Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Free Automated Phone answering service for small businesses

Most small business switched to VOIP, mostly hosted VOIP services to save money. Today, you might find another great way to cut cost with free phone answering services and save money/resources on call center.

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.

Most phone answering system obviously comes at a cost however, there is one Free Automated Phone answering service called fongenie. Fongenie lets you setup a phone answering service for your business for FREE (It will be free for limited time).

You have to understand that Fongenie is in early beta and obviously not 100% perfect. But hey its free and it workable for your small business. You can register and then secure a new phone number for incoming calls and enter the phone number for your store/office location. You can offer your office/store hours and closing days. This should setup a workflow to trigger a voicemail instead of actually ringing a call center number.

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.

Fongenie is currently free but soon will be paid service. Monthly plans will cost about $30 for a certain number of incoming calls. Unlimited plans will cost about $150-250 each month depending on the size of the business.

If you own a small business, will you use FonGenie? Do let us know your thoughts on this automated phone answering service.

2 comments:

Prashant Mishra said...

Great post on Great post on call handling services. Please sharing post like this thank you.

shane said...

it is very useful and knowledgeable. therefore, I would like to thank you for the efforts you have made in writing this article.
Phone answering service

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