SmallBizTechnology.com’s article about FonGenie (Turning Customer Calls Into A Revenue Engine and Productivity Booster, August 19, 2009) really did a great job summing up what FonGenie offers the small and new business. They pointed out, “The wow feature about FonGenie is that since it’s so simple to update (even via cell phone text message, for example) FonGenie encourages you to have a “daily” special (or hourly special) as a menu button on your phone,” which is exactly what we want our future users to know. We are not a virtual receptionist but an automated sales tool.
Thank you for helping express that.
Article Reprint:
Turning Customer Calls Into A Revenue Engine and Productivity Booster
Aug. 19, 2009.
Turning Customer Calls Into A Revenue Engine and Productivity Booster
Think about how busy your business gets during the course of the day.
DailyVista.com article: FonGenie targets small biz customers with phone messaging platform
DailyVista.com is an online blog that “connects corporate executives in the marketing and advertising industry.” Their teams scour news sources for news of interest to the marketing and advertising world with an emphasis on presenting it in an understandable way.
On August 13, 2009 DailyVista.com feature our own FonGenie service in an article entitled “FonGenie targets small biz customers with phone messaging platform.” We would like to thank DailyVista.com for their insightful article about our exciting service. The article did a good job pointing out that FonGenie is “a user-friendly service that allows retailers to increase revenue while reducing costs to further grow their businesses.” They also emphasized the strong analytics, which has been proven to assist small business owners succeed in this difficult economy.
Article:
FonGenie targets small biz customers with phone messaging platform
Aug. 13, 2009 | DailyVista.com
FonGenie targets small biz customers with phone messaging platform
VoIP Guides didn’t really go into too much depth about the sales potential for small businesses by using FonGenie services. Of course being a VoIP industry blog VoIP Guides emphasizes FonGenie as being an “Automated Phone answering service” which really sells FonGenie short.
The strength of FonGenie is in its ability to assist small businesses improve their sales first and foremost. Secondly, FonGenie tracks and analyzes the behavior of the businesses’ inbound callers. FonGenie was developed as an automated sales tool which uses a virtual attendant on the front end. As a sales tool FonGenie is quickly showing promise and value to current beta users at this time.
Article:
Free Automated Phone answering service for small businesses
Aug. 11, 2009 | VoIP Guides
Free Automated Phone answering service for small businesses
Thank you Zack Stern for the insightful article you wrote for PCWorld.com (Phone Answering Service Pays Back in Time). We’ve posted the article below along with links to the article on the PCWorld website.
If there was one thing we would like anyone interested in FonGenie to know is that FonGenie answers your business phones only as a means to help your business sell and promote your products and services. We are primarily a sales tool. This article appears in PCWorld’s “The Cost Cutter” section with the tag, “Using technology to save money for your business.” Our goal is not to just save you money, but to make you money.
Zack writes, “FonGenie representatives are especially excited about using voice prompts to advertise specials, claiming that businesses have already seen improved sales with this option,” and he is totally correct. FonGenie will help you sell and we have seen this with our users.
FonGenie in KillerStartups.com article
Thank you KillerStartups (killerstartups.com) for your article about the FonGenie service (FonGenie.com – An Answering Service For Your Business). We appreciate the fact that you didn’t objectify our service as being a virtual attendant, but that the ultimate aim of FonGenie “is to turn analytic reporting into a more proactive and organic task.”
As our current users already know, FonGenie doesn’t just answer your business phones but we help you to analyze your caller interests and needs. With this insight users are able to directly improve sales to their customers.
In regards to their final question, “How much does it cost?” and “Are there different plans for you to choose from?” we haven’t set the price of the service when it comes out of the Free beta period. It will definitely be competitively priced against the closest related services and there will most likely be a 3 tier pricing model.
FonGenie press in VentureBeat
It was really nice to have such a well written article about FonGenie in VentureBeat online tech news (also appearing in The New York Times Technology section) in. VentureBeat’s mission is to provide news about innovation for forward-thinking executives, which in this case was right on target. Thank you Anthony Ha for your articulate assessment of our service.
The article, “FonGenie automates phone calls for small businesses” gave an informed description of the FonGenie service, though it would be difficult to impress the importance of our analytics in this article. FonGenie’s analytics were designed to be easy to read and give valuable information that would be used by the business owner to make intelligent decisions about changes and editions in the real-time menus. The latter half of the analytics window wasn’t shown in Mr. Ha’s article. This would have given the menu items that were explored, and in what order they were pressed. I personally feel this is a unique strength to our real-time analytics and is best appreciated when used in the FonGenie service.
Our FonGenie blog has joined the ranks of the Technorati.com community of blogs. Take a look at the many blog postings they connect with. (Technorati.com)
What is Text-to-Speech and why would I want it? (Hint … improved sales and customer satisfaction)
Essentially, text-to-speech is the ability to type something from your keyboard (from a computer or other input device) and have it read audibly.
Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology has come a long way in the last couple years. We all remember the chunky, monotone “computer voice” of older answering services, some of which are still in use today. Unfortunately, these early voices left a lingering distaste to some people whenever they hear of a business that promotes TTS as a feature of their service.
With the newer TTS technologies the “Pros” definitely outweigh the “Cons” especially in business services and applications. FonGenie applies state-of-the-art TTS to make it easier for the small business owner to communicate and maintain, while giving the caller a pleasant clear voice they can understand.
Listen to a sample of FonGenie’s flexible text-to-speech business greeting.
- Example: FonGenie greeting with male voice
- Example: Blog_example2_Female
An intuitive web interface makes FonGenie one of the easiest customizable attendants available today. The sign up process takes only a couple minutes and with the business type templates, which are fully editable to suit your specific business needs, your FonGenie account can be working for you almost immediately.
There are those who wish to forgo the templates and build their FonGenie greeting and menus from scratch. This is not a difficult task as the web user interface pretty much leads you through the necessary fields in an intelligent manner. Watch the following video for a demonstration on the steps you will need to accomplish this.
You should not have much difficulty with setting up your first basic greeting and menu scripts. Moving forward you will now be able to think about setting up your “post greeting” script where your FonGenie marketing will start making you money.
As we (FonGenie) have officially started tracking the number of telephone calls handled by retail business in the services industry (Spa, Hair Salon, Nail Salon) and others including (Restaurant, Take-Out, Florist) we are finding interesting data points unaware to most of us including the actual business owners.
Based on our survey, almost all business owners are not aware of the number of telephone calls they handle each day unlike how we are able to and can track number of visitors and page views on the Web.
Due to the nature of the confidentiality, we are unable to share and/or disclose the actual names of the business and the type of the business we have been tracking, except for the classification of their industry as mentioned above, but here are our findings for the week of March 8th, 2009 (3/8/2009 to 3/15/2009).
