Recent Press

This is what the press, bloggers and everyone else are saying about FonGenie:

PCMAG.COM, May 24, 2010 FonGenie is an online receptionist for your retail or small business that lets you customize greetings and menus for incoming calls and also offer daily specials and incentives. The company promises to boost your business' sales or they'll pay you $500. 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.
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InformationWeek SMB, May 19, 2010 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.
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TMCnet.com, May 19, 2010 FonGenie is a cloud-computing service that offers the merchants and small businesses a virtual telephone platform and business intelligence tools, announced it has upgraded from the private beta version after numerous months of end-user testing.
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ZDNet, May 18, 2010 A new cloud computing company says it will give you $500 if its new service doesn’t boost the sales of your small business. The service — and Mountain View, Calif.-based startup — is named FonGenie, and it’s designed to pick off low-hanging fruit, such as calls asking for your hours, location or current specials.
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MSNBC's Your Business, March 7, 2010 FonGenie experienced a spike of attention in FonGenie signups following a mention on MSNBC’s Your Business (Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 7:30 AM ET). This television spot highlighted, “Top Five: Home Office Gadgets”. Although the spot didn’t delve into the heart of FonGenie, the improvement of your product and service sales or the powerful analytics that is produced by every phone call to your business, we really appreciate that MSNBC brought FonGenie to the attention of more small to medium size sales and service related businesses that are looking for this solution to improve their bottom line. "Advances in technologies are allowing entrepreneurs to run their companies in the comfort of their very own homes."
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Focus, February 12, 2010 Small businesses everywhere are now replicating the capabilities of F500 enterprises with remarkable ease. This is especially true with respect to horizontal business functions that reside in the back office. These are functions that are dedicated to running the business itself, like human resources, finance, and procurement. Thanks in large part to the internet, the build out of these functions has become a straightforward proposition. This Brief looks at the basics of how a small business can leverage back office capabilities that have historically been the domain of the large enterprise. It’s part of series of Briefs that examine how even the smallest of businesses can build a F500 enterprise from scratch.
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Inc. Magazine, January 13, 2010 FonGenie was one of 10 featured tools (Essential Home Office Tools) in Inc. Magazine's online Start-Up section. "Here's a look at 10 gadgets that every home-based entrepreneur should keep within reach." Though we see oaurselves as more than a "Phone Answering System" have a look at what they are saying.
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Inc Magazine, December 1, 2009 "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 qustions, 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."
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VoIPGuide4U, August 28, 2009 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.
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Business Opportunities, August 24, 2009 By avoiding customer calls this creates a potential for loss of sales within your company. Just imagine if you had an automated system such as FonGenie, you could better direct your callers and in the end, not only to keep their business but possibly sell them an upgrade or a whole other product to make their life easier. And this can be done just by having this automated system to better service them and direct them in the first place.
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Smallbiztechnology.com, August 19, 2009 FonGenie provides an "interactive response" system for incoming callers. What's neat about it is that it's all web based and you can program the system by typing. No need to record the voice prompts. FonGenie reads what you type, so you don't have to record it with your voice. If your customers are used to a natural, human voice, they'll have to adjust to the mechanical nature of FonGenie's computer generated voice.
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Daily Vista, August 13, 2009 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.
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Fox Business, August 12, 2009 FonGenie provides sales support and customer/sales analytics in a single comprehensive web-based platform. No customer hardware is required. It provides superior customer experience over the entire sales cycle -- without replacing the all-important human interaction so crucial in satisfying even the most demanding customers.
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VOIP Guides, August 11, 2009 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.
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CentreDaily, August 11, 2009 FonGenie’s easy-to-monitor advanced reporting and analytic capabilities track all of the relevant information, including who called, what menu items they listened to prior to making a reservation or ordering, or how many callers needed to learn the business address or hours of operation. Early customers have seen FonGenie increase their sales by more than 15 percent on average, and profits by an even higher rate.
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PC World, August 10, 2009 Small retail- or service-based businesses often spend time--or money--fielding mundane phone calls. Where is the store? How do I get there? When does it close? Are there any current promotions? If this sounds familiar, you might already have callers reach an answering machine that rattles off these details. But customers might waste time waiting for the end of the message for the information they want.
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Washington Post, August 10, 2009 FonGenie, a simple, automated phone answering service fixes these problems and even arms businesses with details about calls. Customers hear messages that you can easily change, quickly navigating menus to get information they need. Your phone will ring only if they want more assistance.
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Network World, August 10, 2009 The prompt system uses two fairly good text-to-speech voices, making it easy to reprogram greetings through the website. You just type in new messages. The voices occasionally sound robotic, and you can't record new prompts manually. (FonGenie is considering an option for you to upload your own recordings, but that would defeat some of the service's nimbleness.) But I didn't mind listening to quick menus with these voices.
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San Francisco Chronicle, August 10, 2009 FonGenie representatives are especially excited about using voice prompts to advertise specials, claiming that businesses have already seen improved sales with this option. Analytical tools could help you determine if sales change and otherwise improve your services, since FonGenie stores data on each call.
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The Industry Standard, August 10, 2009 FonGenie is currently free but will be entering a paid period. A company representative said that the shift should begin this week, although you'll still get a 60-day trial. Monthly plans will cost about $30 for a certain number of incoming calls, to be determined. Unlimited plans will cost about $150-250 each month depending on the size of the business.
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Springwise, August 10, 2009 Companies that sign up with FonGenie get access to a website with graphical user interface that's used to type in the automated responses they'd like the system to use to answer calls. The system uses text-to-speech technology so no voice recording is necessary, and menus can be customised on the fly to reflect things like daily specials—such changes can even be made via mobile phone or Twitter.
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KillerStartups, August 3, 2009 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.
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Venture Beat, July 31, 2009 If you run a brick-and-mortar store, there’s a decent chance that you or your employees waste a lot of time answering dumb questions on the phone: “What are your hours?” “How do I get to your store?” “Are you open right now?” Now a startup called FonGenie has built a service to automate this process and to help bring in more money, too.
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The New York Times, July 31, 2009 FonGenie also provides access to an analytics service, which gives clients real-time information about things like how long a customer was on the phone, what options they selected, and when they called. That could help businesses see whether their specials attract much customer interest and help them make decisions like changing store hours if most customers seem to call when they’re closed.
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Company Press Release, May 17, 2010 MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FonGenie (www.fongenie.com), a cloud-computing service that provides retailers and small businesses with a combination of business intelligence and a virtual telephone platform to help business owners, up-sell products and services to callers while gaining insights on customer calling behaviors, today announced that it has emerged from private beta after several months of end-user testing.
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Company Press Release, August 12, 2009 According to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), the failure rate of newly formed business – in their first year – exceeds 50%. It is no surprise then, that small businesses continually evaluate every aspect of their operation to look for new ways to survive, prosper, and be profitable. FonGenie puts a sharp focus on developing a creative, user-friendly service that will help small businesses and retailers unleash new levels of effectiveness to increase revenue, grow the business, and boost profits.
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