Fonolo lets you skip phone menu purgatory
Getting stuck listening to automated phone menus can be downright dreadful. Some systems require half a dozen or more menus to get you to an actual human being. A service called Fonolo is trying to make this experience a lot easier by listing the entire phone tree on one page and giving you little call buttons to skip right to that part of the menu. The best part is that it actually calls you when it's time to talk to someone and you don't even have to do any dialing!
Fonolo is officially launching to the public in early September, but I got a sneak peek Monday. There are just 50 company numbers in the listing, but there should be several hundred by launch. One of the best uses for this technology is for calling department stores and banks--both of which can have five or more sub-menus that you must suffer though to reach a human. Digging around in Circuit City's listing I was able to find the department I wanted to call in just a few seconds, whereas it probably would have taken me about five minutes if I had called in.
As part of the sign-up process, you give Fonolo various numbers it can call--be it your office, home, or mobile line. Next to each option there's a call button that will let you pick which number you want the call sent to. You can track how long the call is and actually hang up from your browser; Fonolo is simply the routing the call.
Eventually the service plans to let you record these calls (potentially for sending to the Better Business Bureau or other such organizations), although the feature is currently disabled. You can sign up to use Fonolo before its September launch on this page.
Fonolo shows you how to skip some of the annoying automated phone menus you run into when calling many large businesses (click to see entire tree).
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Josh Lowensohn is an associate editor for Webware.com, CNET's blog about cool and otherwise useful Web applications and services. If you've found a site you'd like profiled, shoot him an e-mail. E-mail Josh.
with phone tree menus is an area that has been without a good solution and now there
are applications to help solve that problem.
Addressing the above comment... There *are* other sites that have listings of phone tree shortcuts (including the grand-daddy of them all, GetHuman.com). The key to Fonolo is our ability to "Deep Dial" -- we actually connect you directly to the point in the menu that you want.
When you click on a phone menu in the Fonolo interface, Fonolo dials the company, navigates their menu and then calls you back. When you answer, you are connected directly to where you want to go.
Aside from being really convenient, doing it this way gives us two other advantages: First, each time our system Deep Dials for you, it uses speech recognition to confirm that the text of the phone menu hasn't changed since it was last spidered. (That's how we keep the trees fresh.)
Second, by routing the call through our servers, we are able to do maintain an "intelligent call history" for you, along with notes and call recordings. The Deep Dialing and Intelligent Call History work hand-in-hand to empower you as a consumer and make it less frustrating to deal with large companies over the phone.
More info at www.fonolo.com and at my blog www.shaiberger.com.
- Shai Berger
Thank you,
Mariano
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by shaiberger
July 15, 2008 11:13 AM PDT
- Mariano,
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Reply to this comment
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(4 Comments)Thanks for the compliment!
Once you log in, you can review our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Call Recording is an opt-in service so if it makes you uncomfortable, you are free to use our other features without it.
If you do choose to enable call recording, we will keep the data strictly private and you can delete any recordings you don't want to keep.
- Shai Berger
Fonolo CEO