During the past 2 1/2 years, Fonolo has developed and refined a set of cloud-based contact center solutions designed to support more efficient conversations between individual customers and the firms with which they carry out business. During that time, the company has landed several large enterprises, including named accounts like the Australian telecoms company Optus, Royal Bank of Canada, Sirius Satellite Radio Canada and others. The selling points, as we noted in this post revolved around “reinventing” the contact center experience by delivering callers directly to an agent and providing that agent with sufficient context (caller’s identity, call history, purpose of call…) to lead to a more pleasant and successful transaction.

Today, under the headline “The End of Hold As We Know It”, Fonolo introduced a commercial offering that representing new packaging and pricing of its services. The starting point is a package that includes its “deep dialing,” Web access, mobile interface, virtual queuing and post-call survey offered for a monthly fee of $99 to serve up to 10 agents. A second package is designed to serve up to 40 for $399 per month. It adds the ability for customers to schedule a callback, manages “pre-call questions” (to assess the purpose of a call more accurately) and the addition of “multiple widgets” to be added to a company’s Web site to help customers initiate a conversation with the company. These offers define the “$10 per agent per month” pricing proposition that promises to be a disruptive force among cloud-based customer care contact center providers in the coming year.

Fonolo founder Shai Berger explains that, while the large accounts have been the primary focus of the company’s marketing, sales and product development efforts, it has long been aware of demand from small-to-medium sized companies looking to take advantage of the “virtual queuing” technology, at a minimum, and then add more features and functions at a reasonable price. It also encountered demand from individual departments or business units in large companies, who sought a low-cost way to provide their customers or clients with direct access to knowledgeable customer service agents or telephone sales reps.

The offer recognizes that small-to-medium businesses, as well as business branches or subsidiaries of large corporations, recognize the rich sets of resources that reside in various service clouds. Competitive factors have helped them overcome concerns over security and lack of control associated with cloud-based deployments. So has the ability to offer customers some features and functions (like virtual hold) that they would otherwise not be able to offer. The new Fonolo offer adds economy and simplicity by making an offer at a single monthly price that doesn’t vary by minutes of use, ports in service or number of transactions.

Taken together, the price, simplicity and certainty (lack of variability) stands to be very disruptive in the Conversational Commerce space.

Categories: Articles

Tags: customer care, Contact Center, CRM, Cloud-based services, Fonolo