As we saw in the video, voicemails are unstructured asynchronous ways to report missing property. Customers assume they are just going to a black hole and tend to call back multiple times. But more importantly, voicemails rarely prompt the customer to provide information that is useful to staff trying to reunite that item.
That voice message requires staff to decipher the call for any useful information, inevitably call the customer back when they don’t have enough information to go on, and typically leave a voicemail themselves (tag you’re it).
A single voicemail can lead to multiple volleys of calls and duplicated work that doesn’t result in returning an item. So why are we still doing this?