Originally Posted by MarinaVanessa:
I had an issue with a DCM and so I got a googlevoice account. Basically it's like a phone service but it's free. It gives you your own phone number which I use as the telephone number for business and then just have the calls forwarded to my cell phone (or house number or whatever). I have to say it's awsome. You get a voicemail box that (if you have calls forwarded to your cell phone) gives you a brief transcription sent to you as a text when someone leaves you a voicemail. The transcription is not perfect obviously but it's nice to get a written text of the message before having to actually listen to it.
Also you can record the greeting and can have several of these assigned to certain numbers. For example my main greeting is for my business so anytime a random person or client calls it has the "Thank you for calling [daycare name] etc." but I also gave this number to my daughter's dad so that I could keep his texts and I assigned a special greeting that's just for him so he doesn't hear my business greeting.
What's super nice is the texting. When someone texts to this number it saves it online and you can make folders for each client and save them. If you have the calls forwarded to your cell phone the texts wil also go to your cell phone and you can text back and forth on the googlevoice number. This is nice for those that worry that texts won't count in court because they can be altered when printed etc. You can just log in to your account and show the court the original texts. You can also save the voicemails and when you look through them online you can see a piece of the transcription so it's easy to see which voicemail says what.
You can also screen calls and if you have clients or people that you don't want being able to call you anymore you can block them. It's super easy and like I said, it's free. I think you have to be invited by someone that already has an account so if anyone checks out the website and is interested let me know. I think I have 1 invitation left maybe 2 (You get 5 originally I think).
WOW! All of this for free? Is it free for a limited time or forever free? I'm going to check it out.