Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

A few days ago, I received my invitation to Google Voice.  As is my standard operating procedure with new technology like this, I signed up first and figured out a business application after a few days. Well, I’ve had some time to think about this and I’ve compiled 5 ways of how you can use Google Voice for your own business.

Setup an “office” in another city
So when I moved to Chicago, I didn’t change my cell phone number, as most people already knew what it was and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of updating it and possibly losing people in the process. As a result, I still have a (586) Detroit area code for my cell phone number. With the advent of Google voice, now all of a sudden, I have a local number to give people, without having to change over my cell phone. If I wanted to, I could use this for marketing purposes and “setup shop” in cities where I don’t necessarily have a business office yet. If you are a small business, or a larger business trying to setup shop in a new market and want local credibility – why not check out Google Voice? It allows you to get a local number, but still maintain your homebase of operations.

Filter calls while you’re on vacation
Say you are out of the office and only want to receive client calls on vacation. Well, now you can do that. With Google Voice’s filtering logic you can provide a voice greeting to fellow employees, vendors, or anyone else you just don’t want to talk to on your vacation. However, if  a client calls (or any other specified number) you can have it go straight to your cell phone while you’re sipping Mai Tai’s, I mean, if that’s what really you want.

Visual Voicemail
One of the big selling points for the iPhone and AT&T’s services is that they have visual voicemail, where you can move back and forth within a voicemail or even download it much as you can with any other audio file. Google Voice can also provide this functionality. You can download and share voicemails with whomever you like, regardless of what phone system or cell phone provider they have. This is also great for archival purposes.

Customized Greetings
This is actually a really cool/creepy feature. How cool would it be if you called someone’s phone and it said “Hey Jeff, sorry I missed your call. We’re really glad to have you as a new client. Leave me a message after the beep”? Well, you can now with Google Voice. Based on a specific number, you can leave a different voicemail message. See more here.

Call Recording
And just as cool/creepy is the fact that you can now record entire phone conversations to be saved for later use. This is great from a business standpoint for transcription later. Now you can just focus on the conversation at hand and jot down the details later. Again, Google has an entire video here.

Overall, I think this is a fantastic new tool Google has created. If you have a small, midsize, or even larger business, I would consider adding this to your existing phone system.

Let me know if there’s any issues you’ve seen so far or other uses you’ve come up with which are applicable to your own business in the comments.