Hello HN, my wife lost the Google Voice phone number she uses for her business after 10 years due to the recent change requiring outgoing activity every 90 days.<p>For the past 10 years she has used the number for inbound lead gen, forwarding the voicemails to her main business line. However pregnancy has put her business on hold for a few months, and as such she has not checked the email associated with the number (different primary email) in a little while. Today we discovered the number is gone and we are outside the 45-day reclaim window. There were no calls or texts to the Voice number with any warnings, so we were not aware this was a thing until it was too late.<p>According to localcallingguide.com, the number is still held by bandwidth.com which I believe means it's still in Google's pool, although we can't see it for reclaiming in the system. Is there any chance a kind Googler can help us out? This has been the primary inbound phone number for her business for over a decade and losing it permanently would be devastating. My email is in my profile, we can prove a long history of usage privately if that helps.<p>Thanks!!
Not knocking the business phone setup, but if all the Google voice number is used for is lead generation to then forward to your main business line, then couldn't any other g voice number work to generate leads? Do you advertise that number anywhere and if so would it be feasible to just update it?<p>Also, wouldn't existing customers be using your official business number after converting from leads?<p>I hope you can get it back but I'm also not sure this will affect your wife's business all that much, imo it would lead to more spam calls <i>shrug</i>