Category Archives: Fonolo

Fonolo at ITExpo September 13th – 15th

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Fonolo‘s CEO Shai Berger, and Director of Sales Chris McLean will be at this years ITExpo show.

If you’re planning to be in Austin for the show, which runs Sep 13-15, we’d be thrilled if you stopped by 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. 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!

Shai will also be presenting at two panels, both on Sept 15th:

Harnessing the Customer Service Experience with a Multi-Channel Approach

and

Bringing the Social Experience into the Business Context

We hope to see you in Austin!

Fonolo Virtual Queuing Whitepaper

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A New Approach

Fonolo’s approach to improving the call center is radically different from anything you’ve seen before. Rather than asking you to install new hardware or software, Fonolo integrates with the call flow by bridging every call between your agents and your customer.

Hold-for-Me

With Fonolo’s Hold-for-Me feature, you can show your customers that you respect their time and offer to call them back when an agent is free.

This approach to virtual queuing can eliminate hold time for your customers in a way that is completely transparent to your existing infrastructure.

To your call center, calls through Fonolo look like any other inbound call. Your IVR, ACD, CTI and other systems will continue to work exactly as before.

Benefits

  • Create an improved customer experience.
  • Reduce operational costs and improve agent efficiency.
  • Provide a uniform interface between the web and mobile applications.
  • Collect information from customers before the call to streamline the agent conversation.

Visit the Fonolo Resources page to download the full Whitepaper on Virtual Queuing.

No “Fail Whale” for Fonolo After Slashdot

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Last Thursday (June 23rd), my company Fonolo was featured on Slashdot, which then it made it’s way to Boing Boing, and a handful of other sites.

Now, this was great news for us, as it generated a TON of traffic into our sites, but I was also understandably concerned about what this extra traffic coming into our system was going to do. I’ve heard (and seen) dozens of horror stories about sites featured on Slashdot, who’s servers simply ended up melting from the extra traffic. Having a full out “fail whale” situation, would simply be an embarrassment to us; and I would consider it a personal failure, given that I have been the chief architect of the Fonolo system.

But despite traffic peaking at ~44MB sustained, our system handled it with tons of room to spare- no interruptions, no failures, no downtime.

and lighttpd handled all the web traffic like a champ.

Why are your customers still waiting on hold?

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Waiting on hold is consistently one of the top complaints about phone-based customer service. One way to eliminate hold time is to hire enough agents that one is always available. Of course, this is cost prohibitive for most companies! Another way is to implement a virtual queuing (VQ) solution.

Shai has written a great series of posts on our VQ offering, Hold-for-Me, on his blog. See, for example:

There are some great cost-savings arguments that support the case for VQ. (I’ve been spending a lot of time working through these scenarios with prospective customers.) But I believe the best case for it is the uplift in customer satisfaction.

In today’s hyper-connected world, delivering a superior experience to your customer is something that echoes quickly and has long-lasting impact. I just came across this quote that sums it up nicely.