All of the local numbers in your account can now send and receive text messages! We’ll now automatically forward text messages sent to any of your Better Voicemail numbers to the primary cell phone number configured in your account. If you’d like, each number can be individually configured to forward text messages to any cell phone number you want.

You can easily send outgoing SMS messages from our account dashboard now as well! Support to send text messages from your Better Voicemail numbers via our App is coming soon! Look for it in the next couple of weeks.

Let us know if you have any questions about sending and receiving SMS messages with Better Voicemail.

Quick update! You can now sort and filter calls based on time and date ranges. Once you apply any filters you can also now export all of the matching calls to a CSV file.

This lets you easily do basic analytics on your incoming calls. As a side note, you can now also easily see all calls answered by a specific number by searching “answered:15121234567”. This report can also be exported to CSV.

Let us know if you have any questions about these great new features!

Last week, we rolled out Zapier integration. Zapier is an incredible service that makes it easy to connect other services together. For example: Want to create a new Better Voicemail contact every time you add a Google Contact? Zapier makes it easy!

With Zapier supported added, you can now integrate Better Voicemail with over 180 other services (and that number is growing every day).

Example Integrations:

• Auto export each new Google Contact into your Better Voicemail account. Why? Friendly names are matched to CallerID numbers thus making Better Voicemail notifications easier to identify.
• When a call is routed to Better Voicemail, either because you missed the call on your cell phone, or because you’re routing all of your inbound calls to a Better Voicemail number, this Zap sends the contact information over to Highrise. Highrise will create a contact if one does not exist using the information Better Voicemail has on the caller.
• if you are using Better Voicemail on your cell phone, this Zap sends each of your missed calls over to Evernote as new notes. Notes will be created with the CallerID name and Phone number and will have the transcription and MP3 of the voicemail attached.

Let us know if your integrated in connecting your Better Voicemail account with your CRM, Accounting System, or anything else! Zapier can probably help!

Better Voicemail + Zapier Information Page: https://zapier.com/zapbook/better-voicemail/

Happy New Year! We’ve released a ton of new features and enhancements. Many of them are under the hood, but some are front and center. One of the coolest new features is the ability to make outbound calls right from your Better Voicemail dashboard.

When you log into your account dashboard, you’ll now see a little tool at the bottom of the left side menu that lets you make calls from your Better Voicemail number. You can also receive calls in your dashboard by configuring your templates to forward calls to “client:your_username”.

This is just one set of many enhancements we’ll be pushing out in the coming weeks!

Do you use VOIP phones in your home or office? If you do, you can now transfer calls directly to a SIP device without it needing a phone number associated with it!

This feature opens up a ton of ways Better Voicemail can be integrated with existing business telephone systems. Want a better call routing system for your business, but don’t want to invest a ton of money in new hardware. Better Voicemail can easily make that happen!

If you’re interested in outbound SIP support, just let us know! We’re happy to help you get it set up.

This is a late Thanksgiving post, but still applicable! We, at BetterVoicemail.com, are very thankful! Here is a small list of things we’re thankful for and why. Some may sound silly, but all are heartfelt:

• Our Customers: we couldn’t do it without you!
• Our Employees: see above.
• The Internet: we wouldn’t be in business without it.
• The iOS App Store: This gives us an outlet to easily make voicemail better on your phone.
• The Google Play Market: see above.
• Modern APIs: Amazon Web Services, Twilio, Plivo, Nuance, Github, and many more. These APIs make our business infinitely more easy to run.

We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. If there is anything we can do to make you more thankful for our product, let us know!

Lately, we’ve been focusing a lot of our resources on integrating our product with various CRMs. Some of the ones we’ve been focusing on so far are SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, FollowUpBoss, and TopProducer. 

Without our product, all of the valuable data (caller name, number, city, state, zip, voicemail transcription, menu choices, etc) from inbound calls that hit your cell phone just falls into a black hole…it is being wasted! Why isn’t that data being captured and automatically imported into your CRM? It should be!

An example of how we integrate with SalesForce:

Any time you miss a call from someone that has never called you before, we can automatically create a new Contact in SalesForce with all of the caller data we have. If the caller leaves a voicemail, we can optionally create a Task so that you or another team member knows to follow up with that person. The creation of Contacts and Tasks also enables you to easily generate client call history Reports in SalesForce.

We think CRM integration is a huge value add for using our product and we will continue to invest significant time on deeper integrations. If we didn’t mention your CRM above, let us know in the comments so we can add it to our radar!

Some of our team is headed to the National Association of REALTORs Conference in Orlando today! We’ll be there until Saturday, so if you’re going to be in Orlando for the conference this week, send us a tweet! We’d love to meet you.

Shameless plug: If you’re going to the conference, just think about how many calls you’ll be missing while your in sessions, meetings, and wandering around the expo. You really should have a Better Voicemail system to take care of those calls for you!

We’ve just released a drastically simplified setup process! Our customization wizard is still available, but our basic set up form lets you easily add a menu to your voicemail, forward missed calls to team members, send text messages with product information, and much more!

The new setup process has received a lot of great feedback and is so easy a caveman could use it! However, as always, if you need help setting up your Better Voicemail system, don’t hesitate to let us know. We’re happy to help you!

We’re always improving Better Voicemail!

Previously, our voicemail notification emails contained direct links to the voicemail MP3 in the email content. We did not directly attach the voicemail MP3 recording to the email. Now we do!

This is very beneficial in offline environments, like when on a plane. You can download your emails before boarding, and your voicemails will be accessible in your email inbox.

Let us know if there are any improvements you would like to see added to Better Voicemail.