Sirius Canada Selects Fonolo to Enhance the Calling Experience for its Subscribers

TORONTO, March 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Fonolo, the company that makes it easier and less frustrating to call large companies, announced today that Sirius Canada, the country's leading audio entertainment company, has signed an agreement to use Fonolo to improve the calling experience for its subscribers.

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Fonolo's visual dialing solutions enable callers to connect directly to the right agents, bypassing phone menus and eliminating hold times. This technology, first pioneered with Fonolo's award-winning consumer service, now empowers businesses to improve the customer experience while reducing call center costs. Since October of 2010, Fonolo has been available on the Sirius website, contributing to a notable rise in caller satisfaction.

A friendlier alternative to phone menus

"Providing a satisfying experience to our subscribers is a top priority for Sirius," said Mark Morais, Director of Customer Operations for Sirius Canada. "Like most companies, we need a phone menu to direct callers to the right agent, but we know that customers often find this approach frustrating. Fonolo provides us with an easy way to give callers a much friendlier alternative to the phone menu. This helps us keep existing customers happy and streamlines the sign-up process for new customers."

Fonolo's web component appears in several places on the Sirius website including the 'Contact Us' page (http://www.sirius.ca/en/contact). It presents consumers with several "call buttons" for common tasks, such as "activation" or "account management". After making a selection, the consumer receives a call back from Sirius when the appropriate agent is ready.

"Sirius is dedicated to staying on the cutting edge of customer service and we're delighted to be working with such an innovative company," said Fonolo CEO Shai Berger.  

Virtual queuing from the cloud  – an industry first

Sirius is using Fonolo's "Hold for Me" technology to eliminate hold times for its customers. In doing so, Sirius becomes the first company to offer this ground-breaking service to the general public.

"The idea of getting a call back when the next agent is ready has been a dream in the industry for decades," said Berger.  "While several 'virtual queuing' solutions have been on the market for years, implementations are rare because they always require intense integration at the call center. Our 'touch-less' approach is a major game-changer for the industry."

Industry analyst Jon Arnold commented in a recent Focus.com brief that, "one of the biggest challenges facing any contact center is minimizing the hold time for callers ... Virtual queuing really is win-win technology, as it makes contact centers more productive and effective, and it addresses a major shortcoming of the end user experience."

Cloud-based approach means easy deployment

"Ease of deployment was a key component in our decision to implement Fonolo," said Morais.  "We didn't have to install anything or change the way our agents work."

Fonolo, unlike similar solutions on the market, does not require integration with the call center – typically a complex and costly process.  Rather, calls handled by Fonolo appear to the call center as regular inbound calls, meaning that no changes are required to existing equipment and no software has to be installed. This cloud-based approach means that any company can easily add Fonolo to their call center.

About Fonolo

Fonolo helps organizations improve the call center experience for their customers while reducing costs. A growing list of organizations, including the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), have discovered the value of using Fonolo to connect their call center with their web site. The privately held, Toronto-based company, has received numerous awards, including "50 Best Websites" from Time.com, "Best New Product" from Emerging Communications Conference, "Judges' Choice" from GigaOm's Mobilize Conference, "Top Telecom Idea" from Springwise and "Top 25 Canadian IT Up and Comers" from the Branham Group. For more information, visit www.fonolo.com.

About Sirius

SIRIUS Satellite Radio Canada, one of Canada's 50 Best Managed Companies, is the country's leading audio entertainment company with more than one million subscribers. SIRIUS offers 120 channels of commercial-free music, premium sports, news, talk and entertainment programming from studios in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and New York. SIRIUS offers listeners unparalleled coast-to-coast signal coverage and digital quality sound broadcast from four high-orbit satellites.

SOURCE Fonolo