My friend owns a tutoring business.
Currently the main number rings directly to her personal cellular phone.
She is considering changing over to Google Voice for the main number for the business.
Is this dumb?
It would let business partners or senior tutors take over customer service while she’s out of town… we could just forward the calls to other numbers via Google Voice.
Wise? Unwise? Thoughts?
I have no experience with Google Voice, but nothing but praise for Vonage for my personal phone. Must be 6-8 years without any trouble. It freed us from the terrible service of a hick government monoply.
I don’t see any reason why that wouldn’t work. My experience with GV is that it is just as reliable as any other phone service.
So, she plans on porting that existing number over to GV, right? Otherwise, it would involve changing the business phone number, which is probably not desirable.
The other option, if her cell phone is on a post-paid/contract plan, is that most cell phone companies allow conditional call forwarding, which would allow her to accomplish the same thing, except that her personal cell phone/number would not be freed up for her own personal use.
Bump for the daytime crowd.
I use Google voice and it’s very good. I have had it for 3 years and it’s never failed.
I would say as a tutoring business it’s great. Also remember they allow you to pick a number to a degree. You can choose something that spells a word
I would not recommend it for anything like a B&M business as you don’t want to ever look cheap or like your amateur, but for tutoring, she won’t be disapointed
I have one and I love it.
When I can’t get my calls it takes a voicemail, transcribes it (as best it can) and sends me a text to my cell as well as an e-mail so it’s pretty hard to miss a call.
I had a problem for a long time where if I originated a call via GV, there would be a one-way-speech path (I couldn’t hear them or they couldn’t hear me, I forget which). It has gone away, but it makes me wary of using it in a business setting.
I use one for my business, and it works perfectly fine. There is no way I know for anyone to know that it is a Google Voice number.
I believe that if you have the Call Screening function turned on, and someone who you have not specifically “allowed” calls you, it says something to the effect of “The Google Voice user you are calling has enabled Call Screening, so please state your name at the tone.”
But as long as you don’t have Call Screening turned on, I don’t think there’s any way for the caller to know it’s a GV #.
My bet is that only those I have told know I am on vonage. I am in a strange exchange mostly for data lines. I get very, very few wrong numbers.
I’ve used Google Voice every day for a few years. Here are some things to watch out for (that may or may not be big deals):
Each forwarding number can only be attached to a maximum of two Google Voice numbers. For example, let’s say I only have one real phone. I can add it to a personal GV account AND only one other one – whether it’s your friend’s tutoring business, my own business’s, or maybe a secret number for whatever reason. This is an issue for me because my other workplace already forwards their GV to my cell phone, so I couldn’t have a second workplace do the same thing. Dunno if this’ll matter for your employees.
Outgoing calls, unless placed through special smartphone apps or a special dialing number (almost like a phone card), still appear as from the actual forwarding number. This can be confusing for customers who see the real number, not the GV number, on their caller ID. It can also be bad for your friend because that’s probably the number they’ll save in their phones, not the GV one your friend prefers. Some businesses can fake their caller ID, but I’m not sure how that’s done.
Many Google Voice functions are dependent on the Internet. If your friend is using a smartphone, this means she can’t check her text messages or voicemail without an internet connection (whereas with a regular phone number, those things only rely on cell phone reception and not necessarily internet connectivity). Your friend also won’t be able to place calls to first-time numbers without an Internet connection, since Google Voice assigns a new virtual number through the Internet the first time you call somebody.
In my personal experience, Google Voice significantly degrades call quality when calls are made through its smartphone app. My unproven hypothesis is that even though you call a regular number, Google then does a VOIP thing to connect you to the other party.
Text message & voicemail deliveries on a smartphone can often be significantly delayed, due to smartphone radio sleep, internet connectivity, and other reasons that I’ve not quite tracked down. This means that your voicemail/SMS indicators will NOT be anywhere as reliable as a regular cell phone. I live with this as a home user, but this might very well kill a time-sensitive tutoring business if not accounted for right. You could work around it by maintaining a separate SMS (of the real sort) plan and having GV forward all notifications to that.
I’ve had not-great experiences with Google voice. Not terrible, just not as great as I had hoped.
I’ve had some outages where I couldn’t connect to Google voice from my phone (even though my phone internet connection worked). I had a heck of a time solving some problems with google voice interacting in strange ways with different cell phone providers’ built-in voice mail. At one point, each GV call would call me twice. That was a configuration error on my end, but since it’s Google, there’s no actual human tech support. You can either figure things out from forums or random blog posts, or you’re SOL. When I screw something up on my cell phone and can’t figure it out, there are nice people in India who will hold my hand through a troubleshooting checklist.
At one point I had a complete Google Voice outage for several days. I could still see text messages and voicemail on their website, but nothing was forwarded to my phone. This was not a config error on my part. I didn’t make any changes when it stopped working, and after trying a bunch of stuff that had no effect, it started working again on its own a few days later.
I had hoped that GV would be a “never have to change my number again” service, but now that I have an iPhone, it doesn’t integrate nearly as well due to point 2 that Reply mentioned. (which I can’t blame Google for. It’s clearly due to Apple being dicks about not letting you replace the stock dialer app), so I went back to my old number (at least for calling out).
My impression is that any development on Google Voice is being sandbagged because Google doesn’t want to endanger Android’s most-favored-OS status with a lot of cell carriers, which makes me wonder how long it’ll stay around.