Thoughts on web-telephony integration plus the inside scoop on Fonolo
Fonolo is nominated for a Webby Award in the “Web Services and Applications” category.
The LATimes says it is “the only award show for Internet sites that matters.”
I’m a bit late posting on this, because voting ends tomorrow. If you are a fan of Fonolo, please vote today by clicking here.
The Mobile Voice Conference starts tomorrow in San Francisco. Looks like an excellent line-up, so I encourage you to attend if you are interested in how speech recognition technology is impacting the way we interact with our mobile handsets.
That may seem like a overly narrow scope for a conference, but consider the following points (which I took from their site):
It is point number 4 that interests me most, given Fonolo’s close connection with the world of contact centers (aka call centers).
I will be part of a panel Thursday afternoon titled simply "Innovative applications".
The Emerging Communication Conference starts today, returning to San Francisco for its third year. The travel delays due to the Iceland volcano have taken a chomp out of the attendee list including organizer Lee Dryburgh, but the show is going on. I understand some speakers will be delivering their address via Skype. (how appropriate!)
Fonolo is back for the third year in a row to present. I will be speaking at 9:45am on Tuesday the 20th. Here is the talk description:
Every day, millions of people make calls to large companies - banks, airlines, cell phone carriers, etc. - to speak to a customer service representative. For consumers, these calls often amount to a dreaded chore as well as a considerable loss of time. For companies, these calls amount to billions of dollars added to annual operating costs. Given the sheer volumes of time, money and energy spent on these customer service calls, improvements to their efficiency - even small ones - carry the potential to deliver significant results. Flaws in the way these calls are handled increase costs to companies in at least two ways: the higher expense associated with longer calls, and the loss of goodwill from customers.
In 2008, Fonolo launched a service for consumers with the goal of learning more about how some of the shortcomings in the call center experience could be addressed. Fonolo’s technology platform performs navigation on behalf of callers dialing a corporate phone system, connecting them directly to the person or department they need. To make this possible, the company maintains a database of over 500 companies. For each company, the content, structure and usage of its phone menu (IVR) are tracked.
As a byproduct of this traffic, the company has accumulated a unique perspective about what it calls the "pipeline" that exists between a caller and the call center agent. This presentation draws on that traffic data, as feedback from Fonolo users and other industry sources, to identify trends in technology, caller expectations and customer experience.
I will post slides and video as soon as I can.
I have fallen a bit behind in keeping up with Fonolo press coverage. We’ve had some terrific articles written about us lately. In particular, it’s great to see that the press from the call center world is taking notice and talking about our enterprise product.
Blake Landau writes:
…As consumers, we come to begrudgingly accept [IVR systems (interactive voice response)] as a fact of life.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. If the customer service department would look at some of the next generation technologies available today, like those that make the most of web and smart phone user interfaces, their customers would have a much different experience — [with a] faster connection to a real human and without the IVR frustration…
Gen Y’ers expect their customer service encounters to mirror the speed, agility and simplicity of their smart phones, iPods and flat screens. But so far the call center industry has failed to do so.
Fonolo [turns] turns any phone menu into a visual interface. This allows customers to navigate phone menus in a more natural way—visually from their browser or mobile application screen. The paradigm here is that callers, like visitors to a standard or mobile web page, get to click or tap on the box that best represents what they need. From there, the Fonolo application connects them directly to the agent that can best serve them.
Erik Linask writes:
[Fonolo’s] basic premise… is that contact centers are fundamentally flawed because most do not leverage technology effectively to create a simple interactive process for customers, resulting in longer calls, more calls, multiple transfers between agents –- all of which results in aggravated customers and cost the company money.
… Fonolo develops a visual representation of the phone menu, which allows customers to quickly navigate their routes through an IVR system — without having to wait for countless menu options — and then click on the most appropriate menu option to immediately reach the agent that is most likely able to respond to their needs.
By leveraging telephony automation and cloud-based communications, [Fonolo] believes the time to resolution can be significantly reduced, resulting in considerable increases in customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs…
Companies like Fonolo understand how to integrate the latest technology trends with traditional support mechanisms to optimize the customer experience.
Eugene Liu writes:
[Here’s] ultimately what Fonolo aims to do. For customers, allowing them to reach a company’s service representative easily, away from the tired voice interface. For enterprises, allowing them to leverage existing contact center infrastructure but provide an additional channel of customer interaction.
…implementation… [takes only] a Web widget embedded on the company site….[and]… absolutely nothing has to be changed to the existing infrastructure. The PBX is left alone, the IVR remains untouched, and the CTI system requires no tweaks. Calls continue to arrive to the agents — screen-pops and all.
By presenting a visual interface Fonolo cuts down on mis-navigation and could save a company a big chunk of cash. Happy callers? How about happy contact center managers, too.
Enterprises should take an honest look at themselves to see if they are doing their best to provide the most efficient method of customer service in today’s Web-centric world. Fonolo can be the bridge to that gap.
A few months ago we got word that Fonolo was accepted to speak at the prestigious Under the Radar event. I was excited of course, since I knew how highly that event was regarded. Now that we are less than a week away and I see the caliber of presenters and judges, I am very fired up.
Fonolo will be part of the “Communication” track which will also include AwayFind, CubeTree and SendGrid. Judging our presentations will be
Presenting companies only get 6 minutes so it takes real discipline to deliver the most powerful points in your message. It certainly makes you focus on what’s most important!
In the week since the release of our iPhone app, we have received considerable press coverage. Here is a short segment from ABC News:
And here are some excerpts from journalists, bloggers and analysts:
Fonolo Launches Free iPhone App
“Wow. We need this app.”
