ShoreTel Blog
Contact Center Award goes to ShoreTel
Posted by ShoreTel on Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Authored by: Bernard Gutnick, Senior Director, Product Marketing
Yet again, ShoreTel has earned a prestigious industry award, this time a 2010 TMC Labs Innovation Awards presented by Customer Interaction Solutions magazine for its ShoreTel 11 release.
ShoreTel 11, released in back in July this year, included many innovative features that are in high demand among businesses today, including a client for the iPhone, a distributed database, simplified system management features, reliability enhancements, and an even greater choice of mobile device.
The TMC Labs Innovation Awards honor products that demonstrate raw innovation, unique features, and significant contributions toward improving communications technology.
ShoreTel 11 sets the bar even higher by challenging the industry to build brilliantly simple IP-based communication systems that offer a low total cost of ownership and an all-in-one contact center solution.
"These winners have proven to the staff of TMC Labs that their product or service is truly innovative in the CRM and call center industries. New companies, new products and new services in the CRM and call center industry are being created all the time. This award distinguishes the companies that make significant contributions in the advancement of this industry," said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC.
Look for mention of ShoreTel and the other 2010 TMC Labs Innovation Award winners in the September and October 2010 issues of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.
Labels: Awards
ShoreTel demonstrates brilliant simplicity at ILTA
Posted by ShoreTel on Thursday, August 19, 2010
Authored by: Bernard Gutnick, Senior Director, Product Marketing
Successful communication is the core of any service industry. Without it, the needs of a client can be jeopardized and customer satisfaction threatened. For the legal industry, a streamlined and custom communication system can also mean better time management and tracking.
Many of our customers in the legal market have leveraged the brilliantly simple ShoreTel UC system with their legal services software to facilitate convenient and accurate telephone time tracking and billing that in turn provides improved cost recovery for billing clients.
Law firms 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.
Next week, we will be demonstrating the unique applications that meet the needs of legal firms at the upcoming ILTA (International Legal Technology) Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada from August 22-26.
One of the key solutions that we will be showing is the Cost Recovery Integration application that has specific features to meet the needs of customers, like legal firms that bill by the job or by the hour. We'll also demonstrate how ShoreTel Communicator for desktop and mobile devices helps employees communicate effectively with their clients.
If you are planning to attend the show, feel free to stop by booth #231 for a demonstration and to hear more about the ROI that current ShoreTel customers are seeing with their implementations.
If you’d like to schedule a private meeting or demonstration, please contact Bernard Gutnick at bgutnick@shoretel.com, (408) 331-3514.
Labels: Event, Product Updates
ShoreTel employee joins top "Women of the Channel"
Posted by ShoreTel on Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Authored by: Tom Hamilton, Senior Director of Worldwide Channel Marketing & Development
The ShoreTel team was both proud and delighted today to learn that our very own Annette Lorenz, Sr. Manager of Worldwide Channel Marketing, has been recognized by Everything Channel’s CRN Magazine as one of the top "Women of the Channel."
CRN’s annual list recognizes female executives across vendors’ channel organizations, distributors and solution providers for their accomplishments over the past year and the far-reaching impact they are having on the technology industry going forward.
This year’s Women of the Channel were chosen by the editors of CRN magazine based on their achievements as executives and the amount of influence they wield over the technology channel.
In her two years with ShoreTel, Annette has driven scalable, global program and process changes that have dramatically simplified the ways our reseller partners do business with ShoreTel. Her work has been instrumental in improving partner communication, rewards and recognition, and helped ShoreTel earn the 2010 CRN Five-Star Partner Program award.
For more information about the award, see the special July issue of CRN Magazine and expanded coverage online at www.crn.com.
Labels: Awards, Market Perspective
How to Untangle: Customer Service Communications
Posted by ShoreTel on Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Authored by: Bernard Gutnick, Senior Director, Product Marketing
Customer service can be a key differentiator for most companies today, and every customer, whether a person or a company, amounts to a mountain of good will—not to mention the revenue!
But providing a level of customer care that will distinguish your company from the competition can be tricky.
Today, the number of customer communication channels continues to proliferate: phone, email, Web site, instant messaging, and faxes. And customer information can reside in multiple locations—CRM systems, SQL databases, and Excel spreadsheets.
