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Google Voice is not a marketing tool

“I think I was suspended for sending too many texts in a row. I use this number for work and it requires me to talk to a lot of people.”

Let’s face it, dealing with the phone is a huge pain for most small business owners. We are constantly bombarded with robocalls, spam text messages and emails. Your customers are inherently distrustful of any communication that comes across on their phones. However, when reached in the right way this communication can be a powerful outreach opportunity. Read rates on text messages can be as high as 98% (source)!

Google Voice provides a very compelling platform for aspiring SMS marketers, but I’m here to tell you: DON’T DO IT! Why? Well, the Google Voice support forums are full of horror stories of people having their accounts suspended for sending communications that are not SPAM but they still managed to set off the Google SPAM detectors. As I covered previously, once your account is suspended it is difficult (and frustrating) to get it back.

I will explain how you can quickly get yourself into trouble with Google Voice when using it for business use. If you are adamant about sticking with Google Voice I will provide a few tips on how to be more successful.

Disclaimer

Before we get to that, a Public Service announcement is in order. This guide is not intended to be a how-to on sending SPAM or avoiding the Google Voice SPAM detectors. This guide is intended for helping enable communication with customers who want or will benefit from your text messages. Google Voice is a powerful tool that has enabled some really neat, and new forms of communicating.

Example of how easy it is to get your Google Voice account suspended

One jarring example that I found during my research for this article was from a teacher who was using Google Voice to send messages to low-income families about meal and food options available through the school. The teacher had a contact list of 75 families and would send out a text message letting them know when donations or free meals were available. The messages that were sent were short, but repetitive and were likely sent in rapid succession to many different phone numbers at once.

This activity is by no means SPAM and all users had likely opted in with the teacher to receive the text notifications. Unfortunately, the Google SPAM bots don’t differentiate between legitimate, non-SPAM messages. They watch for specific usage behaviors and flag your account for suspension. Ultimately, because Google Voice is not a business service, they don’t have to worry about making the distinction.

What is particularly heartbreaking about this specific example is that this user’s account was disabled right before the Christmas holiday as they were trying to get messages to families about meals and food that would be available during the School’s holiday break.

Not a Business Solution

Another important point to make is that Google provides very limited support for Google Voice. If you do find yourself with a suspended account, it can take days or weeks to get it back, if you get it back at all. Do you want your critical business operations to depend on a service like that?

“Google Voice is intended for personal use only, not for business use.” – Google Voice Community Product Expert

It is worth repeating that Google Voice was not built as a business communication tool. If your business requires you to always be available to your customers then I would strongly recommended that you consider a different service. As mentioned above, there are many horror stories of users having their accounts suspended and numbers lost for long periods of time or indefinitely because their account was flagged as “abusive.” If you do insist on using this service for your business, understand that if you get suspended there is no guarantee you will get your account back. If your account is permanently suspended you cannot port your number to a different service, it’s gone forever.

Improving your experience with Google Voice

Now that you understand the risks be sure to read my guide where I get more in-depth on how to prevent your account from being suspended. At a high-level here are a few things you can do to ensure your success with the service.

You are more likely to be flagged for abuse if you send the same messages to many people in a short period of time
Including URLs in your messages will trigger the SPAM detection system much quicker than if you don’t include one.
Encourage your recipients to respond to your messages. Google Voice is intended for personal use and the SPAM detection system expects text messages to take place in a conversational way.

Next steps

This article is part of a series on how to leverage communications tools to empower your business. Please continue to check back as we release the next version in the coming days.

How long does it take to port my number to Google Voice?

You’re all set, you have your mobile phone number ready to port to Google Voice. You fill out all of the forms, pay all of the necessary fees and you’re ready to go.

Great!

Now you wait, and wait, make a few test calls, wait some more. After a while you start to wonder, “have I just made a huge mistake?” “WHERE IS MY PHONE NUMBER?!”

Well, I’m here to put your mind at ease. According to Google themselves, the porting process for your phone number can take anywhere from 48-96 hours to complete. If you are still within that window, please be patient and continue to make regular test calls to your phone number. Alternatively, you can check the Google Voice Porting Status page here

Sometimes numbers get stuck or lost, for those issues, please check out my guide to resolving issues numbers stuck in porting “limbo.” COMING SOON!

6 steps to prevent your Google Voice account from being suspended

You’ve heard the horror stories of people having their Google Voice accounts suspended for violating one of the Acceptable Use policy rules. Maybe you’ve been suspended before and worked hard to get your account unsuspended and you don’t want to go through that again. You’ve come to the right place, the following points are my top ways to avoid getting your account suspended.

Understand what behaviors got you suspended in the first place.

Regardless of whether you’ve been suspended or just want to avoid the pain of a suspension consider taking time to read the Google Voice Acceptable Use Policy. It is important to understand what behaviors are allowed and which ones are not. Knowing upfront what is against usage policy is key to deciding how you will interact with your account.

