Supplier Q&A on IP Contact Center Solutions with ShoreTel

This month’s Supplier Survey is focusing on IP contact center solutions. Replying for ShoreTel are Bernard Gutnick, senior director of product marketing, and Venky Ramen, senior product manager of Interaction Center:


Q: What top trends do you see happening in both contact centers and in your industry and what is driving these trends?

 

A: The key changes we are seeing in the contact center industry are:

 

--Rapid acceleration in demand for remote agents and supervisors: We are seeing a majority of our customer base increasing their teleworking agent population. This shift has become more pronounced in the current economic environment, and we feel it will continue to trend upward as customers seek out more cost-effective and higher quality resources both people and technology.

--Faster growth in the midsize contact centers: In North America we are seeing more midsize businesses demanding feature-rich contact centers that are tightly integrated with unified communications systems. Enterprises of all sizes view their contact centers as a critical enterprise brand tool that differentiates their services in this Web 2.0 age of customers expecting quick responses in their choice of media. Availability of integrated self-service applications, such as outbound dialers, is also viewed by customers as a way to lower costs and increase the productivity of fewer agents.

--Disaster recovery is planned and not an afterthought: Planning for disaster recovery (DR) through a completely distributed UC and contact center system has gained prevalence. Enterprises of all sizes are considering a DR solution not just for their phone system, but also for their applications. Contact center applications are a critical part of the company brand and considered indispensable area of their DR planning.

--Unified communications (UC) in contact centers is gaining broader appeal: Customers want a future-proofed solution that lets them integrate all UC components (IM, video, voice, chat, e-mail) in a user-friendly, easy-to-administer, and tightly integrated manner. Customers are realizing the advantages that a UC system brings to their contact center agents, particularly the ability to easily reach experts and fully achieve ‘First Call Completion.’ While customers currently are not deploying all elements, they certainly are demanding a unified desktop application, easy management and tighter integration with call recording, and work force management packages.

--Increasing adoption of UC deployments in large distributed enterprises: ShoreTel (News - Alert) is providing more solutions for 1,000- to 10,000-line businesses each month, as they leverage the benefits and cost effectiveness of unified communications. These large businesses are looking for integrated contact center solutions that leverage the distributed architecture of the core platform and enable new customer service applications.

Q: What new products, services, and/or enhancements to your existing solutions have you developed, or perhaps are currently working on in response to these issues, and how will they help contact centers improve their performance?

 

A: ShoreTel has always been extremely strong in the UC market, which is now becoming the fastest growth segment for contact centers in North America.

 

ShoreTel has been making heavy investments in its contact center portfolio and services offerings, and most importantly in enabling its sales channel to take advantage of the recent trends and positioning our solutions. ShoreTel has always had one of the best sales channels to meet the needs of this market, and has been extremely successful in winning business.

Also, we feel that we have significant offerings and features that take advantage of recent trends, thus making the ShoreTel solution extremely attractive:.

 

ShoreTel contact center solutions enable agents and supervisors to seamlessly telework, while still receiving all the critical real-time information required to manage the contact center. Using the ShoreTel Office Anywhere feature, agents can use any phone (office, home or mobile) for the voice path for contact center calls. Agents also can use the ShoreTel VPN phone for remote capabilities while maintaining a secure connection with built-in quality of service (QOS). The ShoreTel solution is a single image system, rather than multiple systems networked together. Agents can work from any site on the network and work off-premises from a home office, yet still benefit from all of the same features, monitoring and reporting capabilities as if they were physically sitting in the contact center.

One of the key strengths of ShoreTel contact center offerings is that we provide an all-in-one solution with important features such as e-mail, Web chat, and outbound dialers, in a single cost-effective package with integrated reporting and management. This makes the solution extremely attractive for the rapidly expanding small and midsize business contact center market. In addition, ShoreTel contact center solutions offer complete self-service functionality, enabling smaller contact centers to effectively reduce their costs while improving customer service.

The ShoreTel contact center solution runs on top of the best-in-class ShoreTel highly available UC system with an N+1 redundant architecture that ensures no single point of failure within the contact center. All information, including switched connections, routing information, configurations, reports, announcements and management information system (MIS) reporting capabilities, are replicated. The ShoreTel ShoreWare Contact Center solution works in a redundant mode where a fully duplicated redundant server can be deployed across the WAN in a disaster recovery site.

