VOIP Tech Blog

On more than one occasion I have actually had to telnet into a clients router or switch using nothing more than a mobile phone!  Now, that is either an example of superior customer service or an indication of creeping insanity.   When you have to, you have to!   Sometime ago I moved to an Iphone and that actually makes RDP, VNC  or Telnet actually usable on a mobile phone in a pinch.
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If you have been following our tech tips, you know that route points in the ShoreTel IPBX have a matching IRN in the Contact Center. If you want to route a call to a different destination based on the date and time that a call hits the Contact Center, how and where would you apply the schedule? Technicians familiar with the ease of creating schedules in the ShoreTel IPBX, might immediately apply a schedule to a route point. After all, each call to the Contact Center hits a route point first, why not apply the OnHours/OffHours call handling directly to the route point?

At the end of the day, Contact Centers are designed to provide management, detailed information to facilitate staffing, allocate resources, decrease call holding time and increase customer satisfaction. Candidly, it is all about REPORTS! My personal prejudice is that contact centers should be designed by starting with Reports! What is it that Management wants to see? If we want to know how many callers are hitting the Contact Center during Off-Hours, for example, we can not apply the schedules to the Route Points. If the Schedule applied to the Route Point deflects the caller to a Voice Mail box, that call will not appear in the total Calls presented to the Contact Center.

If you want the call to be counted, it must actually enter the Contact Center! For this reason, most Contact Center deployments are deployed with the Automated Attendant functionality being defined within the Contact Center. In this way we can accumulate accounting information on all calls that hit the Contact Center, regardless of how they are ultimately routed. The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center has a very powerful configuration capability as it relates to defining Schedules. Schedules are defined as “types of days” and “shifts”. At first this concept is a bit difficult to digest, but once you play with it you will realize just how powerful and impact this configuration strategy can have on your overall Contact Center call flow.

The Working Times facility enables you to define a type of day and then associate shifts to that day type. The normal ShoreTel Schedule works on a binary On-Hours Off-Hours call handling model. What happens if you want to build a call flow that needs to have calls routed differently between specific hours of the day. For example, between 12AM and 8PM, we want incoming calls to be routed to the Guard Station. Between 8AM and 12 Noon we want a live answer point at the Reception Desk. Between Noon and 1PM calls need to be routed to an outside answering service; and between 1PM and 5 PM they need to be routed back to the Reception desk. Now any technician that has been working with the ShoreTel IPBX for any period of time has developed several strategies for handling this often required call flow. The strategy usually involves cascading Hunt Groups in combination with Workgroups to achieved the desired result.

The Working Times facility within the Contact Center would handle this complexity with ease. You would define a Day Type (i.e. WeekDay) and the define the various Shifts that comprise that day. In the example above, the ticking of the clock would transition through the various “shifts” resulting in a different destination based on the time of day. This is advantageous in a call center environment and significantly less demanding to administer than the cascading Hunt group strategy. Contact Center call flow is often managed on a time of day, day of week and holiday basis at a level of sophistication that goes way beyond the On-Hours Off-Hours approach to call handling. The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center Working Times facility is a power strategy for achieving maximum call routing control.

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How many people hit the Auto Attendant and then dialed one for Sales? One of the most requested reports from ShoreTel clients is the analysis of Automated Attendant key strokes. With in the ShoreTel iPBX there are probably several ways to implement this, but we prefer the use of “route points” (see past blog). “ Thank you for calling our company during our normal business hours. For Sales Press 1, for Service Press 2 or stay on the line and the next available member of our staff will be right with you”. Typical Automated Attendant? We set the time out value to go to a “hunt group” and each of the menu items to a route point. You can actually run a User Detail report against a route point, as long as that route point terminates on a Shoretel end point other than a TAPI end point. For this reason, you can then run the report and find out exactly how many callers dialed one for sales!

