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Hosted Contact Center

Bundled is better – 100% Hosted Call Center Software & Services

ShoreTel Sky Contact Center

The most successful companies realize that their Contact Center provides a communication channel through which they can learn how customers interact with products — and reinforce the company brand. Customers who are satisfied with their call-support experience are more likely to become loyal repeat customers and to reinforce an organization’s reputation by sharing their positive experience with colleagues.

ShoreTel Sky Contact Center extends contact center functionality to an entire enterprise, and because it’s bundled with our cloud-based phone system, our customers can take full advantage of the cloud and don’t need to treat their call centers like a separate island anymore.

The ShoreTel Sky Hosted Contact Center Advantage

  • Bundled: For years, IT departments have faced the unenviable challenge of integrating a “bolt-on” contact center application with the enterprise business phone solution.  Your customers don’t make a distinction between calls to the contact center and calls to the front desk, so why should your technology?   With ShoreTel Sky, businesses with hosted contact centers don’t need to buy separate technology to meet their needs. It’s built into our service and that integration means fewer headaches for you and a more consistent calling experience for your customers.
  • Overflow: Any ShoreTel Sky phone profile can have a hosted contact center agent license added to it, even employees outside of a traditional contact center group.  This means that any employee can become part of the same contact center queues to which contact center agents are assigned.  Automatic overflowing during busy periods will reduce staff costs and improve customer service results. Wait times will be reduced and fewer calls will be abandoned.
  • Recording (With a purpose): Ever wonder if anyone listens to all of those calls that are “recorded for quality and training purposes?”  With the ShoreTel Sky Contact Center, call recording is built in, but more than simple recording.   ShoreTel Sky contact center includes agent evaluation forms that allow supervisors to track agent performance over time.  Purposeful call recording and assessment are the keys to service excellence.
  • Integration: ShoreTel Sky Contact Center works with ShoreTel Sky Connect’s application integration to improve efficiency with “click-to-dial” functionality, while at the same time, improving service with inbound screen pops.  The process of entering call notes is automated and management gets a never before available view of critical business metrics.
  • Self-service: Supervisors have direct web-based access to all administrative functions, including live dashboards, reports, and queue configuration.
  • Flexibility: The ShoreTel Sky Contact Center gives you the option to use hosted contact center technology in untraditional ways.  Not all call centers are dedicated to customer service.  What about sales? Would you like the option to treat your inside sales team like a virtual contact center and set up queues with prioritized routing for particular sales representatives?  What if you could overflow sales calls to knowledge workers or customer support representative to ensure that a sales call never goes to voicemail? Our solution opens up this possibility and many more.

Key Features

  • Full ACD Control: With ShoreTel Sky Contact Center, call center managers have full control over ACDs.  Unlimited queues can be created on-the-fly, and managers have control over every queue property.
  • Prioritized Skill Routing: Most call center managers are used to hearing about “skill based routing.”  We’ve taken that concept a step further by turning it on its side, making it easier to use, and renaming it “Prioritized Skill Routing.”  In ShoreTel Sky Contact Center, agents are added to queues (what other systems sometimes called “skills”), but are added with a priority that defines the order in which calls will be distributed.  For example, calls in the Service queue would first search for “Priority 1” agents, and only if none were available would it search for “Priority 2” agents.  And so on, ad infinitum.  By using a combination of multiple queues with priorities on the queue and multiple agents with priority on the agents, supervisors can more easily route calls to the right agent at the right time.
  • Configurable Hold Treatment: Each queue can also have separate hold treatment, and call center managers can configure that hold treatment on their own.  Sometimes this may just be hold music, but other options such as announcements, estimated wait time, position in queue, and ringing are also available.  This is all drag-drop enabled in the web browser so it is very easy to use.
  • Audio Library: Every audio file used in the system is stored in one place called the Audio Library.  This central repository allows call center managers to manage all their recordings in one place and update them (either via telephone or by uploading a WAV file) without hassle.  This is great for emergency message changes: all a supervisor needs to do is write down the “Audio ID” for a particular audio library slot, and carry it around in his or her wallet with the recording phone number.  Then, when a message must be updated and there’s no time to professionally produce it, they can use any telephone to record-over that message anytime.  The very next caller in the queue hears the updated message.

Queue Properties

  • Priority: Each queue can have a priority, which allows managers to prioritize certain queues over others.  Think “escalations” and “VIP service”.
  • Timeout: Each queue can hold calls in it for any period of time, and can auto-escalate calls somewhere else (a voicemail box, another queue, a specific phone number, etc) when that time expires.
  • Recording: It’s just a checkbox to turn on/off.  No separate recording system or integration is needed.
  • Wrap-Up Time: Each queue can keep agents unavailable for a specific amount of time to complete end-of-call work.
  • Type: Each queue can have a choice of routing algorithm for finding available agents.  Options include Round Robin, Fewest Calls, or Most Idle.
  • Service Level: Each queue can have a different “Service Level” value, which specifies how quickly managers wish for calls to be answered, so that reports can display the % of time that calls were answered faster than this value.
  • Whisper Announcement: Like an “audio screen pop”, this announces calls to agents when they are delivered, so an agent can hear an audio file in their ear to prepare them for the call.  “You have an incoming call from the service queue.”

Dashboards and Reports

The ShoreTel Sky Contact Center provides users with real time information that they can act on to improve service levels, adjust staff research utilization or recognize emerging problems.  Live dashboards update in real time and can be used as a “wallboard” by connecting a PC to a TV.  Here are just a few of the key dashboards and reports:

  • Current ACD Activity: This easy to understand dashboard shows ACD activity as of right now and over the last 60 minutes.  The lines show Connected, Queued, Abandoned, and Available Agent counts taken at 1 minute snapshots.  The ribbon underneath the graph shows what’s happening right now the longest wait time of all calls in queue.  The Logged-In Agents section shows one row for each agent as well as their current status.
  • Agent and Queue Status: Some customers prefer to see live dashboards that show agents and queues in vivid color for an easy representation of what’s happening right now.  Agents that are green are available to take calls.  Agents in yellow are not available to take calls because they’re away.  Agents in red are on calls right now.  Queues in green have no calls waiting and have agents that are members of that queue that are logged in and available to take calls if a call enters that queue.  Queues in yellow have no calls waiting but there aren’t any agents available to take calls if calls did start holding in that queue.  Queues in red have calls waiting right now.
  • Easily Configured Reports: Reporting is easy and doesn’t require any special IT knowledge or SQL (sequel) query training like some other solutions.  Instead, all reports are point-and-click in your web browser, and are configurable for different queues and date ranges.  In addition, every report can be exported to Microsoft Excel.
  • Call Detail Reporting with Drill Down: Customers that want individual call detail access have it.  Calls can be searched using filter fields (such as queue, agent, direction, caller ID, recorded flag, duration, and date/time range) and then the resulting list is drill-down enabled to bring up individual call details and recording access.  In addition, the list can be exported to Excel for offline analysis using pivot tables or whatever else you want to do with the data.

 Helpful Resources

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