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).
You can now increase sales, productivity and make your customers happy; yourself included as a small business owner. How? Let us share a few additional findings from our trial customers.
Case Study #1 – up and running
A business (Spa) located in the NYC Metro area had seen a steady decline in business; based on a comparison of weekly and monthly sales compared to the previous year’s activity. This unfortunate decline has been shown in all areas of sales according to industry data.
FonGenie (sm) (FonGenie.com) was introduced to this particular business owner during a networking event in New York in February, 2009. The business owner recognized the dire direction of their sales and was open to try anything that might help reverse the trend. This business got their account up and running on February 21, 2009 and quickly got comfortable with the customizing and tuning FonGenie to best serve their business needs.
How are many small business owners are tracking and monitoring the number of calls they are handling on a daily/weekly/monthly basis? Most don’t make use of this powerful information. This is not because it’s useless data but because they don’t have the tools or a way to easily capture understandable information. And if they did, the useful information beyond the raw data would need someone who is religiously and manually witting it down (time of the call, caller id, what is what for, frequency of such caller if that’s even possible capture). But what does it mean to the business owner? How do you decode it?
The FonGenie “Call History” does all this for the business owner then presents the data in such a way that they can clearly see how it affects their business by seeing who is calling and how often. It then gives a clear picture about what information has been the most important to their customers, and whether the sales and specials they make available are being heard.
Welcome to FonGenie
We’re all about making you money, not just saving you some.
Welcome to the official FonGenie Blog. We have been working diligently with our new FonGenie service and our beta program. This has been more successful than we had originally hoped and are preparing to open it to more beta testers. You can follow us here or at Twitter – FonGenie.
We are looking forward to blogging with informative and productive goodies that will assist you run your business and communicate to customers!
