GrandCentral for Managing Calls
Written by Brandon Hull on December 18, 2006. Leave a Comment on this Post.
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Do you have one local phone number to give out to friends, family, prospects and clients? Some sales professionals do. How about one consolidated voicemail box for your cell, home and home office calls? How about an anti-spam-like (or all out blocking) filter for handling unwanted calls?
And how about all of this, with the ability to save voicemails for an unlimited amount of time, after adding your own notes?
I’ve been testing a free service called GrandCentral for a little while now to do these things and more, and while it’s not the be-all, end-all, it’s solid. (Unnecessary disclaimer: I am offering GrandCentral as a sales tool for you to check out; I have no vested interest.)
Really, some of this functionality has existed for years by the name of “unified messaging.” Plenty of salespeople have loved the functionality offered by services such as Onebox, RingCentral, and others. GrandCentral offers quite a bit more, though.
I’ll let you go to their what is it page to find out the basics. But let me give you some scenarios on how it could help you. As a mobile sales professional, with GrandCentral, you can:
- Give people just one number and the service will try to reach you at several phones simultaneously, while they simply hear the phone ringing. If you’ve never had a service like this, it’s extremely powerful after you get used to it. Clients and prospects don’t have to call your office line, get your voicemail there, then call your cell phone to try to track you down there. Or vice versa.
- Add, then group your contacts and have their incoming calls routed to different phone numbers based on group settings. They can even hear a different voicemail message if you can’t take the call–though it’s just one voicemail box. In fact, you can listen to them leaving you a voicemail, and choose to pick up or not, like so many of you do at home! While I can’t envision screening calls like this from a business standpoint, you may choose to do it for the personal calls that come in.
- Add your own online notes to recorded calls and/or voicemails and save them indefinitely. If you deal in voicemail a lot, you’d be able to add a few notes to remind you of the topic of conversation, particularly with recorded calls.
- Forward your voicemails via email as mp3 attachments.
Now, it isn’t all rosy. Though I’m suggesting you look into them, here are a few reasons why GrandCentral won’t become a default phone number for me just yet:
- It’s free and in “beta” testing–which doesn’t give me an in-it-for-the-long-haul warm and fuzzy feeling.
- I currently have a voicemail system that pulls both messages and faxes in, sending both to me as attachments via email.
- This would be yet another spot I’d have to upload and maintain contacts at. More on #3 in another post…
You should take a look at it if you’re not fazed by my three concerns above. At the least, give consideration to one of the unified messaging platforms out there.
Brandon,
Thanks for the coverage. Couple of responses to your comments:
1. we don’t intend to stay in beta very long, but felt we had to be upfront about the fact that there could be small bugs here and there. Nothing can replace 10,000’s of users using the service and we wanted to confirm that the service would be rock solid before removing the beta tag.
2. hopefully the level of control we give you over your vmails will make you switch providers on this :-) Being able to keep them all in one spot, search them, add notes, forward them is very addictive. Hope you’ll give it a try.
3. Agreed, although we’re working on a seamless sync with Outlook etc… to help you solve that. The fact is that your call log is your most up-to-date source of information for your contacts. As a result, my GrandCentral address book is growing quicker than my Outlook AB.
Best
Vincent
Brandon,
Thank you very much for mentioning RingCentral and for showing that the real value of Internet telephony is not in cheap phone calls, but in revolutionizing the way we communicate. You’ve mentioned several excellent examples how it can benefit sales professionals. I’d like to add a few points that we at RingCentral have learned over the last few years from tens of thousands of subscribers. Many of them use RingCentral to project a professional image to their customers and make their small companies appear larger and more established. That translates into service features such as multiple toll-free and/or local numbers, multiple extensions with auto-attendant (dial 1 for sales, dial 3 for shipping .etc), professionally recorded custom announcements and greetings, a dedicated fax number for sending and receiving faxes, as well as routing phone calls and playing greetings by scheduled date, time and Caller ID. The business benefit is quite substantial. In fact, some of our customers reported that adding a toll-free number and a click-to-call button to their web sites increased their sales by 20%. Just a few years ago such functionality would be out of reach for small businesses and individuals, but now it’s just a few clicks away. Your readers might want to check out our blog (http://blogs.ringcentral.com ) to see how it all works in the real life.
Thanks,
Boris Elpiner
Vincent,
Thanks for checking in!
I like the features in GrandCentral, so I’ve slowly given out my number to more people. (I am learning that old habits are hard to break–if a person knows they can reach me on my cell phone, they still just call my cell phone instead of the new number I’ve given them!)
Also still hoping that the ability to receive faxes comes at some point, too.
Thanks again for checking in with us! Good luck developing GrandCentral!
Hi Boris,
Thanks for your comments and recommendations on your RingCentral product. I really do like unified messaging tools, so I’m sure at some point this year I’ll give you guys a close look and add a review here as well.
Best of luck in 2007!