Fonolo: A Chainsaw for Phone Trees
Now this is a service we can get behind! Fonolo serves one purpose and one purpose alone: Kill phone trees. If you’re not familiar with the term “phone tree” you’ll certainly be familiar with the concept. When something you own isn’t working properly despite your best efforts, you get angry. You pride yourself in being a skilled gadgeteer so the fact that you can’t fix the problem yourself is a bit enraging. Now you have to swallow your pride, cowboy up and call the dreaded “customer care line”. After dialing, are you greeted with a knowledgeable human? Of course not. A digitized female voice simply makes matters worse by asking you all kinds of questions and requiring you to push various buttons for a few minutes before you have the pleasure of sitting on hold for half an hour. Ugh. There is hope though, and that hope is fonolo.com. Fonolo provides you with flow charts for each company in its data base. The flow charts represent each and every option that you would have if you called the customer service line yourself. Simply select a point on the chart (likely “speak with a customer service rep” down near the bottom) and Fonolo will call the company for you. It will automatically navigate the menus and then ring your phone once it has reached the point you specified. Best of all, it’s free! There are also some other cool options such as the ability to record calls and publish them online to give others a taste of what they can expect should they need to call the same company. The catch? It’s currently in private beta. You can enter your email on the homepage to be notified as soon as they’re ready for you and we highly recommend doing so. This is the kind of service worth waiting for.
[Thanks Robby]
Tags: Customer Service, Fonolo, Phone Tree
yes! dats whassup hope they have it for the blackberry 8310…..i pray version 2.0 will have only english speaking customer service reps from u.s.a instead of getting transferred to somewhere in da indian ocean lol.
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can you remind us when it’s available with another post? thanks!
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theres a great site that tells u exactly what phone number to call and which options to press to get directly to a human, most the numbers are direct to human, but if not then they give instructions on how to get a human. the site is http://www.gethuman.com
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Cool! I love projects like this that transfer the power back to consumers.
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Forget the phone trees, best feature is that you can record your calls and they promise transcription in the future. Let the youtube postings commence.
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This is probably the best thing I have read all year.
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You guys nbotice the olo in fonolo looks like a peeness?
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Hi everyone. I’m the co-founder and president of Fonolo. Thanks for the enthusiastic responses! We’re sending out beta invitations as quickly as we can.
Any questions, feel free to email me directly (shai AT fonolo)
- Shai
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