ShoreTel Sets Gold Standard for Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is not just about whether the product performs according to advertising claims. Doing business with a vendor that has high customer satisfaction ratings makes it far more likely that the product adds tangible business value to your operations, and that your overall experience and implementation is successful.

Customer satisfaction means that every stage of the project goes smoothly—from installation to future support and enhancements. Users are quick to learn and adopt new features. Productivity goes up as a result of improved connectivity and collaboration. Communication costs go down, return on investment is swift, and the total cost of ownership is reduced.

As a result of ShoreTel's obsession with ensuring world-class customer satisfaction, ShoreTel was named the best IP telephony provider six years in a row, according to the Nemertes Research PilotHouse Awards. The PilotHouse Awards are based entirely on the experiences of IP telephony decision-makers, and no vendors sponsor the research. These awards are truly the voice of the customer.

Real Customers Ranking IP Telephony Providers

In this year's Nemertes study, 1,393 IT practitioners rated 39 different IP telephony providers in five areas: value, technology, customer service, ease of implementation and troubleshooting, and management tools. ShoreTel earned the highest score in every category. ShoreTel outranked competitors large and small, including Cisco, Microsoft and Avaya.

ShoreTel's 4.05 score was significantly higher than any IP telephony competitor and ShoreTel was the only provider to rank above a 4 in the Nemertes PilotHouse Awards.

"Implicit in the results is that ShoreTel has provided a solution that has created a solid customer experience," wrote Nemertes analyst Irwin Lazar in the report. "Customers routinely praise their purchases of ShoreTel gear as providing an exceptional set of features and a highly resilient architecture at both lower upfront and ongoing costs than its competitor. Its distributed architecture provides for redundancy at an affordable price."

ShoreTel's top focus is on delivering world-class customer satisfaction and a brilliantly simple unified communications (UC) system. "Our obsessive focus on customer satisfaction shapes every facet of our business, from product design and development to sales and marketing to distribution. We measure customer satisfaction with the same rigor and frequency as we measure revenue," said John W. Combs, Chairman, President and CEO of ShoreTel.

  • Value. The Nemertes study ranked IP telephony vendors on value, or the way customers perceive whether they are getting "bang for their buck." ShoreTel provides an exceptional set of features and a highly resilient architecture at both lower upfront and ongoing costs than competitors. With ShoreTel, users can easily manage communications from their computer and seamlessly move between video, voice or instant messaging, thereby improving communications accuracy and productivity.
  • Technology. The Nemertes technology rating captures how customers view the sophistication of the underlying technology of the vendor's product. Another win for ShoreTel. ShoreTel was built from the ground up for IP communications, and its distributed architecture is ideal for companies that span multiple locations because ShoreTel appears and behaves as a single, unified system.
  • Customer service. In the Nemertes study, customer service ratings define how customers feel their vendors serve them, particularly in the areas of response time to problems, account rep service and the RFP process. ShoreTel's obsessive focus on satisfaction permeates all parts of the business, including resellers. ShoreTel measures and ranks customers' satisfaction with their reseller partners, and requires that resellers deliver high levels of satisfaction as well.
  • Ease of implementation and troubleshooting. This category rates how easy it is to install vendors' products and once installed, the ease of troubleshooting. ShoreTel's system was designed from the ground up to be easy to manage and free from complexity.
  • Management tools. Customers rated IP telephony vendors on the sophistication of the management tools that come with the product. ShoreTel's management interface applications, ShoreTel Director allows customers to manage the entire IP phone system, no matter how many locations, from a single browser-based interface.

A six-year winning streak is one for the record books, but ShoreTel's accomplishment is even more meaningful given that ShoreTel has consistently come out ahead over the incumbents. Choosing a market-share leader simply based on size clearly may not be so satisfying after all.

Just ask ShoreTel's raving fans.

Download the Nemertes PilotHouse Awards report and see for yourself why ShoreTel's obsessive focus on customer satisfaction is good for your business.