Google Voice for Business: part 2

In my previous post, I brought you up to speed on what Google Voice is and what it is generally capable of doing for businesses. In this post, I’ll get a little more specific on how to make it the voicemail solution for your business.

While you can sign up for Voice using your existing mobile number, there are more benefits of signing up for a Google provided number and working everything through that.

To have Voice handle your voicemail for your mobile phone, you first need to be on a network they support, which are currently AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon. It’s not impossible to get it to work on other carriers, but you may wind up paying some call forwarding fees with them. Once you’ve added your mobile number to Voice and chosen the option to “Add Google voicemail to this phone,” it will walk you through the process of setting your mobile number to forward unanswered calls to Voice instead of your carrier’s voicemail system. So that’s one phone down.

Now getting your office phone to forward to Voice is a little different. If your phone system at work or your telephone company have options for “forwarding when there isn’t an answer or when busy” (‘Forward No Answer’ or ‘Forward Busy’ is how I’ve seen it commonly referred to), then that’s what you will want to implement. Have those numbers forwarded to your Voice number when you don’t answer. In my experience, setting up these forwards is very simple and doesn’t take any time at all, so don’t feel bad about asking IT or the phone company to do this little part.

You now have your office phone forwarding to your Voice number. Now, if you don’t tell Voice what to do when it receives a call from this number, Voice will ring all the phones you have directed it to ring to when someone calls. If you know people might call you from your office phone (or home phone which you can set up in this same way), then this might be just fine. But if not, you can tell Voice to direct calls received from these numbers directly to voicemail without the extra ringing, which you can do through the Contacts section.

Voice integrates with your Gmail Contacts or address book. When you click on Contacts in Voice, you’ll see all the same information you put into your contacts when you created them. They will also be in the same groups in which you created them. You can set up specific Voice settings for individual contacts or whole groups. Whole groups, like co-workers, or even individuals, like your spouse or friends, can have their own custom greeting when they hear your voicemail greeting.

As I mentioned before, create a contact with your numbers in it like your cell and work phones, then edit the Voice settings for this contact. You can tell it to skip ringing your other phones and go directly to voicemail whenever these specified numbers call in.

Voice will also send emails and/or text messages when you have received a new voicemail or even missed a call. It can also try to transcribe the voicemail message that was left—sometimes with hilarious results. Voice has apps for Android and iPhone/iTouch/iPad that allow viewing and playing of messages without having to call in to your voicemail at all.

There are many more little tricks and features that Voice can do. Check it all out here.