Recently, we had to create an Automated Attendant on an Enterprise Contact Center. At first this seemed almost boring, but then we ran into an issue. You can use the MENU icon to create your Automated Attendant script, with a TRANFER icon to each destination selected by the caller. You can use the SCRIP icon to send the caller on to a script to collect information like the callers account number for a SQL database look up; but how do you send a caller to “service”? Now that was a more interesting challenge and I have to thank Chad Burnett for pointing out the use of what has become my favorite new ShoreTel ECC scripting icon: “the Change Profile” action. This icon is a powerful call profile manipulator and enables the Enterprise Contact Center configuration to explode with call processing options.

Using the Change Call Profile icon you can select various Call Profiles for manipulation. Each system contains a number of mandatory system level call profiles like ANI and Caller ID. You as a system designer can also create Call Profiles to meet the needs of your exacting design requirements. For example, you might add the Call Profile “Account Code” that you might use in a script that prompts the caller to enter digits that you will use to look up a record in a SQL database.

The Change Call Profile icon also allows you to select a previously defined SERVICE. The following video clip reviews how the iPBX and the ShoreTel ECC interconnect. It demonstrates the use of the Change Call Profile icon, by demonstrating the creation of a simple automated attendant!

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As you can tell from our video library and blogs, we are very excited supporters of the ShoreTel Contact Center!  You can not find a more feature rich or cost effective  solution to call routing, email routing  and web collaboration!    To be fair, however,  ShoreTel has always been ahead of the curve with “call center” like  functionality.    Out of the box, the ShoreTel IPBX has an amazing set of features that can fit just perfectly in the small “call center” model.   It may be easy to define the difference between a “call center” (i.e. phone calls only) and a “contact center” (i.e. voice, email and chat); but it is much harder to differentiate a “workgroup” from a true “call center.     ShoreTel clearly believes there is a definable difference and for that reason has always had an impressive call routing option humbly named the “Workgroup”.    Not the “call center” but the “Workgroup”!   Going way beyond simple  ”station hunting”, the ShoreTel “Workgroup” enable scall queuing,  Agent  ”log in” / “log out” ,  ”wrap codes” and provides a rich set of easy to generate performance reports.

ShoreTel has  recently introduced the “ShoreWare Workgroup Monitor”.   This amazing  software package provides real-time, color-coded, graphical views of the the Workgroup and is an optional feature to the already powerful ShoreTel Workgroup feature set.   Compatible with Version 7.5 and up, this software enhancement enables call center management to both optimize and monitor call center performance.

There are three software components:  an application that is loaded into the Shoreware Director or any of the distributed voice servers;  a client application that is loaded on the Supervisors desktop and any version of the ShoreTel Call Manager.    Key  features of this optional software package enable a Workgroup Supervisor to create a standard workspace display or “canvas”.    This “canvas” could be displayed at the desktop or on a “wall board” and provides many of the real time characteristics of a full blown Call Center solution.   With this software you now have the ability to set color coded threshold displays and audible alerts.    We are particularly excited about the ability not only to see abandonded calls, but to click-to-callback!  (Now admit it! How kool is that)?

Supervisors can drill down on the Workgroup of interest, with an easy <> window arrangement.   You can set the threshold alerts for the selected Workgroup to enable Yellow or Red alerts for Calls in Queue, Maximum Wait time and Average Wait time.   The “at a glance”  window gives you a snap shoot of each Workgroup,  indicating the number of calls with longest and average call holding times.   How about a “trend” analysis?  Yup, we got that!   For those spacial database managers with holistic mind sets, you can replace the rows of linear figures with a color pie chart to see Agent status!

The ShoreTel Workgroup feature set,  built on the f the standard out of the box  ShoreTel IPBX,  when combined with the ShoreTel Workgroup Monitor software option is a powerful call center strategy.    It truly rivals any solution in the market at any price point.     (Full Disclosure: ShoreTel does not pay me a dime to write this blog and ShoreTel does not support this site in any way.    I really do believe this stuff).   Keep in mind, we are talking about a single server solution,  not multiple application servers and five acts of  vaudeville to get this call center functionality.  Just  ShoreTel.  Just simple.

