About ShoreTel

ShoreTel is the provider of brilliantly simple Unified Communication (UC) solutions based on its award-winning IP business phone system. We offer organizations of all sizes integrated, voice, video, data, and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use. Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices and partners worldwide. For more information, visit shoretel.com.

Rich customer communications at your fingertips

Optimizing the customer experience in an Internet world means arming customer support and sales agents with the tools they need to answer questions by phone, email, instant message (IM) or other methods. It also means ensuring the information they need to answer account questions and take advantage of upsell opportunities is right at their fingertips.

Many organizations still rely on separate communication and messaging systems to support customer service, yet these systems can be difficult to integrate, leading to an unsatisfactory customer experience and duplicate work efforts. Building customer loyalty means responding to customers quickly, and in the way they choose, and managing those
communications to ensure efficiency without driving costs through the roof.

The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center solution is designed to help organizations respond to the consumer-driven market place with a communications platform that puts business intelligence right where it’s needed. By deploying ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center, organizations quickly realize the benefits of a fully integrated business communications system.

ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center is a powerful call center solution that includes universal queuing and enterprise resource matching, and offers optimized call routing by service level, skill matching, priority, customer identity, schedules and caller location. It also supports email and Web contacts, and outbound calling as service options. Voicemail and fax can also be routed to individual agents through emails.

Increase efficiency, reduce costs

ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center is designed to deliver a rapid return on investment by helping to reduce costs. For instance, agent screen pops with detailed customer information can dramatically help reduce interaction time. Agents have an unified desktop client which provides the option of seeing the presence status of experts outside the call center. Through the ShoreTel Communicator (formerly ShoreTel Call Manager) interface, they can can initiate voice, video and IM sessions for single call resolution.

Customizable real-time and historical information about callers, trunks, groups and agent utilization allows supervisors to optimize resources. Plus, advanced call routing based on service levels, skills and priority helps ensure calls go to the right agents, reducing the service time per call.

Highly available virtual contact center

Increasingly, organizations are looking to take advantage of IP telephony technologies and create virtual call centers using home-based agents. In the case of multinational companies, cross-border call centers can help optimize resources and expertise. ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center makes it quick and easy to create virtual contact centers, connecting geographically dispersed agents on a single, easy-to-manage system. This helps companies reduce costs without compromising customer satisfaction.

Integrated into your business processes

The ShoreTel Unified Communications (UC) system is based on open standards, so where additional business intelligence is required, ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center workflow easily integrates with other enterprise applications to increase the overall value of information, and to deliver business intelligence.

Applications integrate into customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, trouble ticketing solutions or, in fact, any backend database/customer management system to increase agents’ productivity while optimizing the customer experience.

Fully integrated, all-in-one solution

ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center is integrated into the ShoreTel UC system, and runs without specialized computertelephone integration (CTI) platforms. Supervisors and agents are connected to the server via intuitive user interfaces that provide the tools they need to deliver superior customer service.

High availability with brilliant simplicity

ShoreTel enables previously stand-alone contact center functions, including ACD, IVR, computer telephony integration (CTI), outbound campaigns, and multimedia routing, to be integrated onto a single, centrally web managed, highly available platform. ShoreTel also makes it possible to integrate contact center workflow with other enterprise applications, increasing the overall value of information, and expanding business intelligence.

Key features

Supervisorcapabilities:

Advanced real time dashboard:
Supervisors get a real time dashboard of the call center and can react to conditions by bringing more agents or taking out agents from groups. For example:

• Read the pulse of your call center by getting visual and audible threshold alerts on critical conditions.
• React to higher call abandons or lower traffic by bringing agents in or taking them out of queues with simple clicks.
• Monitor whether agents are in a no-work mode (release) and see the code along with the duration of that state allowing them to closely monitor agent activity.
• Supervise agents in training closely by monitoring specific extensions visually and also by using silent monitor, barge in, and coach features.
• Track all media types: voice, email, chat, outbound campaigns, through a single reporting interface.
• Compare real-time information with historical information to understand trends better and schedule agent availability accordingly.

Comprehensive historical reports:

Review advanced statistics of all the activity in the call center without requiring database programmers or third-party reporting applications. This provides customer insight, interaction traffic, agent activities and queue performance.

• Easily create flexible reports by date or by interval.
• Enjoy the convenience of reports being delivered to the person and media of choice. Schedule reports to be generated automatically to be saved in various formats (csv, xls, pdf, htm etc) and also be automatically emailed.
• Monitor how a queue or group is performing using typical KPIs.
• See detailed agent activity for billing purposes or for performance evaluations.
• Analyze the reasons for customer calls by creating reports on post-call activity or wrap codes.
• Measure the effectiveness of outbound campaign by getting call-by-call details on each outbound call made by the system.

