06Feb

Dramatic new pricing comes to Fonolo

We’ve made two big changes to Fonolo this week. The first one is our dramatic new pricing model, which I will cover in this blog post. The second is a new self-serve process for starting a free trial, which I’ll cover shortly.

Flat rate pricing: $10 per agent per month

The first remarkable thing about the pricing is that it has a very low entry point — just $99/mo for small companies. Virtual queuing has never been available in this price range before. (Not by a long shot!) And remember that Fonolo is much more than just virtual queuing. That price also includes visual navigation (using our unique Deep Dialing technology) from the web or mobile,  post-call surveys and more.

The second remarkable thing is that pricing is based on the number of agents rather than number of calls or minutes. We made this change in order to make it easier for you to buy. It’s easy to count how many agents you have. It’s harder to estimate how many calls or minutes you expect to pass through Fonolo. That’s an exercise we’ve gone through many times with our customers and, while we’ve gotten good at helping folks work through it, it was definitely a barrier to getting started. Now, that barrier is gone!

Behind the scenes

We are able to offer this new pricing primarily because we’ve built our own telephony infrastructure and we’ve reached a scale now where we can keep our costs-per-call quite low. (Having our own infrastructure has many other benefits such terrific uptime and being able to offer advanced features.)

Another reason we can offer flat-rate pricing is that we now have enough deployments under our belt to have a good feeling for how to budget for calls we can expect from any given situation.

 

Three tiers

Our “Starter” package is intended for small companies with fewer than 10 agents. It costs only $99/month and includes all the basic Fonolo features: Visual navigation from the web or mobile, Deep Dialing, and post-call surveys.

Our “Professional” package covers call centers up to 40 agents and costs $399/month. It also adds some advanced features such as pre-call questions and scheduled call-backs, so if you have a smaller call center but want these features, you can choose this package.

Our “Enterprise” package is for call centers with more than 40 agents. (There is no upper limit — we’ve done deployments with companies that have hundreds of agents.) This is also the package for anyone that needs an on-site deployment, international calling or multiple IVRs. Here is pricing gets more complicated because there are many more variables with larger call centers.

You can see all the details here: fonolo.com/pricing.

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01Feb

Don’t wait on hold for us, we’ll wait for you!

There’s nothing quite like getting great feedback from customers!  Here’s what Jeb Brilliant had to say about Fonolo in a recent Phone.com blog post:

I’ve written about fonolo before but I wanted to remind everyone about it.  It’s a service that holds your place in line until we have an operator ready to talk with you, leaving you to do whatever you want.

You just head our to our Customer Support page and take a look on the right side for the fonolo box titled Talk to us!  Select what you’re calling for, Sales or Customer Service, fill in your Phone.com number (if you have one, if not don’t put anything in there)  and the number you want us to call you back on.  Click Start Call and the then go about your business.  Once it’s your turn in our phone queue you’ll get a call from us and one of our operators will be on the other end of the call waiting to help you.

Jeb goes on to say:

We know you’re busy and don’t want to make you wait for us, we’ll wait for you.

Couldn’t have said that better myself.  And with Fonolo’s cloud-based virtual queuing services available for businesses of all sizes, nobody should ever have to wait on hold again.

 

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18Jan

Fonolo sponsoring next week’s Call Center Summit

Call Center Week LogoOne of the industry’s biggest events is taking place next week and Fonolo is proud to be a sponsor. The Call Center Summit kicks off in Orlando, Florida on Monday. You can follow news from the event via the twitter account CallCenterEvent.

I will be there representing Fonolo along with our CEO, Shai Berger. If you are attending the show and would like to talk, we would be delighted to meet with you! Just send me a note at chris@fonolo.com.

Oh, one last thing: You should definitely plan on  attending the Tuesday morning keynote. Not only is the speaker top-notch (Tracy Wright, the Director of Customer Care for Avon) but you will also find a tasty treat on your chair from us!

 

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03Nov

Real-time analytics: a silver bullet for call centers?

A growing number of vendors are offering analytics products to call centers as a way to improve caller experience and agent performance. The basic goal of analytics is to give the agent extra insight into a given caller by “data mining”. Some offerings analyze the caller’s transaction history with the company, some analyze the actual words in recorded conversations (speech analytics), some even try to discern the caller’s mood by examining the way words are spoken.

