We’re one step closer to taking down Automated Phone Trees once and for all. Fonolo, a startup that won the top prize at today’s GigaOM Mobilize Conference, provides users not only with a way to bypass the irritating and inefficient trees, but also a central hub to help monitor previous conversations for future reference. Fonolo is currently in private beta so you’ll have to hold out a while longer, but we’ll be keeping close watch for its public launch.
The site’s primary function is to let you skip phone trees entirely. Fonolo presents a nested path menu for each supported company, which you can browse through until you find the person you’d like to call. The service then dials the number for you, using audio detection in real time to ensure the menu hasn’t changed. Once it arrives at its destination, it calls your phone and immediately connects you. In August, we wrote about Direct Line, an iPhone application that does nearly the same thing (though it doesn’t let you identify exactly which department you’d like to speak to).
What differentiates Fonolo is its online hub, which allows users to view their call history and add notes. Perhaps most useful is the service’s recording function – Fonolo will automatically record all of your calls for future reference, so you won’t have to worry about jotting down a Customer Service Representative’s name or a confirmation number.
Other sites that offer some relief from automated systems include Bringo, which we wrote about last summer, and GetHuman.
Here’s a video of the company’s presentation from iPhoneBuzz:
Can’t wait for this, but unfortunately since it’s in closed beta, I guess I will. Hopefully this will help customer service get back to it’s roots; actually helping the customer.
Waiting for the launch and preview!
Saw a demo of this product and its incredible — solves a real frustration that we all have…can wait to use it.
I’m of the lucky ones in the private beta and I can tell you Shai and his team have been working hard to make Fonolo a great product that helps us all get what we need – service!
Congrats on the win and the great coverage!
Jaafer
Brilliant concept.
that is good for phone users from world wide.
and companies that use call centers
Thanks for the kind words everyone!
If you’re interested in the beta, please sign up at our site. We’re ramping up our calling capacity this week so we’ll be able to send out a bunch more invites.
- Shai Berger (Fonolo CEO)
Shai,
What is a phone tree? I am not sure I understand what Fonolo does? Can you or somebody explain to me what exactly it does and what problem it solves?
Thx
sganguly@yahoo.com
So, you couldn’t take the time to go to the site, or their competitor’s sites to figure it out?
Have you ever called a large company and been given the IBR system, “Press 1 for Sales, 2 for support, 3 for billing, or 5 to cancel your subscription” ???
These guys aren’t exactly innovating here, but no clear leader has emerged.
seems useful, but what it the revenue model since I see that it’s free to use?
I really like the concept and find this kind of services very useful. I have been using Meexo.com on my iPhone for quite some time and really happy with it. It’s like gethuman on your iPhone.
Sounds like they could, with a little user input, build directories of company personnel and rate them, so you could ask for the right person in, say, tech support.
@Umm “These guys aren’t exactly innovating here…”
There are several things that differentiate Fonolo from the other services mentioned here.
First, only Fonolo shows you an actual transcript of the full phone menu. Most of the other services tell you how to get to an agent quickly (e.g. “press zero 3 times”). That’s a flawed approach because not all agents are equal. If you have a technical question, hitting zero might get you a billing agent, and you haven’t really helped yourself. With the full phone menu available, you can navigate properly to where you’re going.
The reason we can display the full text of the phone menu is that we are actually spidering the menus. We regularly call every company and explore all the paths, processing the audio and comparing to our database. That’s the “heavy lifting” here and the technology to do this is one of our core assets. To my knowledge, no one has ever done this.
A second innovation is our approach to “Deep Dialing”. When you initiate a call through Fonolo, we call the company and navigate their phone tree. But we aren’t blindly sending the touch tones down the line. We are actually processing the audio along the way, and comparing with our database. This way, we know if the menu has changed since we last spidered it. Every call through Fonolo re-validates a path through the tree. A nice consequence of this is that the more people use our service, the more accurate our map becomes. To my knowledge, nobody else is doing this.
Finally, our service goes beyond phone menu navigation. Fonolo is a way to organize all your calls to companies. Our Intelligent Call History keeps a log of all your calls to given company, across all your phones, and makes it easy to make and review call notes and recordings. This is all part of our mission statement: “Make it easier to deal with companies over the phone”.
P.S. Better video quality is coming later this week. I’ll post the link here when it is available. Or check my blog at http://www.shaiberger.com.
P.P.S If you’re a blogger and want a beta account email me with a link to your blog and I’ll set you up. (shai AT fonolo).
It only gets you past the first level? It should let you answer questions (enter phone number…) and actually navigate before connecting the call….maybe it does, but i didn’t see that.
High quality video is now available.
Mobilize posted the video for the whole launchpad: http://events.g...artup-Launchpad
The Fonolo part begins at 54:00.
I love the concept, but isn’t automatic phone recording somewhat… illegal in certain states and countries? In a lot of places you need mutual informed consent to legally tape conversations. Unless Fonalo is giving an automated warning like the call centers do, then either it or its users could be open to some liability on that. Food for though.