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Comment by stanleydrew | Hacker News Reader

Charge CEO here. We can definitely disable voicemail for you. I actually have it disabled myself. Just send us an email to get it removed.

We should probably just add a checkbox for it in the management UI though now that I think about it.

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And this is how you run a company, everyone please take note. User feedback is actually seriously considered and responded to in an acceptable manner.

It's great to see someone from a company pop up in a discussion to help out a user, but this is absolutely not the way to run a company. It leads to the Google approach to support, where you can only get a non-automated reply only if you raise enough stink by on social media, or happen to know someone who works there.

Now, each individual case where an employee unexpectedly helps out is great, but this is NOT 'how you run a company'. You should focus on getting your general customer service and support lines to be good.

I've never dealt with this company before, or even heard of them until today, so their normal lines of support might be great. This isn't meant to be a specific criticism of Charge.

However, it does seem odd to me that a phone company appears to give no contact phone numbers on their web site. That's not a good sign!

Best advice!

When you have a page advertising "features for nerds", you damn well better be active in the Hacker News conversation about it....

Phone support is a hard thing to do well. And we have a pretty high bar for support. So I know this sounds like a dodge, but we really are waiting until we can confidently roll out strong phone support to push it.

For now, whenever a customer has a problem that can't be solved via email, one of the founders will call.

Obviously that doesn't scale, so we need to figure out phone support, but we're aiming for what I call "Zappos-level" quality and that's easier said than done.

Company phone numbers usually only lead to an automated phone tree and maybe if you stab zero enough time (since it's likely not an option anywhere in the tree itself), some very underpaid person at the very end doing "support" who barely speaks English, can only read from a prepared script, and doesn't have the authority to help you with anything important.

I just expect this from any tech company today. It's not like you're going to get assistance from anyone at Google, for instance. I tried forever when someone was abusing our open source trademark and then doxxed me on blogspot. But all the "official" channels were completely ignored. I think my unlisted home phone number and old office address is still posted there with a call for people to harass me for DMCAing pirated commercial software they had hosted on random locker sites that used my GPLed code in violation of the license to package it.

That's not scalable when it tries to sell to everyone, however.

really depends on the product

It's how you run a company that has a high-margin (aka "premium", "expensive") product with a small userbase.

This is your expected outcome when you are wealthy.

"Charge CEO here. We can definitely disable voicemail for you."

Yes, but what happens when you disable voicemail ?

ATT wireless can disable vm for me, it just results in weird behavior that confuses people...

If I disable voicemail on Charge, and am out of coverage area (or have phone turned off) what does the caller experience ?

Just tried this. After a few rings you get a default message where some guy says "The person you have called is unavailable right now, please try again later."

We could actually set up some fancy forwarding to make this message configurable, similar to how Google Voice's voicemail works.

The caller can still text you or email you.

Which would be fine with me, since the scammers/spammers wouldn't do it. I don't like voice mail; but there is a difference between voice mail from a friend or family member and one telling me I've one a free carpet cleaning, an alarm service, need new windows, etc. (Not to mention the upcoming political robocalls.)

I'm thinking the reason you can't get the feature you want is because some engineers who designed the call setup for cell networks decided keeping the phone's battery from dying as a result of excessive ringing is a nice feature. I'm with you though, I hate voice mail. So does my mom. She recorded her outgoing message to politely say she never checks v/m and to text or email.

Sony Z3's have voicemail built in. Sadly they are glass both sides and break too easily. The other thing to consider is that when you are out of range or it is turned off, you may well miss an important call. All smartphones should be able to take a message first, and if that fails, then, it should fall to the carrier.

Any plans to offer GSM? I'd love to ditch AT&T but I'm not excited about being on sprint's network.

Near the bottom of the "Data Only" page:

> We’re working hard to add support for GSM devices. Enter your email and you’ll be the first to know when we're ready!

So it looks like they're trying to support GSM, which probably involves deals with large GSM carriers, I would guess, since Sprint only uses CDMA.

It would be nice to provide a custom message, or a message saying voicemail is disabled and to optionally recommend sending a text message.

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