Grandcentral and stupid phone tricks

I’ve been experimenting with a service from GrandCentral.com. The company was started by a bunch of ex-Dialpad folks and they’ve created the 2006 version of “find me, follow me” phone service.  Unlike other bloggers who quickly post stuff, I’ve actually being using the service (I signed up for 2 accounts) as both my primary home and office line (more on how I did that later).

GrandCentral’s service assigned you a new telephone number of your choosing which you give out. At a high level, it basically does advanced phone screening, applies a couple of profile rules to simul ring various other telephone numbers you may have, has a couple of stupid phone tricks and provides a click by name dialing feature which enables you to launch calls from their website to your home, office or car. All in all about 9 telephone features that are not generally offered by any single provider. The base service is free and includes minutes of usage per month, the paid for service  is $14.99 and is basically unlimited and supersizes other elements of the service.

Now before I dice this service up like a Chinese butcher with a chicken, let me say – the implementation is slick. Heavy usage of Ajax, smart user interfaces and other niceties really shine through. It’s all well done. Now where is my cleaver …

I set-up the service on both my primary office and home telephone line. I basically forwarded my primary number to Grandcentral and pointed Grandcentral to other numbers in my home & office. Disclaimer: I work for a VoBB provider and have ready access to all the telephone numbers I could need.

After playing with the service for a week, our team who was initially excited about the service and who are experts in consumer marketing sat down and after 2 hours of discussion, we can’t figure out why anyone would want the service let alone pay for it.   Thus, I’m declaring the service DOA.

The basic premise and problem with Grandcentral is the purported “one number” service. Well, I already have a 1 number service – it’s called my cell phone. I can’t imagine anyone needing more telephone numbers to deal with. Having a virtual number attached to nothing is fundamentally pointless. But just for fun, let me rip the gizzard out of each of the features …

SimRing – I like this feature, BUT – if you SimRing your cell phone, as I did, I’d get a bunch of voicemail message I’d have to delete on my cell phone with GrandCentral calling to tell me it had a phone call. Isn’t this service about saving me time?

Know whose calling – an audible caller line ID, OK well maybe I can like that, but frankly, caller line ID and name, which we all have, it OK enough plus I use my home answering machine to screen calls as it is.

Centralized voicemail – I could go for that, but try getting voicemail turned off on your cell phone or better tell your IT guy to turn off voicemail on your office PBX phone. Otherwise, you’ll have multiple mailboxes all getting screening messages from GrandCentral when is SimRings your various phones.

Listen to voicemail in real time – Stupid phone trick, these guys must all be under 30, didn’t sell well the first time out when I was under 30. Let’s see my home phone rings, I have to run pick up the phone, decide NOT to answer it after hearing the audible caller announcement, then I have to hold the handset to my ear to listen to the voicemail and press * if I want to pick up the call. WTF? Why don’t you just go to Walmart and pick up a $30 answering machine, which implements the same functionality with less complexity.

Record personal greetings – OK, I would like that for the grandparents when they call. It would be cute. So put me down for 4 personal greetings. For anybody else, you’d look like a dork recording a personal greeting for them. Perhaps you might have separate for personal and business contacts, but I’m still putting this in the stupid phone trick category.

RingShare or customized ringback tones – Introduced by 2 wireless operators mid-last year. If you’ve ever experienced it, first, it’s confusing. Why is this music playing when I call someone, did they pick-up, am I on hold? Second, once you figure it out, it’s the single most annoying thing you can do someone. Playing some hip hop theme to me everytime I call is going to get old really fast. There is an application for this in retail, but it has not place in the home or professional office.

Secretly block calls – I’ll give them a few points here, I get the same group of telemarketers calling me that I’d like to block. But note, outbound caller centers are forever changing the 800-number they broadcast when they call you. This will be a moving target. So think carefully – how many people have called you in the last 6 months that you would block? Think hard!! Not many, right? I had the same answer. Stupid phone trick.

Record phone call – A few more points, I will admit there has been occasions during an especially good phone sex call that I wanted to record it for savoring at a later point. I can see some value in this,  like if you are in your car and someone is giving you directions and you can’t write it down. But think again, how often does that happen?

Online voicemail – well implemented, but they can’t light my message waiting light. Nor does GrandCentral allow voicemails to be sent as a common WAV file to your email (I think this was a mistake).

Summary It wasn’t clear to me whether GrandCentral was pitching themselves for the consumer home or business user and unfortunately they mixed feature elements as to not sufficiently appeal to either. For example, personal greetings and custom ringback tone are clearly a consumer “fun” feature. Recording calls is more for business usage.

In the end, life is complex enough – there is no point in introducing yet another telephone number to deal. The cellular companies win, pass it along.

Comments

[UNKNOWN]

i totally agree with your "Know whose calling" comments. believe its the stupidest "feature" i've ever seen in a phone service. why isnt it enuf to look at the caller id ?!

and what's more awkward about it is if you have a pocket pc that can receive company emails. usually the company would setup a policy to lock the device and ask for a pin to unlock it. the pocket pc is kinda nice for other phone calls in that you dont need to unlock it to receive a phone call. pressing the green phone button will do. however to hear the calls from this stupid grandcentral service, you will have to press button "1". to do that in pocket pc, you will have to type in pin first. then press the "key pad" to show the phone keys on the screen then press "1" !!

i've been complaining a lot about it recently but i didnt see any sign of improvement. grandcentral just keep changing its web interface without adding any new useful features and correct its stupidity. cant believe it.

[Nobody]

Well, personally I have cut my landline once (tried out cable + voip) then switched back (b/c dsl got cheap). Also in the past I've changed cell# a few times. Why? b/c I can. Anyway, it's nice to have just 1 # so u don't have to inform everybody every time ur # changed.

[Shane]

To be honest I love the service! I can give this number to everyone I know and never bug them again about my number changing. The other thing is that when someone calls my GC number they reach me everywhere at once. I personally like the ringshare feature and I use this same feature with my t-mobile service its alot better than the old boring ringing. I have also used the "number is not in service" message to fool debt collectors into thinking its not a working number. I also use GC to get unlimited incoming minutes on my cell phone using myfavs because I added my GC number as one of myfavs and I chose the setting to have it show up as my GC number on my caller id that way all incoming calls are free. Thats why I disagreed with you when you bashed them for the caller id announcement when you pick up the phone. I need that feature so I can choose whether or not to accept the call and so that no one can call call me anonimously. They have alot of very cool feature which I will be using for a long time.