Give Your Contact Center the Magic Touch

Enhancements in ShoreTel Contact Center 5.1 boost efficiency and agent productivity and help customers, developers and agents experience the latest advancements in unified communications.

The Georgia Poison Control Center saves lives by providing free poison treatment advice to residents of the state of Georgia 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. ShoreTel Contact Center 5.1 helps the center's poison control operators give helpful advice to the more than 100,000 annual queries about chemical exposures, animal bites and other public health concerns. Callers in queue receive potentially life-saving advice from the next available operator, many of whom may even work remotely from their homes to help deal with increased call volumes during a healthcare panic.

ShoreTel Contact Center 5.1 lets the Georgia Poison Control Center supervisors plan for peak activity periods and scale back when work slows. Supervisors know when agents are logging in or out for work or breaks and can schedule efficiently while ensuring that customer calls are managed effectively.

"With ShoreTel Contact Center, we can better balance our workload among our staff," said Dr. Robert Geller, executive director of the Georgia Poison Control Center. "We can monitor individual productivity, and agents can see when it's a bad time to take a break."

Unified communications (UC) in the contact center helps make the Georgia Poison Control Center efficient and highly responsive. Now contact centers around the world can experience these competitive advantages plus increased productivity with the new customer-focused enhancements included in the recently released ShoreTel Contact Center 5.1.

"We have added advanced reporting features, visual tools for supervisors, open interfaces for programmers, easier installation for IT administrators and new language options for customers," said Venky Raman, product manager at ShoreTel. "Contact Center 5.1 has something for everyone, and it is ideal for distributed enterprises serving customers globally."

Popular interface makes adoption easy

When contact centers deploy UC, customers receive the speedy service they expect. Virtual contact centers are nimble, scalable networks of responders located anywhere and agents can access all the tools they need via the intuitive communications interface, ShoreTel Call Manager.

ShoreTel Call Manager is a unified desktop client and part of the ShoreTel Contact Center solution, designed to allow agents to communicate with customers in their media of choice, whether voice, e-mail, or chat. Agents use the same application to lookup contacts in the directory, retrieve voicemails, setup conferences and chat with internal experts within the organization.

Here's a summary of the many advantages users can expect to enjoy with ShoreTel Contact Center 5.1:

For supervisors: More visibility for supervisors into agents' activities helps improve contact center performance. Supervisors have advanced graphical reports that help them better manage and monitor their agents-in-training. They can also receive personalized audible alerts even if they are not in front of their consoles.

ShoreTel Contact Center 5.1 helps supervisors fully understand contact center activity. They can schedule call reports to be e-mailed to them automatically. Advanced "wrap up" code reports allow supervisors to generate reports that provide post-call analytics. Plus, all the reports can be formatted in easy-to-read PDFs.

For developers: The popular ShoreTel Developers Network program has been extended to include the new open interfaces available in Contact Center 5.1. A real-time event feed allows applications to receive real-time agent activity information. This feature could be used to simplify integration with workforce management applications or to create an application for a call center executive who wants to see what the agents are doing on their mobile phones. The new release includes flexible integration with customer databases and CRM applications.

For IT managers: Simplified installation is another helpful addition. ShoreTel automatically pushes out the software upgrade to designated agent and supervisor desktops, reducing the need for IT resources.

For customers: Customers will immediately recognize the improvements in ShoreTel Contact Center 5.1, such as new streaming options for music or promotions when in queue. Customers also experience localized interactive voice response. Prompts and localized grammar in languages ranging from Swedish to Arabic take effect when the caller selects from a menu of languages.

Experience ShoreTel's world-class customer satisfaction yourself

ShoreTel Contact Center 5.1 is available in editions for small, midsize and large groups, each fully integrated with ShoreTel's Pure IP Unified Communications solution.

If your organization is looking for a fully redundant, virtual call center that ensures uptime, protects against interruptions, and assists customers efficiently—with an eye toward keeping them customers for a long time to come, visit our Web site for more information.