Hey hey,
Prior to just going directly to Google, I thought I would start here.
My Devo team is asking if there's a way to mask their phone number on their personal cell phones when making outgoing calls to donors while remote. Unfortunately, we're still rocking an old PBX system so there's not VoIP solution at play here. Any *free* services I can direct to my users for this purpose? I don't think "Unknown Caller" will be a well-received solution.
Thanks!
I use Google Voice. It works pretty well. When this is all over you can forward calls that come through there to your office phone.
We've set up Google Voice, but we're having problems with the recorded VM kicking in. It seems if we have numbers linked and turned on, it defaults to their personal voicemails vs. the voicemail greeting/box set up in Google Voice. Is there a way around this other than our users having to change their personal VMs or having the users log into the web app directly and unlinking all personal numbers?
Hi Emily -
The only way that I've found in Google Voice to prevent the call from going to the receiving phone's voicemail is to turn on Call Screening. Then, when the recipient picks up the line they are asked by Google if they want to accept the call or send it to the voicemail for the Google Voice account. If they don't answer, the voicemail for the Google Voice account will kick in.
The experience on the other end is that if the caller is in the Google account's contact list, it'll start ringing right away, but if they aren't, it'll ask the caller to record their name. This is obviously not optimal for patrons, but it may be alright in the short run. Out of curiosity, when your PBX forwards calls to the external Google Voice number, does the outbound caller ID send your office number, or the actual caller's number? If it's your office number, you could add just that number to the Google account's contacts so you can bypass the need for the caller to record their name but still use the Call Screening feature.
Thanks,
Patrick
Patrick Schley (Past Staff Member) FOR THE WIN! Through the course of me starting this thread and executing, my use case shifted to dealing with our subscriber services line... This didn't work out completely as you suggested, as our PBX provider passes through the number of the caller vs. the Google Voice number or our office number. BUT in order to work around this call screening feature, I uploaded all our subscriber's phone numbers and masked their names as "Subscriber Services" so my callers are prompted to receive a call from "Subscriber Services" and the patron isn't asked for their name. Not the best solution, but I made it work in under 24-hours, so it's fine... Now, if you'll excuse me, I should now setup MFA on that Google account...