Meanwhile, most customers don’t have the patience to wait while harried representatives track down their account information and look for the right resource to handle the issue.
Customers expect fast, professional service, and if they don’t get it, they are likely to start considering your competition.
If it’s time for you to start providing the best customer service in your industry, here are the key questions to ask:
- Can you start with a flexible phone system today and grow into a large, enterprise-wide call center in the future?
- Can you incorporate new communications channels and types of media into a universal queue as they become important to your business?
- Can you locate agents anywhere—at headquarters, in remote offices around the world, or in home offices—while creating a single face to customers and easily routing each call or message to the appropriate agent?
- Can you integrate your communications and call center systems into other systems, such as your CRM system, and build custom applications that meet the needs of your industry and type of customer?
- Can you provide managers and your executive team with the insight they need to make decisions based on the most current information?
- Does the system support a full range of routing options, including skills-based, agent priority-based and service level-based routing, as well as routing by caller ID or CRM, ANI or geography, DNIS, type of day, time of day, and overflow or interflow on wait?
- Is the system easy to learn, so you can minimize the time and cost of training new users?
- Is the system open and based on a fully distributed IP-based unified communications system, so it can be integrated with legacy communications systems and be deployed incrementally in order to control costs?
- Is the system functionality centrally managed, so one person or a small group of people can manage the system across the entire enterprise?
- Does the system eliminate a single point of failure and offer N+1 redundancy to ensure availability?
If you’d like to learn more about how ShoreTel can help untangle your customer services capabilities contact your local ShoreTel reseller.
Labels: Customer Experiences, Market Perspective
How to Untangle: The IT Needs of Your Rapidly Growing Business
Posted by ShoreTel on Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Authored by: Bernard Gutnick, Senior Director, Product Marketing
As the painful days of the recession begin to subside, many companies are beginning to restart the jets, and are hurriedly expanding workforces to keep pace with growing demand.
That’s great news, but is your IT group ready for a huge influx of new employees?
Communications has changed significantly over the last couple of years as many organizations are now seeing real benefits from unified communications. However, many more have had to put off upgrading their systems due to budget constraints.
Now that the turnaround is here, IT has to pull off a minor miracle: upgrading the communications infrastructure and adding new facilities and people quickly.
More importantly, the communication system now has a mission-critical role and so business continuity is vital to the company’s success. This means making sure everyone understands how to obtain the productivity benefits from a fully integrated communication system—not just the desk telephone, but cell phones, email, voicemail, IM, conference calls, video calls and more.
And IT must do all this without busting its budget, which likely isn’t growing as fast as the staff!
With the right communication platform, however, managing and scaling the system to cope with growth is easy.
If you need to upgrade your communications system to support a rapid influx of new employees, here are the key issues to consider:
- The system should be sufficiently scalable to cost-effectively meet both the current ramp-up and long-terms needs.
- Moves, adds and changes (MACs) should not require the services of a consultant. This will drive down the cost of maintaining the expanding system.
- Learning to use the system should require minimal training. This will reduce the cost of onboarding each new user, a key consideration during rapid growth.
When assessing a system’s ability to support your business’s rapid growth, be sure to ask these questions:
- Is the solution a single, integrated, fully distributed system that can be deployed anywhere across the entire enterprise with plug-and-play ease?
- Is the system open, so it can easily integrate with existing systems and be deployed incrementally in order to simplify deployment and lower the cost of the ramp-up?
- Is system functionality centrally managed, making it easy for one person to manage communications at every location?
- Is the system interface sufficiently easy to use, so MACs can be implemented by any designated staff member, completely eliminating the long delays and high costs of relying on consultants?
- Is the user interface simple and familiar, and are the features easy to access, so most users can take advantage of the system with little or no training?
- Does the system eliminate a single point of failure and offer N+1 redundancy to ensure availability? Is the phone system switch-based, so if the WAN fails, calls can still be placed and received on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)?
If you’d like to learn more about how ShoreTel can help untangle the IT needs of your rapidly growing business, please contact your local ShoreTel reseller.
Labels: Market Perspective, UC Myths