This article originally appeared in the June 2012 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions

Several customers are using the ShoreTel (News - Alert) Enterprise Contact Center solution in conjunction with a virtualization platform, and MonaVie is one of them. MonaVie, a multi-level marketing and community commerce organization that sells supplements and weight loss products, has employed ShoreTel technology to connect remote workers in its multiple contact centers internationally by email and chat.

The company’s main contact center is in Utah, but MonaVie also is using ShoreTel in Taiwan and Thailand, and it plans to get its India and Korea locations up and running on the platform soon as well.

One of the fastest growing companies in the world, MonaVie 500 employees in the U.S., but does business in 21 countries, and has offices in most of those places. The company has seen $500,000 in annual savings as a result of the ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center solution, which helped the nutrition and wellness company manage its staffing requirements.

Joel Lewis, MonaVie's supervisor of contact center operations, said that when he started at the company it was using the contact center only to take phones, but that there’s so much more to its call center operations today. In 2008, he said, MonaVie started to transition its contact center solution to include e-mail, chat and other communications. As a result, rather than requiring 15 reps to handle chat and e-mail outside the automated system, MonaVie can now do the same job with just two reps, said Lewis.

In all, MonaVie has 110 reps at its U.S. contact center handling calls, IM, e-mail, outbound calls, etc. – and it funnels all those communications through a single tool. He added that the system also allows MonaVie to support its widely dispersed call center workforce, 85 percent of which works remotely.