Call centers today have a tendency to create aggravating situations with long phone menus, lengthy hold times, and the unnecessary repetition of information to agents. By the time we actually get to explain our problem, we are already frustrated with our experience making for a very challenging environment for customer service agents. Customers now have instant access to voice their opinions and complaints, thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and the growth of social media use.  

Shai Berger (News - Alert), CEO and co-founder of Fonolo, like most people dislikes navigating phone menus and waiting on hold, which resulted in his founding of Fonolo (News - Alert), a company that specializes in cloud-based visual dialing solutions.

“Communication technology has expanded and changed so much that the rate of innovation is amazing over the last decade. When you contrast that with the call center world, that same pace of innovation really hasn’t been seen,” Berger explained.

The three big flaws of call center technology are navigation, queuing and information exchange. Callers get frustrated with navigation because they are presented with a long list of options and they simply want to speak with an agent, so they press “0”, according to Berger.

Call centers are stuck with the phone key pad that was developed many years ago in the early days of the phone system that was not designed to be a navigation system or a date entry system. As for waiting on hold, everybody hates it whether there are survey results or not and companies are losing money because they are keeping those lines open for customers that are impatiently waiting. Exchanging information with agents, in terms of the money lost, this is the biggest of the three problems.

 “Phone (News - Alert) menus have to be replaced by some visual system,” said Berger.” Waiting on hold needs to be replaced with virtual queuing because it is better for callers and better for the call center. The problem of repeating information we need to take care of by asking those questions ahead of the call.”

Call centers are built on proprietary platforms and each vendor operates on their own standards and they don’t interoperate making for difficult to seamlessly integrate different platforms. With multiple call centers, the only communication between them that you can count on is the dial tone itself.

Social media is the new way for customers to give feedback to companies. People turn to Twitter (News - Alert) right away because it is instant and there is a feeling that because the whole world is seeing this, you can actually accomplish something by complaining. Now, companies have this real-time score board that is always on and can’t hide their internal metrics anymore.

Fonolo’s product can help to solve these key problems in call centers, as it is a visual interface that a call center can add to its website or mobile phone easily. It has buttons that map to options within the phone menu and leverages an IVR that is already in place.

“We approach this as consumers who thought there was room for improvement here. There is no reason why this experience should be so bad,” Berger added.

To view the company’s most recent webinar, click here now.