Use a unique, secure password on your Google account

Please use good password creation best practices! Here is my advice:

Don’t use a password that you use or have used on an account on another website. If that website is compromised now they have your Google Voice password.
Consider using a passphrase rather than a password. Take 4 or 5 random words and string them together. Add in a few uppercase letters, a number, and symbol and you have a very secure password that will be very difficult to crack.
Enable Two-factor authentication (TFA) on your account. Learn more here. Using two-factor authentication gives you an additional layer of security that protects your account from unauthorized access. If a hacker somehow gets your password, they won’t be able to log in unless they have the randomly generated code your TFA app uses.

Why is this important? Simply because, if a hacker can gain access to your Google account they will begin using it to send out email and text message SPAM. Eventually the SPAM detection systems will kick in and your account will be suspended.

Rate limit your text messaging

Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way, this post in no way is meant to promote getting around the Google Voice SPAM detection system. If you are sending SPAM, you deserve to have your account suspended, full stop.

Now that that’s out of the way. If you do find yourself needing to send a message to a group of people take your time. If you message 30 people in the span of a few minutes, that’s going to look awfully suspicious to the Google SPAM bots. Google purposely doesn’t publish the thresholds they use to detect SPAM, so there isn’t a good rule of thumb other than take it slow. During my research for this article I found several examples where individuals were sending 30+ text messages for legitimate purposes but got suspended anyway.

Do not send identical text messages to multiple people

Another way to get your self in trouble is sending the same identical message to a large number of people at once. One recommendation I have seen is to adjust your message by including the name of the recipient or modifying a part of the message so each text is different.

Be careful sending URLs

Including URLs in your mass text messages can also trigger the Google SPAM bots. SPAMers will often include links to a website whenever they send SMS SPAM. This appears to be a guaranteed way to have your account flagged for abuse.

Do not use Google Voice to dial in to a radio station contest!

Ask this person who found out the hard way: repeatedly hitting redial button will get you suspended pretty quickly. It’s likely that Google interprets this as harassing behavior or a TDOS attempt. Either way there are documented cases of people having their accounts suspended for this behavior.

Are you a small business owner considering using Google Voice for your business but have heard stories of people having their accounts suspended and not being able to make or receive calls for days or weeks? Consider reading our article on 5 things to consider before running your business with Google Voice

Would you like more content like this? Consider signing up for my mailing list, I will occasionally email you with similar content and helpful links on how you can use communication tools to improve your business.

My Google Voice account has been suspended, what do I do now?

You have received the dreaded pop-up or email notifying you that your Google Voice account has been suspended for a policy violation. This article will cover all of the steps you need to take to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.

What you need to know

Let’s start with the good news: All hope is not lost. It is possible to have your account restored.

The bad news:You did something to trigger the Google Anti-Spam detectors and it won’t be entirely painless getting your account back. You will also need to change the way you use the service to avoid it happening again (more on this below).

Google Voice is notoriously under-documented and Google purposely does not publish the specific triggers that will get your account suspended. It’s also really difficult to get help. There is no toll free support phone number to call, no email address to email. There is a community help forum, but the moderators are not part of the team that handles account suspensions.

The Fix

It’s important to know up front: has your account been temporarily suspended or marked for abuse? There is a difference.

How do I know if I have been suspended or disabled?

Your account can be temporarily suspended for 24 hours, in those cases you just have to wait for the suspension to be removed.

If your receive and email stating that your account has been marked for abuse you have been marked for abuse and suspended.

Unable to access a Google product
If you've been redirected to this page from a particular product, it means that your access to this product has
been suspended. Read on for more information.
Your access to this Google product has been suspended because of a perceived violation of either the Google
Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service. For specific product guidelines, please visit the
homepage of each Google product you're interested in for a link to its Terms of Service.
Google reserves the right to:
• Disable an account for investigation.
• Suspend a Google Account user from accessing a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system, if
the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated.
• Terminate an account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.
Next steps for suspended accounts: If you believe your access to this product was suspended in error, contact
us.

How to Get your account back

Step 1: Review the Google Voice Acceptable Use Policy https://www.google.com/googlevoice/program-policies.html

Have you violated any of the rules? Be honest with yourself here, no judgement from me. How were you using the service prior to being suspended?

Here are a few examples of behaviors that can trigger the SPAM detection services with Google Voice:

Making a lot of phone calls in a short period of time
Sending a larger than normal number of text messages in a short period of time
Redialing the same number over and over again

Finding this important information about Google Voice is not easy unless you search for it. Stuff happen and accounts get suspended so it’s important to know what you did so that you don’t make the same mistake again.

Step 2: Submit a suspension appeal request

Fill out the following form to appeal your suspension https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/suspended. Explain what happened before your suspension. IMPORTANT: If your entire Google account has been suspended, including your Gmail account, make sure you use a different email address that you have access to.

You can try posting to the Google Voice Help community forum https://support.google.com/voice#topic=1707989, but understand that the team there does not handle account suspensions. That is managed by an entirely different team within Google. They can provide guidance on how best to proceed, just remember to be polite. You catch more flies with Honey than Vinegar.

