If you have managed a contact center of any size, sooner or later, you will be asked to make a change on demand.    A contact center supervisor feels the need to have a “team” meeting in the middle of the work day and needs the entire staff to be present.  This means nobody will be logged in to take calls.    This is the point they call you, the contact center administrator,  and ask that you not only close [...]

Anyone who has been deploying telephone systems for any length of time has run into the “language” issue.   Though I am personally tired of having to “Press one” for English, the fact remains that we market on a global basis even if we are a small local business.  It is rare to encounter an Automated Attendant or Call Tree that does not offer us the option of selecting another language.  In the States, Spanish tends to dominate the motivation to [...]

With an estimated 45 percent of Americans now using smartphones (66 percent for those under 30), it smartphones are starting to bleed into the enterprise. And now some businesses are beginning to evaluate whether they can manage their phone system needs directly from a smartphone. But before jumping directly into managing your business via smartphone, you need to ask yourself a few questions. For instance, what if you want more than one employee to be responsible for responding to your [...]

Have you ever call into a customer service function, been answered with “all of our Agents are currently busy with other customers, please wait and the next available customer service representative will be right with you” and then waited and waited and waited.   It probably crossed your mind that maybe they all went home!   Is it possible that a call center could queue a caller for service when nobody is actually logged in to handle the call?   [...]

It is almost expected that a modern call or contact center be able to offer a “call back from Queue” option to your callers.  In fact some call centers are now offering a Call Back with no phone call required from your caller at all!  The caller can text a message to the call center and receive a text back with an approximate wait time until the next agent is ready!   Take the time to develop a custom “smartphone” [...]

Do you run a business in which the day shift and the night shift share the same telephone instrument?   This is a very common feature requirement in call centers, help desks and order lines.   In the Health Care Profession,  a very common staffing requirement is to rotate the  ”front office” staff,  with  the “back office”e staff from time to time.   If your business or organizational requirements demand that you match a telephone extensions with specific named individuals [...]

The actual task of upgrading your ShoreTel system from one software version to the other is “brilliantly simple”.  The process, however, requires attention to the   detail!  Any software upgrade will challenge your “change management” process!  It is a complex process with many moving parts and it is up to you to understand what those parts are and how upgrading your software will effect those parts. Even a small ShoreTel deployment has many touch points beyond the upgrade of the server [...]

As Contact Center implementation consultants we get to work with both ShoreTel ECC and CISCO UCCX.   The fact of the matter is they are both really excellent solutions and very similar in many respects.   Historically, ShoreTel has had a single administration portal for the deployment of their iPBX solution.   You go to one portal to define your Users, Gateways, Call Flow, Automated Attendants, Workgroups and Voice Mail.   Add a User in ShorewareDirector and that user has a voice mail box, [...]

We continue to focus on call center strategies that optimize the caller experience by reducing or eliminating wait time. Now clearly, you have to be in a business that actually cares about customers, we don’t expect the IRS will be implementing this feature in the near future! In our last blog we took a look at the use of Smartphone based applications that can do the “wait” for you, alerting the call center to call you back when an agent [...]

Imagine that you go to a restaurant, ask for the menu and the waiter hands you a phone?   You lift the handset and hear “Thank you for coming to our Restaurant home of great food and fine dining.  For breakfast, please dial one; for Lunch dial two and for our dinner selections, please press three now”.    Sound like a scene from the theater of the absurd?   Using a touch tone telephone to self-navigate through a customer relationship interaction is just [...]