Switchboard in a Bottle
A new automated phone answering system for businesses

“A more sophisticated version of Google Voice, FonGenie (www.FonGenie.com) is an automated service that lets you manage your company’s phone-answering system online. Users can customize phone menu options and choose between two text-to-speech voices to create messages that provide general business information, answer frequently asked questions, and advertise promotions. FonGenie analyzes phone traffic and provides Web-based reports so you can update your system accordingly. After a 60-day free trial, the service costs $30 for 300 minutes or $150 per month for an unlimited plan.”

Read this Inc Magazine article online, or pick up a copy of Inc Magazine (December 2009/January 2010, page 50) at your local newsstand today to read about FonGenie and how it can help your business.

This is one of many reasons FonGenie is the answer for small retail and service businesses in the United States right now. The more notable is that FonGenie is designed to be an automated sales tool, even though many small businesses find a value in FonGenie as an automated receptionist. You will find that FonGenie is unique. To see what FonGenie can do for you visit FonGenie.com.

Free Automated Phone Answering Service For Small Business

Most small business switched to VoIP, mostly hosted VoIP Services to save money. Today, you might find another great way to cut cost with free phone answering services and save money/resources on call center.

If you are running a retail or services business, you might be getting 30% calls each day asking about your store/office location address, directions to your store or your current promotions? Would you expense your costly call center employees on such calls? Probably not a good idea. How about your setup a phone answering service which handles this type of calls with preconfigured messages.

Most phone answering system obviously comes at a cost however, there is one Free Automated Phone answering service called FonGenie. FonGenie lets you setup a phone answering service for your business for FREE (It will be free for limited time).

You have to understand that FonGenie is in early beta and obviously not 100% perfect. But hey its free and it workable for your small business. You can register and then secure a new phone number for incoming calls and enter the phone number for your store/office location. You can offer your office/store hours and closing days. This should setup a work flow to trigger a voicemail instead of actually ringing a call center number.

Most importantly you can improve sales by putting prompts for promotions, discounts which could improve your sales number significantly. On top of that, you can track data through FonGenie interface to know how many people called and what they did through the prompts. This should give you some ROI on investments and overall cost effectiveness of using FonGenie.

FonGenie is currently free but soon will be paid service. Monthly plans will cost about $30 for a certain number of incoming calls. Unlimited plans will cost about $150-250 each month depending on the size of the business.

If you own a small business, will you use FonGenie? Do let us know your thoughts on this automated phone answering service.

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.

FonGenie targets small biz customers with phone messaging platform

Customizable phone messaging service FonGenie has found a niche with small businesses that seek a user-friendly service that allows those retailers to increase revenue while reducing costs to further grow their businesses, according to the company.

FonGenie provides sales support as well as customer and sales analytics all in one Web-based platform, and also provides the ability to enhance customer experience when they place a call to the retailer or small business.

“To be successful, many small businesses need to be extremely efficient and avoid activities that divert time and resources away from their core focus of customer service and improved selling of their products or services,” Founder and Chief Executive Officer James Im said in a statement. “FonGenie’s mission is to eliminate many of the time-consuming communications-related hassles experienced by many small businesses today and help the owner boost productivity and profits.”

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company intends to revolutionize the text-to-speech element of small business phone messaging, while also offering promotions and discounts to entice customers for future purchases.

FonGenie’s reporting and analytic capabilities track all of the relevant information, including the details of who called the company, and for what purpose. Early customers have seen FonGenie increase their sales by more than 15 percent on average, and profits by an even higher rate.

Spokesperson Harrison Wise told DailyVista that in a nutshell, FonGenie enables small businesses to increase productivity by minimizing the amount of time they spend on the phone answering mundane questions that customers call in with.

“What time they close or what time they open, and ‘What’s the address?’ and ‘Do you have a Web site?’” he said. “These are all very simple questions that are asked pretty often and could take business owners away from important stuff like their business. FonGenie streamlines that and provides customizable phone greetings that help small businesses answer these questions.”

Additionally, FonGenie provides robust analytics that Wise said are not available anywhere else. He added that this type of analytics is the first of its kind to give incredible insight to small businesses about who’s calling them and what they’re calling about.

“It helps them better target various messages and specials to these customers,” he said. “If you find that people are calling after 6 p.m. at a greater percentage, you might consider staying open later. If you find that most people are calling about your address, maybe the first message on the phone call should be your address.”

FonGenie also allows its clientele to market particular specials or promotions that it would like to feature to customers, which is how the platform was able to increase small business sales between 15 and 17 percent.

“Let’s say you’re calling to find out what time the business closes, you may hear something you like and they may be offering a special that day,” Wise said. “Whatever the incentive is, you wouldn’t know about it otherwise. It’s exclusive for people that do call in, and you can see what works and what doesn’t through our analytics, and you can update the offerings from Twitter or your iPhone or from any computer.”