I will admit right away that I don’t have first hand experience with any of these offerings. But, after working with many call centers over the last few years, my instincts tell me to be skeptical of their claims of improved caller experience or agent performance. I sense a high hype-factor.

I just read an article in GigaOm titled Big Data: Making even call centers intelligent. It’s based on a discussion with IBM who, one can surmise, is readying a product for this space. Some excerpts:

 …it’s a matter of putting analytics tools to work for customer service reps … [so he] isn’t left trying to deal with a potentially upset customer while simultaneously trying to find a resolution… the analytics system has done much of the legwork already.

How would it work?

… the rep will have a screen full of charts and dashboards showing a customer’s history, preferences and propensities, based on what the system has been able to determine from previous calls and general activity…

…the system might offer a variety of offers specifically tailored to that customer. A customer likely to cancel service, or one likely to upgrade to an even more-expensive plan, will be offered whatever it is the system thinks will make them happy.

To me that seems far removed from the realities of the modern call center. Today’s agents already have a desktop overloaded with data across many different windows. Is adding one more window going to make the agent perform better?

IBM foresees taking this a step forward, using “predictive analysis”:

… reps could actually type what a customer is saying… let the system perform sentiment analysis in near real time and adjust accordingly… learning as it goes what keywords are correlated with what actions and constantly rescoring customers’ propensity models.

Picture in your mind the effort required to implement a project like this one. You would have to connect the software to your existing databases, program in your current policies, figure out how to deliver “actionable intelligence” to your agents and then train your agents. By the time you do that and run a pilot to see if it was making a difference, you would probably have new policies in place.

I think there’s a better way to use that time and money.  Step one: hire great agents. Step two: Let them do what they do best by removing low-value “house-keeping” chores from their workload (i.e. use pre-call questions). Don’t waste their time handling misnavigated calls.

There are no shortcuts to delivering a good call center experience. The only answer is an ongoing effort by the company to listen to feedback from its callers, tweak its policies and keep its agents up-to-date on those policies.

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07Oct

Travel Planners Adds Virtual Queuing and Visual Dialing to its Call Center

Travel Planners International (TPI) is an agency that supports travel agents by giving them direct access to air, car, hotel, cruise and tour products. At the core of their offering is a web service (TPICENTRAL) that travel agents use to search and book trips. When matters get complicated, there is also a call center that agents can dial for help.

As a consumer, you would never interact with TPI. But if you’ve ever used an independent travel agent, they were able to do their job because of TPI, or a service like it.

Several months ago, TPI embarked on a major redesign of that agent-facing web platform and became convinced that adding Fonolo would help agents immediately become more productive.

We are constantly looking for ways to help our agents do their work more effectively. Losing incoming calls from agents not willing to wait on hold is unacceptable and we recognized that there was an opportunity to improve the process of connecting callers to the call center.

- TPI General Manager Erwing Hernandez

TPICENTRAL now features Fonolo’s visual dialing interface (see below). Agents who need to contact the call center can now request a call with one click, avoiding phone menus and hold time. Because Fonolo’s cloud-based service can integrate seamlessly and automatically with any call center, TPI did not have to change any of its infrastructure or business processes.

“The most impressive feature of Fonolo was the setup. It was seamless and very easy,” said Hernandez. “Fonolo is a key to the success of our new platform. We are now providing a better phone experience for our agents.”

This is another great example of how Fonolo’s visual dialing interface and virtual queuing system can improve the calling experience and make call center agents more efficient.

 

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26Sep

In Canada, Mobile Banking is Used by Over 12% of Mobile Subscribers

A new report is out highlighting the popularity of mobile banking in Canada. The “Canadian Online Banking Insights” report was published at the end of July by comScore. (Hat tip to MobileSyrup.)

Putting 12% in context

Quite a few good data points in there, but the one that caught my eye is that 12.3% of all mobile subscribers are using mobile banking. On one hand, this seems low, given that mobile banking has existed, in one form or another for almost 10 years. On the other hand, if you tried some of those early attempts at mobile banking, you’ll recall how unpleasant they were to use. The game didn’t really start until smartphones became prevalent (specifically the iPhone) about 4 years ago. And it took few more years after that to reach another important milestone that we hit only at the end of last year: Availability of iPhone apps from all the major banks in Canada. (See my post from December: RBC releases mobile app. Now all the banks are in.) With that in mind, the 12% number is actually quite impressive. (I haven’t seen any data, but I would guess that prior to 2010, that number was probably 1-2%.)