Agent capabilities:

• Increase agent productivity by automating agent tasks through CRM or trouble ticketing integration.
• Agents can easily hot desk and log into any phone/extension easily enabling call centers working in multiple shifts.
• Unified agent desktop client for interaction management from a single client with powerful telecommuting functionality.
• Easily view queue and group statistics to manage their activities and transactions without requiring supervisor intervention.
• View complete details of interactions in queue.
• Enter auxiliary and wrap codes to mark calls or inform supervisors of their availability.
• Agents can easily route calls to their personal queues

Advanced functionality

Outbound dialer

ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center has a sophisticated yet simple outbound dialer that can be used for campaigns such as collections, customer follow-throughs or compliance. The ShoreTel outbound dialer provides a versatile solution to meet the needs of your preview and progressive campaigns.

Targeted campaigns: Build campaigns that focus on specific business goals with the flexibility to schedule them for different time zones or specific times of day or week.

Flexible campaign configuration: Tune your campaigns according to your needs. Easily configure the number of times campaigns reload the data. Manage the number of alternate numbers to call for each customer. Manage and get detailed reports on number of times the dialer attempts to reach a destination.

Sophisticated dial list management: Manage your dial lists through any database that is ODBC compliant. Use the powerful outbound dialer scripting capability to import information from your database as well as populate data during a campaign to assist you in maintaining and updating the list easily.

Pace your campaign: Optimize your operations by blending inbound and outbound calls. The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center can automatically ramp up or slow down the campaigns using parameters such as target service levels or inbound calls in queue to optimize customer experience.

Increase agent productivity: Improve agent productivity by scheduling campaigns to launch at specific times or when there is lighter traffic for incoming calls. Agents can be part of multiple campaigns simultaneously. Automated messages including account information or reminders can also be played to the caller before transferring the calls to a live agent, thus reducing interaction times. Agents can preview customer information through a screen pop so they are better prepared for the call.

Distributed campaigns: Using the ShoreTel distributed UC system, agents can be located anywhere and use any device but be on a single campaign.

Compliance: Filter your outbound calls through your custom “Do Not Call List” that can be loaded for the campaign.

Manage campaigns: A graphical report enables you to easily monitor your campaigns in real time and terminate campaigns with the click of a button.
Queue reports give you a detailed view of every agent activity including agents on an outbound call. Threshold alerts allow supervisors to easily monitor agents who are outside their target range.

Analyze results of a campaign: Extensive detailed outbound reports enable you to analyze the result of outbound campaigns and measure the success.

Integrated management: The outbound dialer is an integrated application of the ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center that does not require additional servers and is
managed through a single user interface.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center has a built in IVR engine that can also be used as a standalone application for customers who choose to help themselves. It is built on an easy to use, scalable framework supported by an easy yet powerful scripting engine. Applications are designed through a graphical script editor, allowing you to leverage
your database investments, provide a consistent customer experience and improve your productivity.

Integrated management: The IVR is completely integrated with ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center. A customer requiring live assistance can be seamlessly
transitioned between self- and agentassisted interactions.

Integrated reporting: As with agentassisted interactions, all IVR activity is captured within ShoreTel Contact Center Reports, providing you with a wealth of data to fine tune, improve and align selfservice applications with your business goals. Each menu action is recorded and used to generate reports on frequency of usage.

Standard features to interface with customers: This includes collecting customer information through DTMF and playing prompts in multiple languages. Customer information can be processed through a workflow to automate decision making. The system automatically plays back information to customers including digits, dates, currencies or numbers.

Integrated with standard databases: The IVR application integrates with any standard database through ODBC connectors. Standard SQL queries as well as stored procedure calls are supported. All the information retrieved can be displayed to agents when the call is transferred.

Benefits:

• Easy to manage Virtual Call Center
• High availability and built-in disaster recovery protection
• Customizable call routing for improved service
• Self-service applications for flexibility and choice
• Integration with enterprise applications for advanced business intelligence

Enhance customer service

Creating positive experiences means enabling customers to communicate when, where, and however they wish. Beyond the phone, ShoreTel lets agents interact with customers via features such as Web chat and email. An advanced Interactive Voice Response (IVR) scripting tool enables a self-service option, so customers can immediately handle their own needs if they wish.

For those customers who prefer the human touch, customized routing plans and distributed agents provide superior service by routing each caller through the initial greeting and status announcements while in queue. Calls are then sent to the appropriate agent. Administrators can easily configure call routing to serve customers based on agent
skills, caller identity, wait time, priority or service level.

Open interfaces enabling you to integrate into your business processes

ECC massively open interfaces lets you customize reports, create dashboards, and easily integrate into your critical business applications.

Real Time event feeds provide queue and agent information that can be used to provide custom views through your applications or even used by wallboards or Work Force
Optimization applications.

Standard database interfaces or custom WebServices interfaces allow you to change call flows based on your business logic.

Open interfaces for ACD and telephony events allow you to customize agent screen pops and integrate with CRM and ticketing applications.