The FonGenie team has just added a new feature to the FonGenie Account Interface. The highly requested “Playback” feature will now let you edit your FonGenie account greetings and menus, and then immediately hear them using you computer’s speakers for playback.
As you change your FonGenie greeting, or update your daily specials in the Post Greeting, you can now immediately play it back by pressing the blue play button that appears to the right of that field when the mouse hovers over it. This will play back that field, or you can select the “Preview all” button at the bottom of the page to hear the entire page. Playback buttons are included in Greeting & Menu, Business Hours and Voicemail pages.
June 28, 2010 — Creativity abounds in cloud-based apps (Business)
By Joan Engebretson
for Connected Planet
“When Connected Planet recently asked me to write a two-part series about cloud-based services, the most difficult part was to narrow down the topic. In the end, I focused the first piece on cloud-based unified communications and the second piece on cloud-based security. Both stories focused on specialty service providers (many of them start-ups) that have all taken a bit of a different approach to the market.”
May 24, 2010 — FonGenie Turns Callers Into Profits (Business)
By Errol Pierre-Louis for PCMag.com
FonGenie is an online service that serves as an online receptionist for your retail or small business. It lets business owners customize how phone calls are answered with greetings and menus. The company is so confident in its ability to increase your business’ sales that if it fails to deliver, it will pay you $500 in cash or an Amex gift certificate.
FonGenie let’s you add daily specials, offers, incentives, and discounts to your customized greetings to encourage callers to purchase products or services. According to the company, 35 percent of callers introduced to daily specials when calling a business using FonGenie have accepted an offer.
May 20, 2010 — FonGenie launches cloud-based call management service (Business IT, Technology)
By Jake Widman for iTWire
The FonGenie telephony platform lets businesses script their own menu tree and capture caller information, all with no new investment in infrastructure.
Subscribing businesses use a Web interface to script greetings and set up menu options. The greeting can include an additional announcement about current specials or promotions.
After that, the caller hears a standard voicemail menu with whatever choices the business sets up — hours and location, ring through to specific people or departments, and so on. Customers can use an existing phone number or set up a new one supplied by FonGenie.
The service also offers CRM features, such as information about the caller, what messages they’ve heard, when they last called, and any notes from previous conversations, all of which are displayed to the call recipient before they answer.
May 19, 2010 — FonGenie Launches Cloud Call Management With A Guarantee
By Jake Widman for Information Week, SMB
Now out of private beta and open to all businesses, the FonGenie service lets SMBs establish their own telephone platform, complete with custom menus and caller information, without having to invest in their own infrastructure.
Businesses can bring their own phone numbers to FonGenie or use one supplied by the company. After establishing an account, they can use a Web interface to set up phone greetings and menu options. The greeting can include a customized announcement of current promotions, daily specials, or some other message that a caller will hear before getting the menu options. As with standard voice mail systems, the menu options can include preset announcements such as business hours, choices of departments to transfer the call to, and so on.
May 19, 2010 — New Phone Service for SMBs to Turn Telephone Calls into Profits
By Carolyn J Dawson for TMCnet.com
FonGenie is a cloud-computing service that offers the merchants and small businesses a virtual telephone platform and business intelligence tools, announced it has upgraded from the private beta version after numerous months of end-user testing.
The company helps business owners to up-sell products and services to callers while gaining insights on customer calling behaviors.
According to James Im, founder and CEO of FonGenie, “I am so confident that FonGenie can make a difference to a small business’ bottom line that I’m putting my money where my mouth is. Just try FonGenie for 30 days – it is simple to setup and easy to use – and you’ll realize its benefits immediately from increased sales to cost savings. If it doesn’t, I’ll reimburse them for their time.”
May 18, 2010 — FonGenie: Our phone automation service will boost your small business sales, or we’ll give you $500
By Andrew Nusca for ZDNet
A new cloud computing company says it will give you $500 if its new service doesn’t boost the sales of your small business.
The service — and Mountain View, Calif.-based startup — is named FonGenie, and it’s designed to pick off low-hanging fruit, such as calls asking for your hours, location or current specials.
The Voice 2.0 service went public on Monday after months of private beta testing.
Here’s how it works: A web interface allows you to manage greetings and menus heard by callers, with room to allow daily promotions or discounts.
(According to the company’s own research, up to 35 percent of callers introduced to daily specials on the phone accepted the offer, resulting in a more than 25 percent increase in sales.)
May 15, 2010 — FonGenie: Our phone automation service will boost your small business sales, or we’ll give you $500
By Larry Lisser
“The Virtual PBX market is hot. After eight years of seeding by a handful of leading providers, the market now finds itself in a perfect storm.” — Larry Lisser
Excerpt of Larry Lisser’s article:
FonGenie: This is a newcomer, packaged as a phone service that enables sales and marketing for small businesses (particularly service providers). Under the hood, it shares some similarities to a conventional VPBX, but its feature set and messaging focus on things like screen pop, automated caller interaction and CRM management. Good one to watch.
There are many more of course, like Phone.com that offers VPBX services but doubles as a home phone service – figuring the work place, the mobile and home phones flow into one another anyway. They also leans on a creative affiliate program, among other things, to drive growth.
Top Five: Home Office Gadgets – “Your Business” (MSNBC)
FonGenie experienced a spike of attention in FonGenie signups following a mention on MSNBC’s Your Business (Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 7:30 AM ET). This television spot highlighted, “Top Five: Home Office Gadgets” that were earlier written up in an Inc Magazine article (January 13, 2010). (see our blog post here)
Although the spot didn’t delve into the heart of FonGenie, the improvement of your product and service sales or the powerful analytics that is produced by every phone call to your business, we really appreciate that MSNBC brought FonGenie to the attention of more small to medium size sales and service related businesses that are looking for this solution to improve their bottom line.
“Advances in technologies are allowing entrepreneurs to run their companies in the comfort of their very own homes. Here are five handy home office gadgets courtesy of Inc.com.”
FonGenie was included as one of ten “tools that any size business can use to build out a Fortune 500 back office.” This was in Focus.com: Focus Brief (February, 12, 2010).
Scott Albro, the author of the article, Replicating the F500 Back Office: 10 Things Every Small Business Should Buy (F500 Handbook), is the founder and CEO of Focus and has been a contributor to the growth of several successful Silicon Valley start ups. Focus.com is a resource for business professionals who need high quality research and access to a community of experts.
We appreciate the inclusion in such great company. Mr Albro writes, “Even advanced call center automation is now available to businesses of all sizes with services like FonGenie.”
Please read the entire article/analysis here:
