Vodafone hangs up on Unisys for new voicemail system

Vodafone has upgraded its voicemail system opting to drop Unisys in favour of Acision, the same provider VHA partner, Hutchison, uses for its ‘3’ customers.

The upgrade, carried out at the weekend, will enable Vodafone to offer new functionality and features to its customers while building in greater capacity to cater for increasing customer demand, a Vodafone spokesperson told Computerworld Australia.

“The new voicemail system uses the latest technology to allow for future development of new voicemail features and products,” the spokesperson said. “It also has greater capacity, giving us the ability to cater for future capacity demands.

“For now, the functionality of our new voicemail system remains the same, with new features to be developed and introduced in the future.”

According to the spokesperson the move to a single voicemail provider fits in with Vodafone Hutchison Australia’s post-merger consolidation plans. However these are yet to include moving to a shared platform — at least for its voicemail.

“We have chosen a single voicemail vendor, however, we will continue to run the Vodafone and 3 voicemail systems on separate platforms,” the spokesperson said.

“Since the merger of Vodafone and 3 in June 2009, we’ve been working to bring all vendors and systems together under one roof, and in many instances the best way to capture our new benefits of scale is to consolidate to a single vendor for essential services to customers. The consolidation to a single voicemail vendor is part of this business integration program.”

The spokesperson said the migration —carried out between 2am and 4am on Sunday, 15 May to minimise interruptions — went “fairly smoothly” but that some iPhone users on the telco’s network had experienced a minor inconvenience.

“We did encounter a change which meant that some iPhone customers needed to reboot their phones — simply by turning their handset off, then turning it on again — before they would start to receive new voicemail messages,” the spokesperson said.

“We were able to use our database to identify and isolate these customers and we sent them a proactive SMS on Sunday to alert them to the need to reboot their handsets.”

The telco also intends to store its customers’ old voicemail messages on the previous Unisys system for up to four weeks prior to deleting them. Customers can either have the messages transferred to the new system or can download them as .wav files.

In related Vodafone news the telco has also launched a network coverage checker to show customers the likely signal strength indoors as well as outdoors for any location across Australia.

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