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GrandCentral has taken some heat in last few days for informing a limited number of users that their phone number will change on August 25. The e-mail some users received from GrandCentral cites "quality standards" as the reason behind the change, but for a company whose slogan is "one number for life" forcing number changes is bound to raise people's ire.
In GrandCentral's defense, the service loudly proclaimed itself as a beta and openly warned users not to use their numbers for critical services. GrandCentral says the change effected 434 unlucky users.
Here's GrandCentral's response to the recent number changes and customer complaints:
>(1) One of our smaller underlying carriers (which we had been using prior to the Google acquisition), which had been reliably providing similar services for years (and provided numbers and connectivity to lots of other providers) sent us a notice that they'd be exiting certain markets and disconnecting some phone numbers in 30 days. This caught us by surprise and although we were not happy about this, there was no way we could stop them from doing this.
>(2) We immediately began porting all of these numbers to a one of our larger carrier partners and we were able to get nearly all of these numbers ported successfully.
>(3) Unfortunately, 434 phone numbers could not be ported over.
>(4) Once we found this out, we immediately sent an email to these users letting them know that we had to change their numbers to another one in the same area code and we automatically added these numbers to their accounts. We provided a direct email link to help them with any issues or concerns they may have, let users choose alternative numbers more to their liking, and offered any other assistance that would help them.
We review a lot of beta software, though we try to also point out the beta status in our reviews, but with many sites (GMail comes to mind) carrying the beta label far past the point of critical mass, sometimes it's easy to forget that beta really does mean things can go wrong and the software or web service really is "not ready for prime time use."
For instance, The Consumerist writes: "we have recommended GrandCentral before, and we use it ourselves; but for Google to change user's phone numbers without consent defeats the entire purpose of GrandCentral."
While that's true, and no doubt the move has done some serious damage to GrandCentral's image, it also goes to show how often we all ignore the beta warnings in a rush to embrace useful new services.
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