Anybody who reads my blogs knows I've been very happy with Google Voice ever since it's launch a few years back. Just see any of these articles:
How Google Voice Can Help Landlords
Followup and Detailed Review of Google Voice
Google Voice Opens the Flood Gates Today
Google has done a TREMENDOUS job with Google Voice and I continue to use it daily for my personal voicemail and call forwarding. I've found however that more and more recently when calls route through google voice they don't ring my phones or the call gets cut-off prematurely. This is not a huge deal with my personal calls, it's infrequent enough to be tolerable and the benefits of GV on my personal calls outweigh this drawback; however, since the issue has persisted intermittently for months and Google has no customer service or technical support to contact regarding the issue I've thrown in the towel for business calls.
My goals were to keep the same distributed infrastructure our employees are used to. Everyone may have one or two phones, a Skype voice account, plus a cell phone, that they want to be contacted at. Google Voice would forward through these with ease. I wanted to maintain this functionality, as well as having a permanent record of all voicemails. After much research, trials, and quality testing - the answer is Grasshopper!
Grasshopper supports all of the features I used with Google Voice.
- Custom call routing to an unlimited number of phones, check.
- Online permanent record of all voicemails, check.
- Visual voicemail - although I haven't yet tried this. They provide the option of human transcription at a cost too which would probably be more reliable than GV's transcription.
And Grasshopper's virtual phone system adds these great features which I'm already using.
- Multiple inbound phone numbers (GV only supported one)
- Virtual PBX - Yes, this is GREAT. I can have a real call queue: "Press 1 for sales, 2 for support, etc". Based on the callers entry the call can be routed to different phones. Each queue has it's own set of forwarding numbers. In addition, each employee gets an extension for direct calls. Couldn't do any of thise with GV.
- Built in eFax support. I used to pay another efax company to process electronic faxes for us, but this is now included with Grasshopper.
- You can upload recordings, including professionally recorded MP3 files. GV required you record your own over the phone lines which always ended up being a low quality recording.
- Real customer service. I've called three times, and every time the phone was picked up in less than 30 seconds with a very helpful and well trained rep on the line.
Thus far I'm very pleased with our choice to switch over from GV to GH. Grasshopper however does have a cost, where GV is free. However, since we provide an 800# for all of our customers to call it turns out we're actually saving money and improving our phone system and image simultaneously. How? I used to pay an 800 service to forward inbound 800 calls to our GV number. The cost was 6.9c/minute (I know, we were getting robbed). With GV they handle the 800 # and the rate we pay is closer to 2.5c/minute. So yes, we've improved our phone system and dropped our 800# phone bill nearly in half. Can't squawk at that!
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Nathan is a member of Rentec Direct who provides property management software, tenant ach payment processing, and tenant credit and criminal reports for property managers and landlords.
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