January, 2011 – NFIB, The Voice of Small Business, featured FonGenie’s automated service in this January blog article:
“Like many small businesses, yours may not have a dedicated receptionist to answer calls. An automated phone system could help your staff save time and increase efficiency.”
FonGenie.com
Features: Among typical automated features, such as a Virtual Receptionist and Caller ID, FonGenie also offers analytics tools that track calls (e.g., how many were new callers, how many calls came in after-hours) and make predictions based on those analytics, such as how many calls to expect the next day.
Plans and Pricing: FonGenie offers three plans.
- Bring Your Own Telephone Service is for those who wish to keep their current phone service. It costs $29.99/month and includes 300 minutes.
- Standard requires purchasing a FonGenie appliance. It costs $49.99/month for 2000 minutes.
Upcoming changes for FonGenie customers
In the previous FonGenie blog post on 11/26/2010, we announced updates to the site with a fresh new look and feel in preparation for the upcoming improvements and changes to the service.
For existing FonGenie customers, dramatic changes will be noticed over the up-coming weekend as you log into your account. A new complete makeover has been applied to the user interface along with the expanded reporting and analytics capabilities. Most of these improvements will be available to you immediately when changes take effect, while some are being incrementally added.
Besides the improved looks and easy to use interface, how does that impact existing customers?
Existing customers will not be negatively impacted. To be clear, there won’t be any service interruption or data and record loss. Key changes and improvements are related to the quality of the speech along with a newly added female voice to greet your callers and customers. Also, you should expect to see tons of pre-formatted reports, analytics, benchmarks and trending information to run your business smarter.
Snowballing with the timing of American Express’s Small Business Saturday, we here at FonGenie continue to strive to offer the best possible service for the small business community. We are very happy to announce our updated FonGenie service including new features, functionality—not to mention our improved website.
FonGenie has launched its newly designed website to give business owners a clear message on how retail and small business owners can increase revenue and decrease cost by leveraging technology. We have also added a number of additional testimonials from multiple business owners, who have been able to use FonGenie to increase or optimize their revenue from a simple inbound telephone call. Many thanks to those who have helped us build these success stories and the business owners of MyCollege Storage and AquaSpa for their contribution.
Think of FonGenie as a website for telephone traffic. Your callers need to be able to communicate with you, find information that is of immediate value to them prior to contacting you, and find reward or benefit to them for using that medium.
As a small or medium size business (SMB) you’ve heard a lot of importance placed on the type and quality of information you make available to your site visitors. Along with knowing what information and services your visitors want on your website, you need to be able to analyze what they are interested in and how they got there so you can offer more insuring that they will return for more fresh content. It then makes sense that your business telephone should have a similar function. Websites have services like Google Analytics or other third-party services that dish up reports, which you eventually can learn to read. FonGenie has its “Reports” included and are designed to be understood and read in real-time and without the large learning curve.
FonGenie Boosts Sales for your Day Spa, Beauty Salon or other health and beauty service while answering all your phones and greeting your callers.
By targeting the customers that call your business with well placed promotions and daily specials FonGenie will increase your sales by 25% or more. But we offer you a lot more.
FonGenie was developed as a reliable automated receptionist and sales representative for small and medium size retail and service related businesses, and can be used with your current business telephone number. As the service immediately showed success in several business areas, it was the day spa and salon owners that forged the niche that proved FonGenie to be a powerful tool to drive sales, not just answer, greet and transfer call.
“We have seen our bookings increase by roughly 25% from those
customers listening to the promo.”
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.