- David Sims, TMCNet
Fonolo Skips Automated Customer Service Phone Trees, Now on iPhone
“… we love [Fonolo] for how easy it makes it to skip through those annoying recorded customer service messages that make you press a bunch of numbers to get where you want to go…. Now the service has an iPhone app with the same great features as the site, but with more in-your-pocket convenience.”
- Lisa Hoover, Lifehacker
The Real Meaning of Fonolo’s iPhone App
“[Fonolo] has invested a tremendous amount of resources into calling toll-free numbers in order to map the IVR menus of hundreds of companies… This ‘Tap for an Agent’ function is now extended to iPhone users… a neat trick and deserves recognition as a solution to the hold-time dilemma that leads customers to conclude that their time, ultimately, is not important to a business.”
- Dan Miller, Opus Research
Fonolo’s deep dialer comes to the iPhone
“The main attraction, of course, is being able to dig through a company’s entire phone structure and get connected without having to waste phone minutes (and precious moments of your life) listening to automated prompts.”
- Josh Lowensohn, CNet
Service navigates past automated phone trees
“When you call a big company, how annoyed do you get by having to press one for this and press two for that? Now there’s relief. A new phone application called Fonolo takes you past the phone tree, directly to the department you want.”
- ABC Ch 7 News, San Francisco
Calling a company? Here’s how to avoid automated menu hell
“We’ve all been there before. You’re calling your TV provider, bank, airline retail giant or government and you’re stuck in ‘voicemail hell’. You know, that never-ending phone system menu with touchtone or voice-activated prompts that could drive you crazy… Fonolo has a free “deep dialling” solution, and now an iPhone app, too.”
- Mark Saltzman, Sync-Blog / Sympatico.ca
Fonolo lets iPhone users skip corporate phone hell
“Besides the ’stick it to the man’ aspect of the app, I also like the fact that it operates over wifi, saving users from onerous cell charges… sometimes you simply have to talk to a human, and in those cases, Fonolo looks like it will keep you from smashing things and going berserk before you get to said human.”
- Warren Frey, TechVibes
Great News! Fonolo is now available as a free application for the iPhone and iPod Touch! [iTunes link].
Tired of all the "Press 1 for this and 2 for that" nonsense you normally get when calling a company? With Fonolo, you can actually preview all of the options in a company’s phone menu before placing the call. Just tap the option you need and Fonolo will do the rest.
If you already have a Fonolo account, your call history, bookmarks and recordings will automatically be synchronized to the iPhone application. If you’re new to Fonolo, you can create an account right on the phone. Best of all, the Fonolo service remains free for consumers.
Here you can see recent calls made through Fonolo. How does this differ from a regular call history? Each entry remembers the point inside the company’s phone menu that you called. Just tap to repeat the call.
From here you have one-tap access to the three most common points called in the company’s phone menu. We call them “Common Calls”. You can also dial the company’s “front door” (top left button) or view its entire phone menu to initiate a Deep Dial (top right button).
To navigate through a phone menu, we invented this “split screen” approach. The top half shows you the words that you would hear at this point in the menu. The bottom half lets you navigate to any of the options available from this point.
When you trigger a call, the Fonolo service will call the company and navigate through their phone menu. Your phone will ring shortly afterwards and, when you answer, you will be connected directly to the point you selected.
The Telecom Council of Silicon Valley has nominated Fonolo for their annual award of top start-ups. We are in the "Most Disruptive" category which they describe as an award
for the most game-changing company … whose progress is most likely to disrupt markets and change the way people do things
Yep, sounds like us.
More info here.
The award honors the best telecom startups, so we’re delighted to be selected. As icing on the cake, if Fonolo wins on February 25, the team gets a 1-hour ride on the Zeppelin NT flown by Airship Ventures. (Apparently the only such craft operating in America.) Now there’s a prize you don’t see everyday!
Most people know Fonolo for our award winning consumer service which makes it less frustrating to call large companies. With that service, we pioneered the technology of “Deep Dialing” — connecting directly to any point in the phone menu, without the annoying navigation.
About a year ago, we started working on an enterprise product that would allow companies to use this same technology to improve the calling experience for their own customers. Last summer, we demonstrated the “widgetized” version of Fonolo which allows the Deep Dialing interface to be embedded on any web page. It got people pretty excited. (Illustrated below. Or, try it here or here.)
Over the last few months, we have built supporting technology around this widget version of Fonolo: web-based admin tools, advanced tracking, etc. As well, we have done a number of field trials getting the product tuned to the needs of the market. As a result, I’m happy to say that we now have a solid offering. It’s still a “v1″, to be sure, and there will be a lot of tweaking ahead, but today our product is: easy to deploy, scalable, reliable, flexible, compatible with all major browsers and — most impressively — compatible with any company’s phone system.
We’ve done all this work somewhat quietly; the consumer service has been getting most of the attention. Well, now it’s time to shine the spotlight on the enterprise product. First step: we’ve given it a separate web site. As of today, when you go to fonolo.com, you will see a “fork in the road”:
If your company has an phone menu and a call center, then take a look at business.fonolo.com. We’ve boiled it down to the clearest and quickest way to explain our value to you. I guarantee you will “get it” in 30 seconds.
You can add Fonolo to your site with only a few lines of HTML. Instantly, your customers will have a better calling experience, your call center will be more efficient, and you will get feedback that you’ve never seen before. (Your customers can also use Fonolo from the smart phone too — more on that later.)
If you think there’s a fit, sign up for our free trial and we’d love to talk to you!
I was thrilled to hear that Fonolo was just nominated for a Mobile Premier Award. We are among 50 winners chosen out of over 250 candidates from all over the world. Winners will be announced February 25 in Barcelona as part of Mobile World Congress. The list of all the nominees can be found here.
