Cloud Telephony

Education and coaching firm the Charfen Institute is all about mad growth. From the very beginning, founder Alex Charfen cast a vision of a hyper-growth organization that attracted some of his key employees, including CTO Travis Brodeen.

When it came to choosing a phone system for the company, Brodeen took Charfen’s vision and applied it to his phone system selection.

“I went out looking for a phone system that could grow with us as an organization,” Brodeen said during a recent video about its call center rollout.

The solution he chose was Fonality, an all-in-one, open standards architecture for multichannel interactions as well as SIP and VoIP.

“One of the things you look for as a business owner is that you don’t want to invest in something today that is going to be obsolete in six months from now,” CEO Alex Charfen noted in the video. “The amazing thing about a partner like Fonality (News - Alert) is that whether you are two people or 22 hundred people, the system works.”

That’s because, based on the latest VoIP technologies, Fonality scales well and offers a feature set that most other phone providers cannot offer. It can be deployed on-site, or hosted in the cloud by Fonality.

“People think you have to have some massive IT department to roll something like this out,” noted Charfen. “We bought 12 phones to start with and thought it would last a year. It supported us so well with our growth, we ended up buying new phones within four or five months.”

The company now is up to 90 nodes, reported Brodeen.

One thing that the Fonality system helps Charfen with is call metrics.

“We analyze data, we keep metrics on our callers, we keep metrics on our business development team, we keep metrics on anyone who is on the phone,” said Lucius Alexander, lead software developer for the Charfen Institute. “We like to play back calls and analyze calls sort of like a coaching session with our member services reps.”

For Johnny Quinones, member service team leader, Fonality gives him the ability to proactively monitor his agents.

“We take so many calls during the day, and we hire people and we bring them in, we want to make sure that everyone is saying the right things, everyone is going above and beyond to help our members,” noted Quinones.

“That’s something we can do through Fonality, is listen in on all the calls, make sure our quality is where it should be,” he said. “If I hear something I don’t like out there, or something that sparks my interest, I can jump on in a second and listen to their call. I can even jump in and take over that call if need be.”

“I think Fonality already has played a role in our growth,” added Charfen. “It is about as easy to use as any phone, except you have features that you just can’t get anywhere else.”

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