Monthly Archives: February 2012

FONOLO – Finalist for Prestigious Best of Enterprise Connect Award

Posted by Xania on February 27, 2012

We’re really excited to share that Fonolo was announced as a finalist for the prestigious Best of Enterprise Connect award.  Being recognized as an industry leader reinforces the need for Fonolo’s cloud-based visual dialing solution for call centers. We’ll be heading to sunny Orlando, FL at the end of March to exhibit at the Enterprise Connect Conference – Orlando and hopefully, bring home another award.  If you’re attending the conference, please stop by booth #1429, chat with our team and try our free demo.

For the full press release, please visit:

UBM TechWeb’s Enterprise Connect Orlando 2012 Announces Finalists for the Prestigious Best of Enterprise Connect Award

Free Webinar: How Call Centers are Being Reshaped by Smartphones, Social Media, and Fed-Up Consumers

Posted by Mike on February 23, 2012

Join Fonolo CEO Shai Berger for a free webinar on:

Wednesday March 7, 2012 @ 2:00pm EST/ 11:00am PST

Call centers today subject callers to a number of aggravations: Annoying phone menus, lengthy hold-times and the unnecessary repeating of information to agents. But all that is about to undergo a radical change, powered by the growing impact of social media, the proliferation of smartphones and the rising expectations of today’s consumers.

The call center of the future fixes these flaws, resulting in delighted callers and significantly lower costs-per-call. This webinar will show you how that future is closer than you think.

Consider how most calls begin: The ubiquitous phone menu (IVR) is supposed to connect callers with the right agent, but frequently it results in callers “zeroing out”, which helps nobody. Now consider another flaw: Callers, who have been prompted by the IVR to provide information, are then forced to repeat this same information, when finally connected to an agent. For decades, these flaws have been a source of irritation for consumers and a source of added costs for companies. But now, “web generation” customers who demand more are quick to air their grievances on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The pressure is on for companies to improve.

Fortunately, there are new ways for companies to upgrade their call center and improve the interaction with customers, without making any changes to their existing infrastructure. The key is to use the ubiquity of the web and smartphone to make the call center smarter about how agents and customers interact.

What attendees will learn:

  • The traditional call center flaws (phone menus, waiting on hold, repeating information to agents) are hurting customer experience and raising costs.
  • Fixes to these flaws are available today and can be implemented without any infrastructure changes, leading to happier callers and lower costs.
  • Today’s customer has little patience for poor customer service and is quick to complain on social media networks
  • The ubiquity of the web and smartphone is the key to making call center interactions smarter.

Who should attend:

  • VP/Director of Call Center/Contact Center
  • VP/Director Customer Experience/Customer Satisfaction
  • VP/Director User Experience
  • VP/Director Website Optimization
  • VP/Director Ecommerce/Digital Channels

 

Dramatic new pricing comes to Fonolo

Posted by Shai on February 6, 2012

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.

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

Posted by Jason on February 1, 2012

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.