GrandCentral: A Phone Solution for Small Business

Perhaps you have a cell phone, a home office phone, a professional office phone, and, if you’re like me, periodically work for stretches in private space with its own extension but not really your own office (such as when I’m up at Woodbury, teaching mediation, and using the faculty office). That’s a whole lot of phone numbers. And voice mailboxes to check.

If you have only a cell and home office, you may still be paying for an extra line to keep your home and business calls separate. Or you perhaps you use your home number for your ADR practice, knowing it’s not really the completely professional image you’d ideally like to convey.

One solution is to purchase a toll-free “ring anywhere” number such as those offered by GotVMail and RingCentral, which I’ve mentioned before on Mediator Tech. Though I soured on RingCentral after several bad experiences with tech support, GotVMail is an excellent service with many, many options. But it’s pricey if you’re a micro-business owner and may offer far more complexity than you need.

Now GrandCentral has arrived on the scene and it sure looks like an optimal solution. I’ve been experimenting with it and the experience has been terrific enough I’m ready to suggest you take a look.

GrandCentral’s tagline is “One phone number…for life.” The grand idea behind GrandCentral is that you only need one phone number for everything business and personal, and that your voicemails will all reside in a single place as well. You have one number that doesn’t have to change when you move or open up a new office.

You sign up for a local number in your region (major metropolitan areas are well covered, but if you’re in a rural area like me, don’t expect there to be numbers in your exchange…but do you really need that?). You then use GrandCentral’s website or your phone keypad to tell GrandCentral where you want the phone to ring when people dial the GrandCentral-assigned number. It will ring simultaneously at all those numbers and you can change the numbers with a single button click or by dialing into your account via any phone. When the phone rings, you have several options, including accepting the call, sending it automatically to GrandCentral’s voicemail, listening in on the voicemail as it’s recorded, and interrupting the voicemail to take the call.

You can arrange to have voicemail notifications messaged to your cell phone, sent via email (including a “listen” link), or you can go to the GrandCentral website to listen and file them. You can get even more sophisticated by uploading your contacts and designating which contacts should ring at which phone, which voicemail message they should receive from you, and even which ringtone their calls should generate. Other features include:

• Block telemarketers or annoying callers and never get bothered again.
• Through the call screening option, know who is calling every time, even for blocked numbers.
• Switch phones mid-call…Switch from cell to office or home…your callers won’t know.
• All of your voicemail messages will be saved online, permanently.

And it’s free. It’s in beta, which means they’re still tweaking, but this is one very advanced beta product. I anticipate that there’ll be fee-based services once it’s out of beta, and bet they’ll be competitive while still offering many free options. I’m certainly going to stick along for the ride.

Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.