Step 3: If your first appeal is denied, wait a day or two and try again

In my research for this guide I found a few instances where it took multiple appeal attempts to get an account reinstated. See here https://www.reddit.com/r/Googlevoice/comments/3e9txi/my_account_was_suspended_and_having_issues/

And here https://www.reddit.com/r/Googlevoice/comments/7l3hj5/anyone_else_not_able_to_send_texts_or_receive/

I am not advocating that you SPAM Google, but rather encouraging you to wait a day or two before resubmitting. I know that it’s infuriating that this is the way to get your account back, but it’s unfortunately the only way that I’ve been able to find.

What do to after your account is re-instated

Make sure you don’t repeat the same mistakes again! Check out our easy-to-follow guide <here>

Once you do have your account back, give some serious consideration to whether Google Voice is the right service to use for your business. I have a handy guide that hopefully can help answer those questions for you <link to guide here>.

Ready to make the move to a different product? Learn how to port out your Google Voice number <here>

Did you find this guide helpful? Please consider subscribing to my mailing list. I’ll periodically send you emails with other content related to Google Voice and other products that can benefit your small business.

5 Reasons Why Your AT&T IP Flex Orders Take Forever

You’ve got your AT&T IP Flexible Reach, a.k.a. IP Flex/BVOIP, service provisioned and set up (which was probably a monumental feat in and of itself), you’ve placed your test calls and now you’ve placed your first order. If you are like me, this has probably been your experience:

You place the order with your account team. Maybe they acknowledge your order, maybe they don’t.
After several days or weeks of no response, you follow up but don’t hear anything.
After several more weeks your account manager discovers that there was an issue with the order and it needs to be placed again.
After several more weeks of waiting you finally receive confirmation that your order was accepted
Several more weeks of waiting
You get a meeting invite for the middle of the day (when you requested an after-hours port)
Yadda, yadda, yadda
Two to three months later you’ve finally ported your numbers

Now you get to start all over again and figure out what black magic you have to work to make it happen in half the time! I’m hopeful that this post will help you avoid some of the painful mistakes and issues I’ve encountered on my own IP Flex journey over the years.

Here are my top 5 recommendations for how to improve the AT&T IP Flex number porting experience:

Make sure you have Letters of Authorization Signed.This important form confirms that you own the numbers that you are requesting to port. Your order is almost guaranteed to fail if you do not have this signed and submitted with your order.
Pre-qualify all of your sites for IP Flex at one time. AT&T has a group that will pull Customer Service Records for your branch offices and review all numbers associated with your account. They will do this for any location regardless of whether or not they are the LEC. This saves an unbelievable amount of time for you as the customer because you don’t have to go to your LEC and ask for those records. This one step has virtually eliminated ALL issues we’ve had with incorrect orders or missing DIDs on our orders.
Create Branch Office Extensions (BOEs) ahead of time.Think of a Branch Office Extension, or BOE, as a bucket inside of your IP Flex service. You have your main IP Flex “Nodes” where your calls come in on your SBCs. Those nodes have addresses associated with them for 911. Obviously, not every single site you move to IP Flex will have that address, even though the calls come in and go out of those devices. This is where BOE’s come in. They carve out a space in your environment where AT&T knows that a specific DID belongs to a specific 911 address. This ensures that when an emergency call is placed on the IP Flex network, AT&T knows exactly which PSAP (emergency responder) to route it to.
If you have a large number of branch offices, can you commit to porting 20 or more sites? If so, AT&T can commit project management resources to your account to help with submitting and tracking port orders. Typically, this person will have IP Flex knowledge and will understand what internal systems to check whenever there are issues with orders. Sometimes this can save a full MONTH’s worth of delays.
Check your email! Seriously!AT&T is notorious for assigning multiple order writers to process your order. I will often get lengthy, jargon-filled emails from order fillers that I don’t always understand. Often these emails have a one-liner at the bottom of the email stating what action I need to take for the order to proceed to the next step. Read these emails thoroughly and carefully. Don’t be afraid to email your account team asking for help, especially if you have a project manager as recommended in point number 4. AT&T will cancel your order if you don’t respond in time forcing you to reset the clock on your port order.
BONUS! Set your engineer as the local contact on the order.In fact, there is no reason to list a local person from your remote site at all: with SIP trunking everything is centralized. Listing the name of the engineer responsible for porting the numbers is critical because all email commuincation about the order will go to this person. If you split responsibilities for engineering/operations and order placing make sure ALL individuals are included as contacts on the order. This will save you headaches down the road as your order works it’s way through the AT&T systems.

How can I connect up an older PBX with a new modern VOIP system?

There are typically four ways to do this:

IP based trunking if the PBX supports it. This would involve using protocols such as SIP, H.323, MGCP, etc
T1 tie trunks. You can set up a QSIG or PRI connection between the two phone systems. This configuration requires that you have hardware on both ends to support the T1 connection.
Analog lines. You can extend individual analog lines between your phone systems. This requires that you have hardware to support it as well as making sure you have enough lines to support the number of calls you will route between phone systems at any given time.
Forwarding calls out of your telephone system’s PSTN conneciton. In this scenario, you could allow users on the old PBX to dial the typical 3-5 digit extension and simply send the call out to your telco so that it comes in via the PSTN on the other phone system. This is probably the easiest solution but you could incur carrier charges depending on your set up.