Google Voice and Patlive

[Shawn L.]

Good morning everyone

I have hit a bit of a snag with forwarding my Google Voice (GV) number to Patlive, and I’m hoping that someone on here has some ideas for me. Also, a search of BP yields very few results related to GV and Patlive so hopefully this will help someone in the future as well.

I recently sent out my second round of yellow letters, and decided to try Patlive since I missed most of the calls on my first round of mailings. I forwarded my existing GV number to my Patlive number, since my previous marketing used this number and I wanted to remain consistent.

Fast forward to yesterday and calls started coming in, but the issue is that the Patlive operators don’t pick them up quick enough and they are sent to GV’s Voicemail system. I get my email from Patlive, but instead of a summary of the call it just says that it was a hang up. So far, all my call backs have done this. Kind of defeats the purpose of having an answering service. I did a bunch of reading and it appears that there is no way to disable or delay GV’s voicemail, and this is one of their biggest complaints. You get what you pay for I guess.

I spoke with Patlive’s customer service and they said that this is a common problem with GV numbers; one representative said that only 60% of the calls that come in from a GV number are answered in time! Their recommendation is for me to port my number into their system. I have no emotional attachment to GV so I was about to go ahead with the port when my phone, sitting next to me, buzzed with a text message. “Oh yeah,” I thought, “my yellow letters say to call or text at my GV number.” I then confirmed with Patlive that if I port my number to their system, I will lose all SMS functionality. As an aside the text conversation that followed was very productive, so I do believe this is a viable means of initial contact.

So my questions are:

• Has anyone run into a similar issue and come up with a work around so that the GV does not send calls to voicemail before being answered by Patlive’s operators?
• Does anyone know of a service similar to GV that allows SMS texting, but also allows you to disable voicemail completely? I know there are a bunch of different systems out there, some paid and some free, but looking to see if anyone has used any with good results.

Thanks in advance for any feedback!