ShoreTel offers all the critical components of the UC solution, including conferencing, video, instant messaging (IM), presence, and mobility features in an integrated, intuitive way that has always been a key differentiator of ours. Agent and supervisor applications use a unified desktop application with the ShoreWare Call Manager to provide a single-application control for telephony, contact center, presence, IM and video features to the contact center user, improving efficiency and increasing their productivity.

Q: Where does your firm fit in your marketplace? What are your core differentiators? How would you describe your view of the future evolution of the company? Have you recently or do you plan to enter new markets and if which ones, why, and through what means?

A: ShoreTel is focused on the business communications system market, and offers a complete UC solution, which includes a full-service multimedia contact center for effective customer relationship management.

Our core differentiator is our simple communication strategy for solutions with the lowest total cost of ownership. We empower employees, contact center agents and support teams to optimize the power of our solutions. Employees can easily leverage the unique, intuitive applications for presence-enabled telephony capabilities for voice, IM and unified messaging, along with conferencing and collaboration services. Contact centers can leverage intuitive desktop applications to quickly service customers with maximum attention to customer satisfaction.

ShoreTel is the leader in overall customer satisfaction as evidenced by its No. 1 position in ratings from Nemertes Research for the past five years. The Taylor Reach Group (News - Alert) recently highlighted ShoreTel as the leading provider for contact center solutions. ShoreTel also has been selected by attendees of the annual VoiceCon conferences as the only winner for Best of Show for the last three years. We continue to focus on customer satisfaction, and are pleased to have been recognized in the Customer Satisfaction ACE awards as a leader in customer service for the past two years.

 

ShoreTel continues to invest 100 percent of our research and development in unified communications applications. Our latest release, ShoreTel 9, expanded the capabilities of our unique distributed architecture with enhanced system availability over wide area networks. We continue to invest in our suite of UC applications, including our award-winning ShoreWare Professional Call Manager desktop application.

 

ShoreTel continues to expand into new markets with our strategic partners, including AT&T, CDW (News - Alert) and Black Box in North America, and several Tier 1 carriers in international markets, such as Telstra and Aria Technologies in Australia.

 

We offer a sophisticated, feature-rich contact center [functionality] with an all-in-one solution that includes multimedia capabilities, outbound functionality, self-service IVR, integrated reporting, hot standby redundancy, and an intuitive call flow builder. Built on top of a best-in-class distributed telephony platform, the contact center turns the virtual call center into a reality. All agents can be located remotely, for instance in a home office, and can use the sophisticated ShoreTel Office Anywhere feature to be more productive and retain call quality. Agent and supervisor applications use a unified desktop application to provide a single application control for telephony, contact center, presence, IM, and video features to the contact center user, improving their efficiency and increasing their productivity.

 

Q: Discuss the state of technology with IP solutions. Is it arriving, has it arrived, or does it have a ways to go and if so why and what is needed for it to get there? Also where are we at on SIP adoption? What are the benefits of SIP and are they being realized and if not what lies in the way?

 

A: ShoreTel’s innovation in developing a robust distributed architecture for UC applications has enabled businesses to fully tap the potential of voice over IP (VoIP) solutions. We continue to see more deployments in 1,000- to 10,000-line enterprises, which highlight the acceptance of this technology for mainstream business communications. SIP adoption remains an essential area for our company and for our industry, as evidenced by our support for the leading SIP trunking service providers and a wide variety of SIP devices supported by the ShoreTel UC system. We expect adoption of SIP devices to continue to grow in the business market, as the SIP protocol matures over time with support for more business group services, and other essential traditional services needed for large organizations.

 

Q: Concerns have been raised about ensuring QoS especially to home agents and about whether there is sufficient hard ROI in making business case to migrate to IP from TDM in contact centers. What is your response and what do you recommend to customers and prospects facing these issues?

A: ShoreTel supports all the standard QOS protocols, including 802.1q and 802.1p (L2) and DiffServ (L3), to ensure and maintain prioritization. In the distributed contact center environment, the ShoreTel UC system constantly keeps track of the bandwidth on each WAN segment, and automatically reroutes calls via an alternate path or through the PSTN if there is not enough bandwidth available. The ShoreTel UC system also keeps track of network connectivity and calls route out of an alternate site or out of the originated site to the PSTN. The ShoreTel UC system automatically reverts back to WAN routing when the network is restored.

For agents at remote sites on the network, QoS is handled at the router, Ethernet switch and ShoreGear Voice Switch level. The customer’s router and Ethernet switches must be configured to meet ShoreTel’s performance requirements for latency, jitter and packet loss. Codec selection and admission control bandwidth for WAN links are configured in ShoreWare Director, thereby providing a single management interface to track QoS.

