How To Use Google Voice To Forward SMS Text To Email
BY Editweapon @ November 18, 2009
Jigsaw Health — superior proprietor of magnesium supplements — just launched a new campaign for busy customers; Text Us Your Order. Here’s how we used Google Voice to make this work.
Step 1 – Get an invite & sign up.
My friend Bryan Eisenberg sent me his very last Google Voice invite. I signed up and chose a local phone number so I could get a dedicated phone line for customers to text us their order.
Btw, my “invite a friend” link hasn’t appeared in my Google Voice account yet, so you’re on your own. Request a Google Voice invite here.
Step 2 – Forward SMS to Email
We chose to forward text messages to help@jigsawhealth.com, our catch-all inbox that several people monitor.
Step 3 – Forward the Phone to our Work Phone
We chose to forward the Google Voice number to our main work number which rings to a “hunt group” so any number of us could answer the phone if a customer chose to call instead of text their order.
Step 4 – Receive Text Orders
Step 5 – Reply to Text Using Google Voice!
This was probably my favorite part. It allows any one of my employees to interact with customers via text, using the Google Voice web interface, instead of your cell phone!
One downside…
…is that everyone has to login to a single Google account. That means they have to log out of their own Google account first. It’s sort of inconvenient. I would love to see Google add a feature for adding different accounts, similar to Google Analytics, Adwords, etc.
But it’s free, so I ain’t gonna complain!
Announce To Our Customers
We put together this video and a page explaining how returning Jigsaw Health customers can text their order to us.
Popularity: 2% [?]







NICE! I wish Google would allow for multiple account use as well.
One good workaround is to have two browsers open – the business account logged in on one and the personal account on the other. It works!
Dave
Yeah, I do the two browser thing all the time. Need a few more actually.