My trips into Google Voice is usually brief. Log in, check voicemail and am out of there. The other day, I decided to dive deeper into the features, see if there’s anything new or something I missed before. One of the features I’ve always loved with Google Voice is the Call Widget. In fact, that’s what got me started with them way back when they were still GrandCentral. I really liked the idea of people being able to click a button and be connected to me or whatever phone number I want by phone.

Image by Paweł Zawistowsk

Checking in to this feature again, I had a few pretty interesting ideas what you can do with this widget.

• A call button for each department. The widget allows you to choose which phone number to ring. So let’s say you have your company web site and a JV web site. Support on these two sites are handled by two different people. You can create a widget for your company and another widget for the JV site, set them each to ring at a different number.
• Setup a voice feedback center. The widget also allows you to send the call to voicemail instead of ringing at a phone number.
• Create a contest. Want to do a contest where people call in to enter or maybe a singing or hilarious joke contest. Set up a special button for the contest, and have it go to voicemail. All you need to do is review the voicemail to pick a winner.
• Call to receive a freebie. An updated version of the good old direct marketing method – people call in, leave name and address you mail them your package – you then have a contact or lead to follow up with. An address can sometimes be more valuable than just an email address which is disposable. If you’re worried about instructions, don’t worry, the widget allows you to select which greeting to play too. So you can record a greeting specifically for this.
• Testimonials. Getting people to leave testimonials can be a challenge so making it easy is always a good idea. Nothing can be easier than a phone call. People click, their phone rings, set the widget to send to voicemail where you have a special greeting for them. They leave the testimonial. The best part, the voicemail is already in MP3 format OR if you’re in a real hurry, it comes with embeddable code you can just copy/paste to your website. Oh, oh and Google Voice has a transcribe feature too. Not sure how accurate the transcription is though but it can only get better. The down side, people are limited to 3 minutes. Which should be sufficient for a testimonial.

How else do you use Google Voice?