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ShoreTel Contact Center 7 Enhances Customer Service with Personal Agent Queues

By Sandra M. Gustavsen
Analyst, Business VoIP

Nearly 1,000 channel partners, customers and analysts attended the recent ShoreTel (News - Alert) Champions Partner Conference where the company highlighted seven sequential quarters of financial growth and a growing momentum in terms of product development, sales and marketing. Among the latest product developments are enhancements to the ShoreTel Contact Center, including Web-based management and a new capability called Personal Agent Queues that routes calls to specific agents based on pre-defined logic and scripting rules. ShoreTel partners at the conference noted that selling the contact center solution has helped them to secure sales of larger-sized businesses. ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center now scales to 1,000 active agents and 100 simultaneous supervisors. Read more below and visit www.telecomtactics.com for more on contact center offers from leading manufacturers.

ShoreTel continues to enhance its in-house Enterprise Contact Center for inbound/outbound multi-media communications (1,000 concurrent agents and 2,000 total agents). Over the past couple of years, ShoreTel has added more capacity and new functionality, including support for geographic redundancy and a native hot standby solution (R5.0), additional languages (R5.1) and new productivity applications such as the Web-based Agent Dashboard (a real-time view of agents and queues from any Web browser or even an iPad) and Interaction Viewer for supervisors to view end-to-end information on inbound voice calls, Web chats and e-mails (R6.0). The latest version of ShoreTel’s Enterprise Contact Center (R7.0) improves customer service with Personal Agent Queues, introduces Web-based administration and enhances historical reporting and diagnostics.

What’s new for ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center 7?

• Personal Agent Queues – This new capability enables queuing and routing of incoming calls to specific agents based on pre-defined logic and scripting rules.  Functionality includes routing a customer call to an agent spoken to previously or allowing an agent to answer a higher priority call, while placing an existing call into the personal queue. An agent can also transfer a call to another agent’s personal queue, perhaps one that has a history of interaction with the customer. Supervisors can monitor queue activity of each agent and view real-time and historical reports.
• Web-based management – A new interface is accessible via Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox browsers. Previously, a Windows-based management tool was available so customers were restricted to on-site administration. Now, they can perform management functions from any location via Web browser access.
• Reporting and diagnostics - New reporting functionality stores 24 months of statistics (up from 12 months) for longer archiving and trend reporting and adds a real-time outbound campaign report, as well as reporting around Personal Agent Queues and improved DNIS reports to complement the existing built-in reporting. New diagnostics show snapshots of current calls and views of external database connections.
• Increased capacity – Contact Center 7 supports100 simultaneous supervisors, up from 32 active supervisors in previous releases. The number of configured supervisors remains at 128.
• Improved call scripting - Additional new functionality includes call scripting via a WYSWYG editor (command lines are no longer used).

Availability/Compatibility: ShoreTel Contact Center 7 is generally available as of mid-June 2011 for customers that deploy the ShoreTel Enterprise Edition or Small Business Edition IP-PBX (News - Alert). For customers under a maintenance contract, the upgrade is free as part of this plan. 

Sandra M. Gustavsen, business VoIP analyst, contributes her Business VoIP column to TMCnet. To read more of Sandra's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell

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