Recently in Shoretel Category
Press 1 for English!
Two characteristics of telecom technology in the 21st century continue to not make sense to us. Why are we still using fax? How come we still “Press 1 for this and Press 2 for that”? I mean really, it is the 21st century after all.
Continue Reading...One of the most challenging implementation tasks for an implementation engineer or application developer is getting the client stake holders to agree on customer audio prompts! Having implemented hundreds of call center solutions, having to wait for the client to get their IVR scripts together is the “black hole” of project management. So many other parts of the enterprise have their finger prints on the content of a customer voice prompt. From the call center managers to the legal department, everyone wants to comment on this implementation detail.
Placing your ShoreTel HQ in the “cloud”?
Moving the ShoreTel HQ server to a data center with ShoreTel Support to increase system resiliency, reduce or eliminate down time and increasing overall recovery times has always been high on the check list for business continuity and disaster preparedness. Our preferred “data center” however is Amazon Web Services, or AWS for short! We have been deploying ShoreTel in AWS as a “private” cloud solution for some time and have several blogs on the subject. read more on Build ShoreTel Connect inside your own private Cloud using AWS!
“ShoreTel (SHOR) is in final stages of rolling out ShoreTel Connect”. Who cares? Technology issues aside, ShoreTel remains dog meat in the financial markets. Since the company’s public offering in 2007, the stock has never sustained a price above the first day closing of $12.50, itself a modest premium over the offering price of $9.50 a share.
Continue Reading...Why use Shifts at all?
Most call centers have “on hours” and “off hours” that route callers to different options based on time of day and day of week. ShoreTel ECC has a concept entitled SHIFTS. Shifts have day types: Weekday, Weekend and Holiday. You go to System Parameters in the Contact Center Director, then Schedules and the create a Shift.
Continue Reading...Why Route by DNIS?
Routing by the number the caller dialed, or DNIS is the preferred routing strategy for any Call Center call flow. Clearly you can assign a DID phone number to a specific call flow and anyone who knocks on that door is answered by the same group of agents. It is much more efficient to grab the DNIS information, however, and use it to index a database to retrieve the call routing information. In this way, we only need one door to the call center!
Continue Reading...Phone only ‘call centers’ have been rapidly replaced with ‘contact centers’ that can also handle email and chat communications. Customers want more options for interacting with companies they buy products and services from. Chat requires the customer to be at a computer and though email may be sent from a mobile phone, generally the sender is at a desktop. In a wireless world in which every man, woman and child seems to wonder around with a ‘text’ or sms enabled device on their person, does it not make sense that they would want to text your call center?
Continue Reading...The Contact Center is being transformed at a rate of change that is beyond the ability of current management strategies to identify and react. Most contact centers are still using 1990 thinking in a 2020 world! The adoption rate of Smartphones, customer satisfaction scores through social media, wide availability of video options, and the mobility of customer demographics are terrorizing your call center and what are you doing about it? Still routing phone calls based on Area Code?
Continue Reading...