 

For agents residing at off-premises locations, ShoreTel recommends its Office Anywhere feature. Agents can assign their office extension to their home phone and the ShoreGear Voice Switch routes calls through the PSTN to their location, ensuring QoS at the PSTN level. If remote agents are on a quality ISP network then the agents can also use the ShoreTel VPN phone to securely communicate using the powerful IP device instead of a soft phone or PSTN.

 

Q: There is also a debate between hard and soft IP phones, with issues such as desktop resource consumption being raised. Discuss. Which technology do you think is best for contact centers and why?

 

A: We see this debate more for remote agents than for on-site contact centers. Our experience has been that the decisionmaker always selects a physical phone for an office environment, which offers the quality and ease of use they desire to maintain an optimum customer experience. The wide range of available ShoreTel ShorePhone IP Telephones in terms of price and performance also mitigates any kind of cost concerns.

 

While Moore’s Law is assumed to make the soft-phone option more attractive, the desktop applications that agents use, such as CRM, trouble ticketing also are becoming unpredictable in their resource consumption. As a result, IT administrators prefer to always use hard IP phones in their office locations to avoid any quality disruption in the contact center.

 

Decision makers consider soft-phone options more frequently in a remote or teleworker environment. Here, the options are more constrained depending on how the remote agents access corporate systems, VPN, and MPLS. We are seeing more customers with agents using a business DSL or business cable connection where the operator has strict service level agreements using the soft IP phone option, as it works well for them. Many customers in the same environment also prefer to use our VPN phones since there is enhanced security and the agents have access to all system features even if their desktop fails.

 

Q: What best practices do you recommend in buying, installing, and getting the most value from your offerings?

 

A: Contact center applications are truly business-enabling applications, and therefore should be designed with a thorough understanding of business needs and processes, customer experience, and IT requirements. We follow a proven process that helps ensure our customers become raving fans after using our solutions. The process begins right at the initial sales step and continues right up to post-implementation follow up and support.

 

Sales/Buying Stage:

 

--Detailed qualification: This encourages buyers to provide in-depth information about their existing contact center environment, and visualize future needs. This thorough discovery process force buyers to examine their business needs, customer experience, call flows and reporting needs and clearly articulate them.

--Business applications assessment: Buyers must assess all the applications that they need their contact center to integrate with and understand interface points. We do the same due diligence as a vendor to understand requirements for integration into a CRM, workforce management, call recording application. It also enables an assessment of the implementation and professional services effort.

--Provide a detailed scope of work: This must be mandatory for any buyer looking to purchase a system, as it defines the critical elements of implementation and training. Buyers must take an inventory of all their current needs, including resources, IT infrastructure, disaster recovery needs, toll free numbers, skills requirement, reporting needs, shifts, holiday or weekend flows, and CRM application interfaces.

Implementation Stage:

--Introductory training: This is a critical step and precedes any implementation. This introduces the stakeholders to key terms in the contact center and also gives an overview of specific products. This is useful for both customers new to contact centers, as well as customers with an existing product that is being replaced. There are so many unique terms and feature nuances that buyers almost always need a basic training before their teams can engage in detailed designing.

--Detailed discovery: Creating a detailed design document that includes all the call flows is critical for any implementation. The number of times that customers have looked at our features and define a new process that either optimizes their business processes or enhances the customer experience is countless. Defining the detailed reports also become crucial at this stage.

--Site readiness: This ensures that the buyer and the vendor agree on the state of the infrastructure before the implementation. The last thing anyone wants is to increase cost due to additional time and material requirements because the network cables have not been laid, servers are not ready or the disaster recovery site is unavailable. Site readiness must involve a complete assessment

--Implementation: Buyers must plan their implementation in the utmost detail. This includes carefully considering and planning operational windows, and building alternate call flows to redirect traffic while the system is being built and tested. Customers must always emphasize these details on a test document that can be used as an acceptance signoff.

--Training: We can never over-emphasize the importance of training administrators, supervisors and agents on the application. This training is typically conducted post implementation, so it can be customized to the specific environment and call flow. This also becomes a critical on-going activity when agent turnover is high. Missing out on training eventually results in an under-used application, and also can create disconnects in an optimum customer experience.

--Optimization Stage: Much like regular oil change for your car, contact center applications require redesigns or tune ups every few years. The contact center environment is typically an extremely dynamic environment with business needs, such as reporting requirements, agent changes and adding new business groups or applications, constantly changing. Periodic design and training assessments ensure that organizations are using the solution to its maximum potential and changing processes to meet evolving needs.