For now, FonGenie has primarily relied on public relations and its sales team to target small businesses directly. Its core audience includes retailers and service-oriented corporations like spas, florists, nail and hair salons.

“Our core demographic is retail stores and chains, mom-and-pop shops, small businesses and even sole proprietors can benefit,” Wise said. “The small business term is very broad, and applies to multiple industries. Contractors, florists, you name it – it all falls under that category and FonGenie’s service is scalable if you have a larger organization.”

Trade activity like shows and print advertisements are something that FonGenie is considering for the future, but Wise said that because the company is still in its “launch phase,” it’s trying to get the word out organically through public relations, search engine optimization and word-of-mouth.

“Branding will be an integral component for the growth of the company,” he said. “We want to be at the forefront of the small business marketplace and obviously it’s solving a pain point that small businesses have. Now that they’re trying to do more with less and cutting costs, that type of brand awareness and presence will be important to our success.”

Wise said that the launch of FonGenie could not have come at a better time, seeing as all businesses are attempting to cut costs and “do more with less.”

“I think the timing is spot-on,” he said. “The ability to convert callers to customers is an integral part of any business, and the FonGenie platform also provides the ability for caller to speak with a human at any point, so we’re not just creating a barrier, we’re bringing the caller into the fold a lot easier and quicker.”

FonGenie has contracted our source’s firm Wise Public Relations out of New York to assist with press and media outreach initiatives.

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.

Free Automated Phone answering service for small businesses

Most small business switched to VOIP, mostly hosted VOIP services to save money. Today, you might find another great way to cut cost with free phone answering services and save money/resources on call center.

If you are running a retail or services business, you might be getting 30% calls each day asking about your store/office location address, directions to your store or your current promotions? Would you expense your costly call center employees on such calls? Probably not a good idea. How about your setup a phone answering service which handles this type of calls with preconfigured messages.

Most phone answering system obviously comes at a cost however, there is one Free Automated Phone answering service called FonGenie. Fongenie lets you setup a phone answering service for your business for FREE (It will be free for limited time).

You have to understand that Fongenie is in early beta and obviously not 100% perfect. But hey its free and it workable for your small business. You can register and then secure a new phone number for incoming calls and enter the phone number for your store/office location. You can offer your office/store hours and closing days. This should setup a workflow to trigger a voicemail instead of actually ringing a call center number.

Most importantly you can improve sales by putting prompts for promotions, discounts which could improve your sales number significantly. On top of that, you can track data through fongenie interface to know how many people called and what they did through the prompts. This should give you some ROI on investments and overall cost effectiveness of using Fongenie.

Fongenie is currently free but soon will be paid service. Monthly plans will cost about $30 for a certain number of incoming calls. Unlimited plans will cost about $150-250 each month depending on the size of the business.

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.

Read the whole article below, or visit the KillerStartups.com site. If you are new to FonGenie visit our site (FonGenie.com) and watch the “How it Works” videos. You can be up and running with a FonGenie account and set-up in minutes, and with a simple forward on your business telephone FonGenie can start improving your business today.

Headquartered in California, this company specializes in communication technology and it has created a utility that aims to make for smoother communication among small businesses and their punters.

What it does is answering the phone for you, greeting callers and interacting with them by giving answers to the most recurrent and common questions that can be put your company’s way.

As the team behind it explains, FonGenie does not substitute human interaction but rather enhance the experience for every single individual who is involved within the process. It provides the user with a sort of data mining engine that keeps track of different aspects of the telephone traffic by way of charts and reports that highlight information like caller’s behavior, engagement for each call and the items that have been listened to the most. It is also capable of monitoring the frequency of calls from any given customer.

The ultimate aim of the site is to turn analytic reporting into a more proactive and organic task, and let anybody shorten the distance that separates data collation and its actual assessment. It also intends to bring together the telephone and social media, and as such it is worth a definitive look if you are weighing up how to bolster the standing of your business.

In their own words
“FonGenie answers the phone at your retail and small business. It will greet callers, interact with them by giving them answers to frequently asked questions, and best of all it will position and up-sell your products and services. We do not replace the human interaction, but enhance the experience for both customers and yourself.

Advanced analytics built from the ground up with retail and small business owners in mind give you a data mining engine that continually monitors every aspect of the telephone traffic. Your callers’ behavior is automatically highlighted with the most important information for business owners and managers to act upon. It is filled with charts and reports showing the number of calls during a time-frame, engagements for each calls, most listened specials or menus, frequency of calls from a customer and much more. The main goal is to make analytics reporting proactive and shorten the time between aggregating and analyzing data, drawing conclusions and taking actions based on the collective intelligence.”

Why it might be a killer
It has the potential for letting businesses give customers a better service and measure every single aspect of its efficacy.

Some questions
How much does it cost? Are there different plans for you to choose from?