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Company: TextCall (Business/Service Review)

What it Does

TextCall is a company that will send you a text message as soon as a customer fills out the contact form on your website.  TextCall is perfect for the busy professional who can’t always be at the computer.  After a comprehensive review of the services provided by TextCall, here are my thoughts…

Sign Up

Signing up for TextCall is a breeze!  Once you have confirmed your email address, you’re off!  Sign in and enjoy!

Services

TextCall does all the hard work for you!  TextCall walks you through a simple interface of creating a contact form.  You can choose what fields you want displayed, and after completion a code is generated. Just paste it where you want the form at on your website.

Positives

1.  The code that is generated is very light, and only a few lines.  You are able to customize the code and use your own images, or just text.  I was impressed with this part of the system.

2.  Peace of mind!  It’s quite liberating to be able to concentrate on other projects and not have to remember to check your website several times a day.  One could even go on vacation without signing on!  Free at last! Imagine the possibilities!

Negatives

1. One problem with TextCall is that you are limited to only ONE form per website.  So, you can’t have one for support, and another for sales with different fields and numbers for each.

2.  TextCall also does not allow you to create custom fields to be displayed in your form.  Instead you choose from a list of preset fields.

3.  One of my worries about TextCall is that since the contact form is pulled from their domain, if they were to have an outage–your contact form on your website would be out as well.

Usage

After testing the code on my own domain, I found that the default form is very cool!  A nice AJAX contact form and an elegant look that is sure to fit into any design.  I was impressed to find that the form still worked even without JavaScript turned on, which is a nice plus!

Custom Tweaking

Well, I figured why not!  So I gave creating my own contact form using TextCall’s services a shot.  I was able to take their code and customize the design of the form, however; you still can’t add custom form fields.

Text Speed

TextCall’s speeds are just…LIGHTING FAST!  About 3 seconds after hitting submit on all my forms I received text messages.

There is a text limit when writing messages in the form.  Only so much will fit on your cell display.  With this in mind, TextCall has placed a nice little count down notice so you know when you are approaching the limit.  During my test, I filled out the limit, pressed “send,” then entered in the rest of my message.  I promptly received my two test messages.  They were nicely labeled, 1 of 2 and 2 of 2.  Sweet!

Support

If you need assistance expect super fast support. I made two support requests, not because I needed support, but just to test their reply speeds.  I received a reply within minutes…3 minutes to be exact!

Rates

I am actually very impressed with the rates on the site as well.  The more Text Messages you buy the cheaper they get.  For example, you can get 50 Text Messages for $5.95, or 100 for $11.90!  That’s CHEAP!

Also, the messages don’t expire, so you don’t have to worry about using them all by a certain date like other sites.  You can always view how many credits you have used and how many you have available within your account.

Recommendations

I think there is a place for this service on every website.  I plan on integrating it on mine.  However, due to the lack of support on adding custom fields, I will only use the system as a support method between my clients and me.

I am excited about what may be coming in the future with this company.  This is certainly a company that we should be keeping an eye on!

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5!

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About The Author

Jacob Haug

My name is Jacob Haug, and I spend the majority of my time in website development. I donate many hours each day helping the web community with technical aspects of website design and development. My current project is The Web Squeeze. A “NEW”, “FRESH”, Web Design and Development community dedicated to helping make the internet a better place! @JacobHaug