ShoreTel Blog
Employees Drive Adoption of Unified Communications
Posted by ShoreTel on Thursday, February 26, 2009
Authored by: Kevin Gavin, VP of Marketing
While unified communications deployments are helping a growing number of organizations around the globe weather the economic storm with improved efficiency and reduced costs, many businesses a little further behind in the UC adoption decision-making process are witnessing a groundswell of demand from an unexpected source—employees themselves.
An article written by Charlene O'Hanlon from Channel Insider titled “Despite Economy, Unified Communications Still a Technology to Watch” underscores the fact that employees today strive to be more efficient, and seek out their preferred method of communication, whether it’s telephone, instant messaging or e-mail, to reach that goal. As a result, UC adoption is becoming more employee-driven.
However, organizations interested in learning more about these productivity and cost benefits must understand that not all UC solutions are created equal, and not all will be readily embraced by grateful employees. Ease of use, management simplicity and effectiveness are essential factors that affect whether innovative UC features and applications are well-received by the people for whom they’re designed.
Designing a successful UC application involves careful consideration of these factors, plus the possible barriers to adoption that might deter either an organization or an individual user. Additional considerations include the time-to-deploy, the education process, ease-of-use, and recognizable return on investment.
The ShoreTel Converged Conferencing solution is a good example of how users’ needs drive ShoreTel’s focus on ingenuity. This comprehensive collaboration tool unifies all the elements needed to conduct an efficient virtual meeting in one easy-to-use interface. Audio conferencing, desktop/application sharing, instant messaging, virtual meeting rooms, on-line presentations, and multimedia recording are all available at any time during a conferencing session with just a simple click.
At ShoreTel, we understand that a successful unified communications strategy makes life easier for all employees, and our products are inherently designed to improve efficiency. As Ms O’Hanlon’s article states, “That’s the idea of unified communications.”
Labels: Customer Experiences
Boost Productivity in Tough Economic Times with UC
Posted by ShoreTel on Monday, February 23, 2009
Authored by: John W. Combs, CEO
In today’s economic environment, the mantra "Do more with less" has taken on whole new levels of meaning for organizations of all sizes, and across all verticals. At the heart of any focus on increased productivity is the ability to communicate and collaborate more efficiently. The integration of IP telephony and collaboration tools into a unified communications system can improve levels of efficiency throughout the organization—whether you’re a small local school, or a multinational enterprise with a highly distributed and mobile workforce.
Integrating business processes with business communications via a unified communications system makes it easy for workers to collaborate. For instance, a salesperson might be pricing out a new order for a customer and needs information from the finance department. Instead of looking up the finance manager's phone number in the out-of-date printed corporate directory and then physically dialing that number — as he likely would with a legacy phone system — the salesperson simply calls the finance manager with a single mouse click. As the discussion progresses, the finance manager may need to see additional details of the sale to build the cost model, so he simply clicks again to turn the call into a Web conference where they can edit the spreadsheet together. At the same time, he can use instant messaging to ask the vice president of sales for approval on new discount levels.
Easy, affordable access to effective collaboration tools means distributed teams can work together efficiently and in real time. This translates to increased productivity, a potentially shorter sales cycle and ultimately more satisfied customers. Contact centers in particular benefit from these improved business processes, as agents can confer with subject-matter experts in real time to address a customer issue quickly, and ultimately resolve more calls.
While a boost in productivity is the kind of economic stimulus many organizations are looking for today, hard-dollar cost savings are also possible with an integrated unified communications system. By leveraging a shared IT infrastructure, an IP-based unified communications system can result in savings in capital and operating costs–and in today’s economy, success means making the most of every possible advantage.
Labels: CEO
A New ShoreWare Contact Center 5 Release – Investing in the Right Financial Prescription
Posted by ShoreTel on Friday, February 20, 2009
Authored by: Kevin Gavin, VP of Marketing
With the list of companies feeling the financial squeeze growing daily, I am compelled to continue to press the case for how ShoreTel’s solutions can help businesses save money and keep customers coming back for more.
