Fonolo has been granted two U.S. patents related to its call-back technology. The company now has a portfolio of seven U.S. patents and two Canadian patents, with more applications pending.
U.S. Patent 9,014,351, entitled "System and Method for Deep Dialing Phone Systems," relates to automated methods that can allow independent systems to map out and interact with the call center of another company, using that company's IVR as the interface.
U.S. Patent 9,031,214, entitled "System and Method of Use for Indexing Automated Phone Systems," covers techniques for connecting customers with agents at call centers, the use of statistics to compare the expected remaining time before a human operator will answer, and initiate a call to minimize the wait time.
"Through these patents and the others in our portfolio, we have demonstrated industry leadership in three areas that are key to the future of the contact center: Virtual queuing (allows a caller to wait in line for an agent without being on hold), IVR integration (enables novel interactions with legacy call centers), and callback technology (the only universal way to escalate from a non-voice channel to an agent conversation)," said Masoud Vakili, senior advisor for IP strategy at Fonolo, in a statement.
"These new patents are part of Fonolo's active strategy to build a strong intellectual property portfolio and to bring innovative, proprietary call-back technologies to the market," said Fonolo CEO Shai Berger in a statement. "The importance of call-backs has surged in recent years because of increasingly diverse channels that companies are using for customer service. As the pioneer of cloud-based call-back solutions, our mission is to make it possible for companies of all sizes to add these capabilities to their contact center in order to expand their customer service offerings and improve call center efficiency."