For several months now we have been testing
Google Voice with our businesses. Overall it's worked out quite well.
The phone call quality is quite good and the extra services are great such all your voice mails being stored in a similar manner as gmail.
It makes it much easier to sort them, file them and search them when needed later. When you miss a call, the message is saved and you are notified by email when a new one arrives. Google Voice also attempts to transcribe all messages for you. It's usually quite good, at least enough where you can figure out who and what the call is about before even playing the message. You can then tag the message with your own notes to further clarify or to remember things you want to say when calling back.
Another great feature is the call fowarding. Simply add any phone number to your Google Voice account and all calls are fowarded to that new number.
Then, there's the Do Not Disturb feature, which allows you to turn off phone calls and route them directly to voice mail if you are out or are finished work for the day.
Making calls is also so much easier. If you call the same person over and over, simply start typing their name or number and Google Voice will attempt to find the contact as you type then hit enter and Google Voice makes the call for you.
The BEST part is that all calls within the US are FREE. How Google Voice does this is when you make a call, Google calls you and then calls your recipient and connects you to, so no charge for either party. The calls are free, the local phone number is free... you only pay very low fees for international calls at this time.
Below is a quick list of some of the best features of Google Voice:
- Google voicemail: voicemail like email
- Voicemail transcription: read what your voicemail says
- Custom greetings: vary voicemail greetings by caller
- International calling: low cost calls to the world
- Notifications: read voicemail messages via email or SMS
- Share voicemails: forward, embed, or download voicemails
- One number: a single phone number that rings all your phones
- Free SMS: send, receive & store text messages online
- Block calls: send unwanted callers straight to voicemail
- Record calls: record phone calls and store them online
- Conference calls: join several people into a single call
- Screen callers: hear who is calling before you pick up
The only drawback is that on a rare occasion making calls won't work, but this is very rare and if this happens simply make the calls the old way until you can make phone calls on Google Voice again. I assume that this is most likely due to large numbers of people signing up.
Definately worth a try for your business... it will boost productivity and slash your phone bills.
