Rework GEO Permissions System for LC Phone
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Kevin Pohl
Since May 2024, LC Phone system all-of-a-sudden implemented GEO Permission restrictions on LC Phone lines.
This means that any customer (We're in South Africa) who wants to get a LC number and start using it, cannot. It simply does not function. It's a completely broken experience.
There's no messaging in the UI about GEO permissions when they get their number.
There's no error message when they try to use the phone number. It just does not work.
GHL then created this doc which was supposed to be helpful, but is not: https://help.gohighlevel.com/support/solutions/articles/48000981435-geo-permissions-issues-with-twilio
Our country (South Africa) is shown in this document as NOT High Risk. YET, all our LC phone numbers are blocked by default.
Even if you have a valid regulatory bundle. It doesn't matter.
The process now, is that You as the agency owner, have to reach out to GHL support on Live Chat, wait till they become available, ask them to enable GEO Permissions for any new Subaccount that wants to use LC Phone, provide that location ID, provide a list of countries this account will contact people in (with a limit of 5 max over live chat, for more than 5 countries you have to create a document with the list of all the countries this account needs to be approved for then submit a support ticket), then ask to enable either SMS, Call or Both for these GEO areas.
This is a 20 minute process on a good day. You have to do this for every new customer you get. It is NOT scalable.
This platform is now a mechanical turk. It is not a SaaS platform. The most basic things need human intervention first... CORE functionality that gets advertised and sold to us with hidden caveats.
Nobody informed us at any point in time that GEO permissions were being implemented.
Nobody gave us a process to follow the moment this was implemented.
As usual, we had to find out ourselves by having things break.
Earlier this year when this was implemented, GHL took active working phone lines of my customers offline for weeks. These customers were running Ads to these numbers...burning tons of cash.
This process needs fixing, asap.
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Kevin Pohl
Case in point... We're trying to get GEO enabled for a new customer now... but Support has left us hanging for 20 minutes already.
This is BROKEN Shaun Clark
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Shaun Clark
Kevin Pohl getting this to the team asap
Ronak Jindal
Kevin Pohl we have enabled South Africa for your account for now. We will ensure you don't have to go through this again. The long term solution to this is part of the Q1 '25 plan.
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Kevin Pohl
Ronak Jindal Thank you for acting on this! To you and Shaun Clark
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Emre Celik
Ronak Jindal Hello Ronak. I am facing this issue in Denmark. It is stopping us from scaling our business and onboarding clients to GHL
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Emre Celik
Shaun Clark Hey Shaun. Can you please take this up for the team now for Denmark? Im going trough the same issue
Ronak Jindal
Hi Emre Celik, I understand this is an unpleasant experience. Our solution is already in works and we expect to deploy around mid April.
- Can you tell me if your business location is Denmark?
- Are you looking for Voice or SMS or both?
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Emre Celik
Ronak Jindal My business is in Denmark and we have a danish number messaging danish numbers.
Voice calls seems to be okay and enabled automaticly when a new sub account is created.
It is SMS that seems to need to be enabled manually which is very time consuming
Ronak Jindal
Emre Celik I understand. We want to solve this for you. Unfortunately, we're unable to do this because of some API restrictions from our provider. We're trying to get them to build an API so that we can enable the countries you need automatically.
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Emre Celik
Ronak Jindal Is there a expected timeframe for this to be fixed? Mid april?
Ronak Jindal
Emre Celik I don't have a timeframe to share since this depends on when our provider can build this API for us.
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Emre Celik
Ronak Jindal Ok thanks.
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Kevin Pohl
Ronak Jindal I reported this as an issue in May 2024. You said a solution was coming "Soon" back then already. This doesn't scale. Doesn't work as promised nor advertised. Nowhere do you guys ever mention there will be manual steps to setting up LC Phone that none of our users can do themselves. We might as well just run our own Twilio accounts... at least then we can tick these Geo permission boxes ourselves. LC offers nothing of value.
Ronak Jindal
Kevin Pohl we are working on enabling the business' country by default. Expecting to release it around the second week of April.