Google Voice vs. Lumen Next-Gen Voice

In the past, I would have happily recommended this for small business use cases. Due to its affordability, versatility, and low barrier to entry as well as its simplicity to use. Google Voice was integrated into the Chrome Browser, it was easily accessed from Gmail, and integrated into Gmail and could even be leveraged in such a way to when phone numbers were clicked on, Google Voice was the tool used. However over the past few years and more, in the past couple of years from 2021 to current, this tool seems to have lost favor with the Alphabet suite of tools. With the lack of integrations, it's becoming less stable, and people are just opting more for Google Meet Voice. The biggest area where this is less appropriate and where opportunity has opened for others is its lack of features, like virtual attendants, call recording, call transcription, SMS, MMS, CRM integration, and other key features even 1 or 2 person business really needs in this day and age

Incentivized

CenturyLink SIP is an acceptable solution if you have an on-prem PBX (ShoreTel, Mitel, etc) that accepts SIP. I have found a better solution is to run two different carriers through SD-WAN (such as Bigleaf or Velocloud MSR) and use a provider like BCMOne (formerly NexVortex) to manage the SIP.

Incentivized

• Google Voice has been great for setting up additional phone lines and numbers.
• The voicemail inbox is a great feature and you can see when messages come in online and listen to the messages from your computer.
• Google Voice allows us to have multiple phone numbers and lines for specific business purposes.

Incentivized

• Reliable service
• Supports wide range of key features
• They do have high levels of support where you can receive real answers

Incentivized

• I think there is room to improve with regards to call forwarding.
• I wish there were a concise way to know if the call was to your Google Voice number or your personal number before answering the call.
• when I add a contact to my account on the web it doesn't seem to sync with my phone even though the same email address is logged in.

Incentivized

• Lumen-Centurylink has suffered from many noticeable outages in the last few years - this is a blow to their reputation that they still have to recover from.
• Lumen-CenturyLink does not peer well enough with OTHER carriers - they depend on their own network to give you SIP, which means less true redundancy.
• Lumen-CenturyLink needs a better customer portal/interface to handle failover, see the real-time status, etc.

Incentivized

It's user friendly, how to use it is self explanatory, they support all their own options while someone like Phone Booth uses a third party. I can cancel Google Voice anytime and I choose how much I spend with Google Voice

I haven't had problems with dropped calls, bad reception, lost recordings - everything works the way it should. The iOS app is easy to use, and the process is easy to explain to other people. It's also the cheapest way I've found to call internationally - I've used it to interview people from London and Austraila.

Incentivized

They do not offer support unless you have the Business account for Google Voice under G Suite. This is tough, because Google doesn't really have a customer support team for this service, so when it gets shut down for a few hours, we have no choice but to wait it out. But this doesn't happen that often, which is great.

Incentivized

SIP service support is definitely improving. A few years ago I would have rated them a 2. Now a 7. But, Lumen still needs a better portal experience to report and see a real-time status. Also to manage SIP failover functions in a WYSIWIG/GUI interface. When Lumen's network breaks in a larger outage, there are long hold times and support is not good.

Incentivized

It is a pretty seamless program to transfer to, even for people who either have little experience with these programs or people who were stuck on Skype

Incentivized

The integrations of Google Voice with all our devices are flawless, Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac. Also, the call performance is far superior on wifi as well as on mobile data. With Skype, we had several problems with personal accounts, performance issues, and in general, it felt awkward to use it.

Incentivized

CenturyLink [Enterprise Voice SIP] was the incumbent, so switching providers, particularly for our HQ was an overwhelming task for our small team. We did migrate from the legacy CenturyLink voice product EIPT to the new Voice Complete solution as well as upgrade our US and UK circuits along with a hardware upgrade of the managed PE routers in each location. We also decided to implement RingCentral in one of our very small international branches but the lack of features is problematic. We still have T1 service in our other international branches but are looking to go full cloud SaaS PBX there, likely through Microsoft Teams, which we already use for messaging. There are some complexities, as we can't port our numbers directly yet and need to set up an additional CUBE router for SIP. Eventually we hope to get to fully SaaS via Teams.

Incentivized

Google Voice should be also be use to those who have difficulty in speaking English. So the contract term will need to be a little strict as Google Voice is used in navigations as the part of GPRS navigation is personal. The private data need to be in control much more securely and safely.

It help to connect with the products that we use as a part. We need to get in touch with our professional world. It is like a tool that helps us to get in touch with everything from A to Z in our professional careers. So we need to be in touch with everything as linearly as the jpb can be done.

• Cost for Google Voice is stellar, starting at $10/mo per user.
• While it doesn't offer a new Audio/Video conferencing solution it does integrate with GSuite so it makes use of Google Calendar and Hangouts/ Google Meet.
• Gets the employee's to use their company phone numbers more as texting is easy and deployment is simple.
• The cell phone app is reliable and easy to deploy.

Incentivized

• Faster learning
• Increased numbers of calls
• Organization of calls

Incentivized