Whenever companies spend money, regardless of economic pressures, they owe it to their shareholders and investors to choose solutions that help them retain customers, improve productivity, and drive down ongoing costs. And if they can invest in a single solution that does all three on a rock solid foundation for growth, then even the most cautious CFO should eagerly approve the expenditure.
Enter the latest release of the ShoreWareÒ Contact Center. Here are just a few of the ways the solution meets these important investment challenges:
Retain Customers – Companies can improve the customer experience by providing options so customers can choose their preferred media to address concerns or questions, and still be directed to the right agent. ShoreWare Contact Center solutions give sophisticated options such as an integrated IVR application for self-service capabilities, callbacks, multimedia support, and skills-based routing so companies can offer flexibility and excellent service. .The new supervisory features in Contact Center 5 help teams ensure quality of service, respond to escalations more efficiently, and train new agents. The result is a happy customer, which translates into a loyal customer and one who comes back for more.
Increase Productivity – ShoreWare Contact Center 5 is built on ShoreTel’s fully distributed unified communications platform, enabling companies to use voice, presence status, IM and video to streamline business processes and improve productivity. Agents use a single unified desktop application through ShoreWare Call Manager that integrates all these capabilities and makes it tremendously easy to access experts or information in multiple ways.
Drive Down Costs – ShoreWare Contact Center 5 makes the cost-effective virtual call center a reality, allowing companies to build a highly efficient and professional contact center team, regardless of where the agents work or live. This can help significantly lower operational costs, and as broadband adoption grows, at-home agents can use a wide variety of devices, including the ShoreTel VPN Phone solution, softphone or even their home phones with the Office Anywhere feature to increase efficiency. In addition, the ShoreTel UC system is easy to deploy, maintain and use, which reduces the burden on IT staff, eliminates reliance on high-priced telecom consultants, and minimizes the need for training. The new hot-standby redundancy option in ShoreWare Contact Center 5 also furthers ShoreTel’s commitment to providing an easy to manage, highly reliable business communications system.
Protect the Investment – ShoreWare Contact Center 5 scales to 600 simultaneous agents and 2,000 total configured agents, so midsize businesses can easily scale to meet their future needs. And because the solution is built on ShoreTel’s open, distributed architecture, the entire system is future-proofed. In today’s tough environment the best investment protection any company can make is to purchase from a company that is financially strong, ranked the best in customer satisfaction and committed to developing products that can easily integrate with business processes to transform the way companies work, while helping them stay agile in a constantly evolving marketplace.
Labels: Product Updates
KPIX-TV (CBS 5) Spotlights ShoreTel's Hometown U.S.A. Customer Service
Posted by ShoreTel on Thursday, February 19, 2009
Authored by: John W. Combs, CEO
A few weeks back, Joe Vasquez of KPIX-TV reported on a story about companies that charge a premium for U.S.-based customer service. As part of his segment, Joe visited ShoreTel’s Sunnyvale headquarters to find out why we took the road less traveled and kept our tech support in the U.S. without charging customers a premium, despite the significant savings available from offshoring.
The answer is simple: ShoreTel is focused on customer satisfaction because we know it’s the best way to build our business. Excellent customer service is a fundamental and strategic element of any successful business.
Our entire company is lined up behind the principle of creating happy customers, which in turn creates a healthier bottom line. The growing number of customer testimonials on our Web site speaks to ShoreTel’s proven customer satisfaction. Having knowledgeable people to support our customers is one means to that end.
As Mark Haynes, senior director of technical services, explained to KPIX, ultimately ShoreTel's customer service is about the interaction of our engineers with our clients. We place the responsibility of customer service with employees who not only understand the technology, but who also understand the people using our technology.
For more insight into our customer service philosophy and our highly disciplined customer satisfaction measurement program, have a look at ShoreTel’s Customer Satisfaction Manifesto, which is every bit as true today as it was when we first published it in 2004.