What’s behind the growth?

The forces propelling this growth are

  1. Dramatic improvement of usability brought by the smartphone.
  2. The growing penetration of smartphones.  (Read this: By 2015, smartphones will rule the mobile planet.)
  3. Mobile banking apps are adding more functionality. One much anticipated improvement is the “eWallet” where small payments can be made directly from the phone.

But where is the call center?

However, one area where the apps have lagged is integration with the call center. Today, if you tap the “contact us” link, it simply triggers a regular phone call. No context from your on-device interactions is preserved (i.e. you are starting a new interaction “cold”). Furthermore, none of the amazing functionality of the smartphone is put to use. This is a very large wasted opportunity. It’s an opportunity to improve customer experience and to improve call center efficiency.

It’s just around the corner, actually

Luckily we’re working with a number of banks to change this situation. If you want a peak into the near future, download our whitepaper “Fonolo for the Financial Industry” or tune in tomorrow at 2pm ET for a webinar focused on the financial industry. (If you miss it, come back and watch the archive when you get a chance.)

 

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14Sep

Fonolo named “Best Contact Center Solution” at ITExpo!

We were surprised and delighted today when Fonolo was named “Best-of-Show” in the “Contact Center Solutions” category at the ITExpo conference. You can read the formal announcement (and see the other winners) here.

If you are attending ITExpo, please drop by our booth (#422) to see a live demonstration and chat with our team. You can also see Shai speak on two panels tomorrow. Details here.

Rich Tehrani, the conference chairman and CEO of TMC said

“We’re pleased to honor Fonolo with a ‘best-of-show’ award, and we congratulate them for standing out amongst a large and highly competitive field.”

 

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08Sep

Shai Speaking at Cloud Communications Expo

Our CEO will be participating at the upcoming Cloud Communications Expo, which is co-located with the ITExpo conference in Austin. (See this post from earlier in the week on Fonolo’s involvement at ITExpo.)

Shai will be speaking on September 14 at 3:45 as part of this session:

Three Big Problems. Three Big Answers

Moderator: Larry Lisser, Principal , Embrase
Three dispruptive companies in Cloud Comm will each profile the big problem they are solving, or seeing as a growing one and the market drivers behind it. The audience will tell us if they agree.

We hope to see you there.


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06Sep

Fonolo Going Big at ITExpo

ITExpo is one of the mega events of our industry, and Fonolo is participating in a big way this year.

If you’re planning to be in Austin for the show, which runs Sep 13-15, we’d be thrilled if you stopped at our booth (#422). You’ll be able to glimpse the future of the call center experience via live demos of Fonolo — both web and mobile. We’ll be showing some capabilities there that haven’t been seen before, or mentioned in this blog. You’ll also be able to chat with the Fonolo team about our product and see if it is a fit for your call center. If that’s not enough incentive for you, we’ll also be raffling off some great prizes!

I will be speaking on two panels, both on September 15th:

Harnessing the Customer Service Experience with a Multi-Channel Approach

Description: Today’s consumers are sophisticated. They want flexibility, and simply don’t want to be tethered to just one way of doing business with a company.  As a result, a one touch-point approach – by way of the landline telephone – doesn’t cut it. In a given day, consumers go to and fro between their mobile phone, computer and landline – all based on what is convenient to them to make it through their hectic days. As consumers’ habits change, so too must the approach that businesses take with their customer service solutions….  cont’d

This panel is part of the Call Center track, and will be at 11:00 am. We’ve tackled the topic of multi-site call centers several times on this blog, including this post last month by Jason.

 Bringing the Social Experience into the Business Context

 Description: As business continue to migrate to new work patterns, including more mobile and remote workers…greater collaboration with customers, and an ever increasing number of connectivity options… they often become lost in a sea of applications and services, ultimately reducing the benefits of each one. … [Thus] presenting an enormous opportunity for businesses to leverage the social media experience in their business collaboration environments… cont’d

 This panel is part of the Business Collaboration track, and will be at noon. The impact of social media on customer service was the topic of a webinar I did in May, and can now be viewed on-demand here. I also discussed the topic in this blog post: How Twitter is changing the customer service equation.

We hope to see you in Austin!

 

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