In practice, well:

I was recently unemployed, and moved cities, leaving an old cell phone behind, and planning to start new service. During this period, I went through about 4 phone numbers (old cell, new landline, temporary pre-paid cell, and then new cell phone service). It would have been an ideal time to use a SINGLE number to bridge all the various services.

So I started using my GC number on job applications. During the course of the interview process/period, I missed an important call from a prospective employer. Luckily, I contacted them, and resolved the miscommunication. (And after testing my account, discovered that it was indeed down, for two days - w/o notice or warning.)

If GC works 95% of the time, that’s great. But let’s face it, the convenience of managing multiple phone lines completely disappears when you miss one important phone call.

As much as we all hate the telecoms, they have a proven track record and have service that we can trust. (at least 98% of the time) Trust… no price for that.

Anyway, I’m glad that I waited to send out my GC number in a mass email. Now I don’t have to sound like a complete tool when I send an “oops”, never mind.

I hope this service is up and running in a few years. It would be unstoppable if it was reliable.

I echo the concern of the mobile/caller ID situation. If your GC # can’t show up in the recipient’s log, it can result in more confusion than it’s worth esp. in business. Ditto for the bad sound quality; we don’t need more degradation of phone audio. I can barely stand using my mobile as it is.

As for me I don’t know how I will proceed w/ GC given the mixed reviews. Probably just use it with a few pals for awhile and see how it goes.

There’s nothing that amazing about a hunt group.

We just launched MasqueNumber:
Kleenex numbers with custom caller-id and time-of-day call filtering.

A bit like TalkPlus except it works on any phone without any download, a GrandCentral type of call control technology and with one mantra: Easy-To-Use.

When you choose to forward to voicemail by time-of-day, your phone does not even ring, real peace-of-mind… You get voicemails by email, and you can check your call records in real-time online.

We are thinking of a Netflix type of pricing: you pay for the number of Masque Numbers you use per month, you drop numbers at anytime without any deactivation fee.

Feedback and beta-users very welcome (we are in real beta, online for 10 days only!)

We’ve been using GC for some time, I think 6-8 weeks, for some of our incoming 800 numbers for sales and tech support.

It works reasonably well. Customers call a given 800 number, which terminates at the appropriate GC number, which then distributes the call to multiple staff members around the country at the same time.

We quickly found that receiving GC calls via a landline is much better. For instance, my cell *and* landline are included in the sales group. If I’m near the landline, I WAY prefer to use that to answer the call.

We have experienced the problem of pressing “1″ to answer the call and the GC system apparently not detecting the “1″. That’s really frustrating - to have a customer calling and not be able to connect. Definitely happens more frequently when receiving the call on my cell. Not often on the landline, but still sometimes.

As for the threat of losing the number we’ve given to customers, in our case, it’s not a problem, as we give out the 800 number, which we *do* control ourselves. GC could go out of business and we can still terminate the 800 number anywhere we want. 800 numbers are super cheap these days, so I’d recommend that for any business use, plus I’d never trust my business number not being “owned” by my business :-).

The call-out caller ID thing is indeed a problem. Our tech guys call back customers and the customers capture their cell phone or landline IDs. Then guess what? In time, customers start calling those numbers directly, which is not good… it means that those customers start depending on one particular person, which they would get better service from the whole team (ie, what if that person is on vacation?!).

Anyway, overall pretty good experience, but we are still looking at options, including some old fashioned POTS or otherwise more traditional phone system options.

We have a largely distributed workforce, which makes it tough to find a “perfect” solution. But we also really value the quality of communications with customers, so whenever we miss a call because pressing “1″ didn’t work, we really cringe!

Oh, as for call audio quality itself, we have not had many problems with that, mainly because we have paid for everyone to have landlines and to use them whenever possible to receive calls!

I tried a follow-me service of this kind a while back and this ‘feature’ drove me crazy. As Marc points out GC has no control over this and it doesn’t seem like there anything GC could do anything about, is there?

Peter.

The only way that you can call somebody and have them see you as calling from your GC number would be to use the click to call in the address book. It would be great if you could call into GC and have voice dialing for your address book. Then everybody will see you as calling from your GC number.

If you sign up with GC and call someone with your cell phone, the number displayed to everyone will still be the cell number. Which means 1) the receiver’s history will show the cell # 2) the receiver might capture that number as your contact number 3) if they use GC to call and have that assoicated with your name, then when you call on your cell they won’t know who your are….

etc.

I personally would cross over fully if it was 5 nines, but till then, it is for family and friends to use.

A suggestion, which I’ll put up on the GC site is to allow you to direct the call to a specific line of your pool…maybe *xx (xx being the last two digits of one of your chosen lines) as opposed to the whole set ringing..confusing to people who might be at home when you are at the office and want just the office to ring..

Really interesting solution…look forward to a fully matured implementation..this one has legs.