Entering Grand Central

I've begun to play with Grand Central - a new telephone contact service and recent Google acquisition. They are being promoted through Blogger.

In case you haven't heard of it, Grand Central is a web service that allows you to utilize a "storefront" phone number, with which to communicate with friends, family, colleagues and customers.

The service is FREE.

Once you sign up, you are assigned a Grand Central telephone number. It's THIS number that you advertise to the general public. Calls made to your Grand Central number can automatically be forwarded to any of your personal phone numbers (cell, home, business) or can be forwarded directly into voicemail.

None of your private numbers is ever revealed to potential callers.

And best of all, your voicemails are automatically captured at Grand Central for you. When voicemails are received, you can be alerted via email or SMS. Or you can pick them up via phone.

Voicemails can be saved or forwarded via email. You can even record calls on the fly and save the content as you would a voicemail.

One of the features I'm testing is the WebCall button. It's a piece of HTML code that you can embed on your website, that allows internet users to place a call to your Grand Central number. It's a great way to encourage website visitors to make direct contact.

By simply clicking on the button, the visitor is prompted to enter their phone number and Grand Central does the rest - connecting the call to whichever personal number to specified or by allowing a prospect or customer to leave a voicemail (your choice).

If you conduct business via a blog style website, you can easily solicit verbal feedback to posts and post the voicemails (as you would comments) on your website.

You can easily import existing Outlook or vCard contacts into Grand Central to automatically label messages from known contacts as they are saved in your voicemail box. Once your contacts have been setup, you can configure Grand Central to handle each contact differently. You can choose to have important customers automatically forwarded to your cell phone. Friends and family could be directed to your home phone.

Unknown callers could be immediately directed into voicemail to be called back later, added to a spam folder or permanently blocked. You can even have Grand Central play a "this number has been disconnected" message, under circumstances you configure!

So far, the service has been very intuitive to setup and use. I'm certain that over the next few days, I'll discover great new ways to use the service.

As I do, I'll let you know.