Remember Google Voice also lets you text from a web browser. Get one of those numbers and have the ability to on call or office people to answer and reply to texts. Texting for support is a nice feature for a company and any tech or answering service can log in to the Google Voice account to be able to accept and respond. I turned a friend on to this who owns a junkyard, he can now send text picture replies of cars/parts back to a person who texts right from their workstations where they have all the photos stored and organized on their LAN. He used to do that through his cell phone.
Kurt if you just start the autoreply message to text to the new Google Voice number instead it is a possible solution to your problem without having to change your personal number. Another option would be to port your cell number over to Google Voice and get yourself a new number. In Google Voice you have options to set up forwarding based on hours or pre-screen calls and forward to your new cell to decide if you will answer or send it to voice mail. You can also set up a per contact rule to ring right through to the forwarding number if you like. A lot of flexibility while keeping your old number active. When customer text to your old number it would now show up on the web log in rather than your phone. Thank You, Brian Webster From: AF [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Jones Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2018 1:15 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Customers wont stop texting personal cell Im very firm with the customers who call my cell (they have it for the same reason you state). I dont offer any assistance, just keep directing them to the office number. They get a little mad, but once they realize they will get help from the other number they stop and are satisfied. the worst thing you can do once you commit to getting them to stop is to help at all. That includes advising them to powercycle, or even answering the question of whether there are any known outages On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:26 AM Dave <[email protected]> wrote: Thats what I did for a while to get them to call the correct numbers On 08/28/2018 11:07 AM, Brian Sullivan wrote: Type up a quick auto reply and save it somewhere on your phone. Next time you get one of these texts, reply with your "Auto-reply" and they will stop sending you messages. No one wants to talk to a bot. On 8/28/2018 10:58 AM, Jeremy wrote: We use a Google Voice number for outbound calls, and it goes straight to a voicemail that states "this number is for outbound technician calls only. For support, please call xxxxx". I never gave out my personal cell number, but a few people managed to get it off of caller id when I was having Google Voice issues for about a month. I have been slowly steering those customers to another provider because they text incessantly. I just block the number if they call inbound. Call my cell = find a new provider. It's extreme, I know. On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 9:50 AM Matt Hoppes <[email protected]> wrote: I don’t know that I can offer you any advice at this point, but this is why we all carry a VoIP soft phone on our cell phone, so we can call customers from the company phone number. > On Aug 28, 2018, at 11:45, Kurt Fankhauser <[email protected]> wrote: > > I have had the same personal cell number for almost 10 years now and because > of things like me calling a client while on the road and them saving my > number I have a boatload of them that are always texting/calling it whenever > they have an issue. Its really annoying since I have hired an office > assistant and I am paying them to answer calls now. I had an outage a month > ago and probably had 20 of the same message from numbers I did not know who > they were all asking if the internet was down. I am considering changing my > personal cell number now and keeping the old one and just having it forward > to the office number and maybe get some sort of text auto reply set up on it > to send a message back whenever anyone texts it saying that this is an auto > response, for support issues please call the office number at xxx-xxx-xxxx. > Then when I get my new number I now have a VOIP app that can call out from > the cell and make it appear like the office number so this issue doesn't > happen again. > > The only downfall to this is there are a lot of important contacts i have > that have the cell number that I do need to be in contact with for emergency > situations. And is anyone doing any sort of SMS messaging for customer > service? Or should that be avoided? > -- > AF mailing list > [email protected] > http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
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