The internet has created this crazy new paradigm of free services. The list is lengthy; Google apps, Twitter, Hotmail, Facebook, Blogger, Yahoo Pipes, Posterous, Gmail & WordPress.com are just a few. Free services are literally everywhere these days, like manna from heaven.
To be fair, I do use some of these free services. However, just as I don’t have all my documents in Google Docs, I have a hard time taking Google Voice seriously.
I’m told that GV’s terms of service preclude anyone from using it for business purposes. I’ve looked through their general terms of service and GV specific usage policies and I don’t see where that’s clearly stated. If true, that would seem to limit it to use to a home phone line or novelty applications in the realm of the telecom geek.
Even if Google does allow its use in business, I don’t think that I could. My concern is not so much about Google Voice specifically, it’s more about the free services mentality.
Free services are like doing business with relatives. I once hired a relative to do some work on my house. While the experience wasn’t bad, I vowed to never do it again. When you hire family to do something you just don’t have the same recourse as if you had hired a contractor. You don’t have the same latitude to insist on how the work is done, or when.
What…you think that you’re going to sue a member of the family if they leave the job unfinished? I doubt that very much!
Sometimes paying for a service is most ideal because you then have the reasonable expectation of delivery of that service. When there’s a problem, because you know that time will come, you have the equally reasonable expectation of support. The company that you are dealing with is presumably making money delivering that service, so they have both the motivation and resources to provide you timely support, or lose your account the associated revenue.
If someone contracts to provide a service then fails to do so we have various forms of recourse. We can complain to local, state or federal regulators. If the situation warrants we can sue for a remedy. We can sue for costs and damages. Heck, even Comcast, that bastion of customer dissatisfaction, will credit a portion of my monthly fee for down time. That is, if I take the trouble to call and complain.
What happens when some form of free service goes down? Both Gmail and Google Docs have suffered outages in recent memory. Twitter has been suffering repeated DDOS attacks this week. What if my business relied upon these services?
How do I explain to my customers that they can’t reach me in their time of need because Google Voice is having a problem? Or perhaps I can’t access their customer data because Google Docs is offline? I’d expect to have really unhappy customers under such circumstances.
In the event of a service outage they have a built-in excuse, “What do you expect, it’s a free service? We do what we can.” That just won’t work for me when addressing my management or customers.
I know that enterprise services like SalesForce.com have ramped up their game to deliver reliability. They, and others like them are entirely different. They may be hosted afar, or even cloud-based, but they’re not free. They know that to sustain their business they need to deliver a reliable service. And they know that every single account, their entire business, hinges on that very fact. Not so with Google. They’re considerably less focused.
Our hosted PBX provider, OnSIP has been extremely reliable over the past two years. This has convinced me that hosted services are acceptable in some situations, even for business telephony. But I’m still very careful about support. Reliability is key, but responsiveness of support during failures is even more critical. That’s an issue that can be impacted as a service provider grows, so it needs to be watched over time.
In a troubled economy everyone wants a good deal, but sometimes the best deal is not the cheapest. Any company can sell a service for a low price, but does the support effort scale proportionally? What good is getting the best price if it also results in limited support hours, too few staff or no means of direct contact?
Providing good support costs real money. Support staff worth having must be recruited, trained and then (hopefully) retained. We still maintain Covad DSL in the face of numerous, mostly cheaper alternatives, largely because their first-tier support staff can actually spell IP. Also, in five years I’ve never had a problem with them that couldn’t be resolved quickly by first tier support.
Then there’s the Google Voice service itself. It’s pretty good. But it’s also lacking in some fundamental ways. For example, why is Gizmo5 the only SIP service I can use in call forwarding? That’s just lame.
GV is in some ways elevating the telecom experience of the average person to be more like that of someone working in a large enterprise with a UC solution in place. That’s certainly commendable. Yet various aspects of GV tend to indicate that they’re still working to emulate the telecom services of the past, not seeking to define how we’ll use voice in the future.
For Google Voice to hold much interest for me they have to deal with issues like porting numbers, service level agreements (SLA) and giving customers a means of contacting real people when there is a problem. All these are the hallmarks of what could be a paid version of the service, a “Pro” version of you like.
In reality, it’ll need to be a more compelling solution than what we have in place right now. They have a lot of the pieces in place, but they still have some distance to go. Until then, and in my world, it’s merely a novelty.
Update: John Hermansen of GIPS has a very interesting post called How Does Google Voice Make Money?