InsideGoogle

GrandCentral Users Lose “Number For Life”

GrandCentral, a company Google acquired last month, promised users a single phone number “for life”. The idea was that you’d give out this one phone number, and GrandCentral would forward calls to that number to all your phones. You’d only have a single number, and you’d give that number to all your contacts.

So, if you’re using only one phone number, to the exclusion of all others, it’d really suck to lose that number, right?

Well, GrandCentral/Google did exactly that, changing the numbers of a few GrandCentral users. The users were informed by email that in five days, their old number will change to a new one, because the old number was “not performing to our quality standards and are being replaced with higher quality services”.

I don’t get it. They’re just forwarding calls, right? So there shouldn’t be issues of call quality, and there shouldn’t be a difference in costs depending on the phone number (the new numbers and in the same area code). What’s the real reason hidden behind the PR bull?

No matter what, it’s a huge insult to your customers to do this, and it really destroys a lot of the reliability, credibility and reputation of your service. You can’t claim a phone number “for life” and then just change it. You can’t tell your users to give out a single phone number, then change it and force them to call everyone they know to give out a new phone number.

Unless they can guarantee that this is an isolated incident and won’t be repeated, how can you trust them anymore?
(via John Battelle)

Photo (which I love) by massdistraction under CC license

UPDATE: GrandCentral co-founder Vincent Paquet explained what happened to Om Malik. According to Vincent, a carrier they used before the acquisition decided to cut off service to an area at the end of the month, cutting off the numbers assigned to that area as well. Normally, you can transfer a number to avoid losing it, but I’m guessing that company didn’t give a crap about their customers.

I guess you can’t blame GrandCentral, unless the company involved had a terrible reputation from the get-go. Hopefully they learned a valuable lesson and will choose better partners in the future. At least only 434 users were affected, but I know I’ll be concerned about this sort of thing before I sign up for “number for life” in the future.

August 20th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | General | 2 comments