Texting availability in Google Voice for Business

[cbusby]

Hello everyone, my name is Cole and I'm a tech enthusiast who is working with a small business in my local area on Google Workspaces.

We've had some reports of customers texting our customer-facing Auto-Attendant number. As support informed me, these go to a black hole without any notification to the customer messaging us. 

I'd like to propose the ability to have a group of individuals with voice subscriptions to point these texts to without having to re-assign the Auto-Attendant number to a human or group of humans. 

I feel this is easily one of the biggest features that would allow bi-directional communication from the primary business number to our customers and could be a huge boon to the service overall.

[TaylorSheaer]

I've been procrastinating setting up an auto-attendant, but I finally bit the bullet today and came to this same question. It's a completely unusable feature if I can not receive text messages from my staff to my mainline that I want to direct via an auto attendant after hours. 

What's the solution 

[KPainting]

I've been wanting to use auto attendant for my painting company so I can direct sales calls to the sales team but not being able to accept texts has prohibited us from using it. I wish the text messages to the auto attendant number could be directed to a different number instead of a black hole. 

[newman]

Unfortunately, I doubt this feature will be added.  I was told by Google it won't be in the product in 2023, perhaps never. There just isn't a clear path to implementation, even though it's highly requested. It requires a different carrier peering model called A2P and Google supports P2P.

[JArtDev]

I don't see this ever being possible within Google Voice. All of the research I've done shows this conversation dating years back. I've begun looking into alternative solutions including the possibility of building my own system all together. I stumbled across OpenPhone which seems promising but I am unsure how reliable the company is.

[PrinceMilwauKey]

Is there anyone from Google Voice team who can confirm or deny if this is on their roadmap. At least, we can move on if Google doesn't intend to implement or is not capable of implementing this feature.

[JArtDev]

We just switched to OpenPhone due to Google's lack of effort in improving Google Voice. OpenPhone isn't for everyone, but it did resolve a majority of the problems we had, and it is continuing to grow. I recommend the software to everyone now. You can use their trial to get an idea of how the system works.

My referral link gives a $20 credit. (https://openph.one/referral/yT13kCs)

[icrew]

You might want to have a look in the NDAed product roadmaps to see if there’s anything there about this. See

https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/custom/page/page-id/Workspace-Roadmap-FAQ

for how to request access.

Note: This section of GCC is public, so items that you may see on the roadmap should not be discussed here, as that would violate the NDA.

Hope that helps,

Ian

[Vahe_bbmd]

I have hit a road block with this as well, I am adding my voice to the group Google needs to make this feature available as soon as possible.

one more thing give the option  the outgoing text is the company number not the individual user.  

[jmcguttering]

Our company number just ported in to Google Voice and faced the same roadblock.  Very disappointed and need to start researching what provider we can switch to, again...

All we need is a welcome message to play and calls/SMS to work from and to the company number.

[Scryer_Steve]

So this just dawned on me that as a workaround you could use a Google Voice number as the customer-facing number and have all inbound calls forwarded to your auto-attendant...your reporting will be slightly off because of the hop(forwarding to auto attendant) would only should you receiving calls from your voice number. All actual call records would be in the forwarding voice line. 

You would able to receive texts and allow the auto attendant to handle the calls. Correct me if I'm wrong. I came across this in my setup just now and stumbled upon this post so haven't tested it. 

[jmcguttering]

I believe we tried that and it did not work and confirmed with support it is not possible.  Please try and let us know.