for new services that will offset this decrease, focusing mostly on data and content service. It seems to us, however, that low call completion rates in Latin America represent an opportunity for operators to increase voice revenue, this is an area well worth looking into.