Labels: CEO, Customer Experiences
ShoreTel Excels with the Winning Verdict
Posted by ShoreTel on Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Authored by: Kevin Gavin, VP of Marketing
When it comes to dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s in a phone system purchasing decision, few businesses pay as much attention as legal firms. Successful lawyers have mastered the art of understanding every detail, and scrutinizing every line item. So when law firm Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth not only chose a ShoreTel phone system over Cisco for their offices throughout California, but decided to write about it for a leading law publication, we immediately added them to our global fan base.
Clearly, the team at Stradling Yocca Carlson and Rauth did full due diligence in looking at industry and peer reviews, evaluating handsets for comfort in communication-intense environments and accurately assessing costs, but even more interesting was the feedback from users themselves. “Surprisingly, 74 percent of our surveyed users preferred ShoreTel over Cisco, despite a bias to Cisco as the process began,” the article states.
Here at ShoreTel we’re not at all surprised. We’re hearing similar stories every day—from the busy real estate office in Australia to the multinational camera distributor based in the UK, and the growing government office in Texas. Check out our success story page that covers these and many other industries, or request a demo, and come to your own verdict.
Labels: Customer Experiences
Market Share – Is It Really The Right Measurement?
Posted by ShoreTel on Monday, February 09, 2009
Authored by: Mark Swendsen, Managing Director, EMEA
Our CEO posted a recent blog on the current events at Nortel. Certainly, their bankruptcy filing is an eye-opener for many companies. However, it also betrays a buying pattern that actually runs counter to the intuitive buying patterns of most consumers: that market share data should be an exclusive buying criteria.
Don’t get me wrong – there are benefits to being a market leader. However, manufacturers incorrectly use market share data to implicitly convey two messages: first, that the product is high quality, and second, that the company is stable. The truth is that both of these are false conclusions.
Let’s take the quality implication first. Would you ever assume that wine is the highest quality because it is created in high volume? Is a Timex watch higher quality than a Rolex watch, due to higher sales? In fact, is there anything you can readily think of where high volume necessarily equates to higher quality? As a general rule, the highest volume product is generally the cheapest, both in cost and build quality. By market share logic, the Chevy Malibu is a vastly superior car to the Porsche 911. It’s simply a false conclusion.
While we’re on cars, let’s look at the stability implication. GM is an order of magnitude larger than Porsche. They have a huge market share, while Porsche owns a fraction of a percent. That said, GM is on the verge of bankruptcy, while Porsche is the most profitable company per car. Size or market penetration is not an indicator of stability; counter-intuitively, size can often be a company’s most lethal characteristic. As Rupert Murdoch has said, “Big will not beat small anymore. It will be fast beating slow.” Like Dinosaurs who lost the planet to fast-moving, warm-blooded mammals, so too are the business markets favouring the lithe and nimble to the inflexible and slow.
Rather than pure market share data, buyers should ask market share questions that make sense for their buying decision. Porsche’s market share data is substantive if you are concerned with a particular market: high end sports cars with a premium placed on cornering and acceleration. So does ShoreTel’s market share stand out, as an example, for professional services companies on UC solutions distributed throughout the globe on a single-image system.
With regard to company stability, instead of market share, buyers need to be explicitly asking, “Is the company I am buying from stable?” In ShoreTel’s case, that is a resounding yes. We are among the healthiest companies in the market!
First, we are publically traded, which means that we are completely transparent, and our customers are welcome to examine our financial strength. This is a growing rarity these days. Second, we have 110 million in the bank (actually, multiple banks, and none of them Icelandic). On that subject, Bill Gates always wanted a year of cash on hand, so he could survive for a year even if there were no sales; at our current run rate, ShoreTel has well over one year worth of cash in the bank, one of the highest reserves to revenue ratios in the business. Nortel had lots of cash as well, but what killed them was servicing their debt. ShoreTel has no long term debt. Furthermore, we are also investing more on a percentage basis than any other vendor on Research and Development: over 20%! Even with these investments, we also have one of the highest gross margins in the industry: close to 65%. This high gross margin has allowed us to stay profitable for the last 14 quarters and cash flow positive for the last 3 fiscal years. (Learn to read income statements: there is a difference between GAAP accounting and Non-GAAP accounting, which does not consider stock based compensation expenses.) Finally, ShoreTel is a high growth company in a high growth market. We believe we are the fastest growing company in the space, and we see future growth.
Buying preconceptions are often challenged in soft economic times, and I expect that buyers will again ask the right questions to differentiate between thought leaders and market leaders, to juxtapose large companies against stable companies, and to compare quality opposed to pure volume.
Labels: EMEA, Market Perspective
ShoreTel Featured on Forbes Video Network
Posted by ShoreTel on Thursday, February 05, 2009
Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to visit the Bay Area bureau of Forbes for a video interview with Taylor Buley about ways that IP-based systems can lower the costs associated with the traditional call center model of customer support. (Click here to read how other companies are using their ShoreTel systems to get these benefits.) Time and again, I've mentioned ShoreTel’s commitment to customer satisfaction – not only for our own customers but for their customers as well - and how VoIP can play a role in delivering that. Ultimately, people want to talk to people. Whether it’s to get advice about a purchase, information about a solution, or help with troubleshooting a service, we like to talk to real people, and I’m proud to say that ShoreTel helps enable those connections.
Labels: CEO
Taking It to the Nines - Reliability of UC Systems
Posted by ShoreTel on Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Regardless of the economic environment, organizations need to ensure that their mission-critical business communications are built on a secure and reliable platform. While many companies today are looking to unified communications to help them weather the economic storm, confidence in the reliability of IP-based communications is also important-both for peace of mind, and for the bottom line.
As a UC vendor it's tempting to stay focused on how the rich feature set and advanced functionality transform business processes, but at ShoreTel we spend just as much time focused on the reliability of our system. We know it doesn't matter how many features you have if you don't get dial tone, if you can’t retrieve voicemail, if it takes hours to fix every problem that crops up. Without 99.999 percent availability from your communications system, all the innovative business processes in the world won’t help reduce costs and improve productivity.
The key to five-nines availability is to approach reliability holistically and systemically. This means that the system must be designed from the ground up to be reliable, and each component of the system has reliability built in. Take a look at this breakdown of how ShoreTel approaches reliability: a distributed architecture, distributed applications, and N+1 redundancy, all extend the mean time between failures (MTBF), and simplify repairs. At every step, ShoreTel engineers opted against expediency and cost shaving, and instead chose the path that led to greater reliability.
Since competing products typically use an architecture that has either evolved from traditional PBX platforms or traditional data-switch platforms, these systems require additional equipment at each site, or multiple clustered servers to achieve acceptable levels of reliability. However, in both cases, this means additional complexity and expense. Either you have to manage a web of marginally reliable disk drives that are responsible for providing mission critical telephony functions, such as dial tone, or you're stuck with a labyrinth of management interfaces that have to be configured at each site. In some cases you might have both. One minor configuration error and isolating the fault can feel a lot like looking for the blown bulb in a huge strand of Christmas tree lights. ShoreTel keeps it simple and highly available. More on that in future posts.
For a more in-depth look at reliability, download Building Reliable IP Telephony Systems. Written by Ed Basart, our founder and chief technology officer, this whitepaper compares the approaches that various IP telephony vendors take to ensure high availability. More importantly, it tells you all the tough questions you need to ask every vendor on your list when evaluating UC systems.
We've also got some great stories about how our customers depend on ShoreTel reliability. Thanks to ShoreTel's remarkable recovery capabilities and a little help from their solution provider, law firm Balch & Bingham was able to reestablish communications services to its Gulfport, Mississippi office just one day after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the building. The City of Oakland, in California relies on the ability of its ShoreTel UC system to quickly reroute calls around network outages to ensure communications in a region often plagued by earthquakes and mudslides. And Palisades Charter High School depended on ShoreTel's distributed architecture and the ShoreWare® Emergency Notification Application for increased security and emergency responsiveness during the worst of the Southern California summer wildfires.
John W. Combs
Labels: CEO