Send me a note  (DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com)  and we will get you set up with a free 30 day trail of the Shoreware  Workgroup Monitor!

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You can hardly install a Automated Attendant with out creating the Audio files!    If you have looked at any of our videos on setting up the ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center, you know that we urge you to create all of your audio files before you start setting up your Contact Center Services!   Making recordings should be easy enough, but ShoreTel wants to have the wav file in a specific format:  CCITT-mulaw, 8Khz, 8bit Mono.  This is easy enough to create with something as simple as the standard Microsoft Sound Recorder, but the default wav format is some other format  and you will need to “save as” clicking on the format change option!

There are actually three other strategies for recording voice prompts in the native ShoreTel format.   Early versions of ShoreTel provided for a “preference” extension, used by the System administrator to indicate which phone would be used for making recordings.  The System Administrator would set a specific phone phone for this purpose and when you pressed the Record button from within the Automated Attendant screen of the Shoreware Director, that phone would ring and you would then make your recording.

The resulting wav file would be stored in the Shoreline Data folder, in the prompts sub folder and it would be in the correct ShoreTel format.   With Version 7 of ShoreTel, the option existed to enable Automated Attendant recordings by logging into the voice mail system, using the Automated Attendant greeting number as the voice mail extension number.   This was an exciting possibility as it allowed recordings to be made remotely and on the fly as required to meet specific emergency or holiday requirements.

Unfortunately, the files that resulted from these two recording techniques had very unfriendly file names.   When managing greetings through the automated attendant, it would be nice to have a wav file with a name that related to the greeting.    As a result the best practice method of enabling ShoreTel recordings is to use your Personal Call Manager!   By creating a recording using your Call Manager, you are able to name the wav file something useful and you are able to export the recording as in the appropriate format.

Over 15K ShoreTel desktops later, people are still asking me how to make an automated attendant recording!   I though I would generate a short tech tip video and demonstrate all three of these techniques!  Enjoy!

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I would like to kill  call center challenges with one blog!   In many call center environments, it is possible that an agent has a Direct in Dial (e.g. DID) number that a client might call and by pass the entire call center process!   For a call center manager, this is very frustrating!  Your create a Contact Center to organize the flow of calls to your Technical Assistance Center, and clients by pass the process by calling your Agents/technicians directly!

Clearly you can eliminate this by not giving DID numbers to Agents, but we end up doing this to facilitate an orderly problem resolution strategy.  You might give a client a “home work” assignment and ask them to call you back.   They might object to being put at the back of the queue again, so you give them a DID number that gets them directly back to you.  The challenge is, that this call would not be accounted for in your contact center reporting!   So how then do you provide this feature and also create a mechanism for enabling your contact center to capture all calls for Agent Performance reporting?  One answer is to establish a “service” that has only one Agent in it!   Then build out a DNIS/DID route point to IRN relationship that brings that DID number into the call center and routes it to the Agent.

Actually, it is not a bad strategy!   The Contact Center can now account for all calls, even the ones that reach your Agent through a DID number and  you can apply normal Contact Center routing tools like “over flow”, which brings me to my second point!   Is it possible to overflow calls to more than one other group?  Based on more than one over flow time in queue?

The Contact Center provides a wide variety of methods for handling callers in queue awaiting service.   One of the more interesting concepts is the ability to “over flow” a caller from one group to another group based on the amount of time they have been waiting in queue.   This contact center parameter is set within the “service” and can be found in within the tab labeled “Overflow”.

In figure One below, you can clearly see that we have a number of services defined, including a service named TAC1.   Let us assume that this is a technical service group and that TAC1 is comprised of Agents/technicians that include Agent Gandalf, Kipling, Regan and Jack.      You can also see that a service has been enabled  by the name “Direct Kipling”.    This service was created to enable callers to Kipling’s DID number to be brought into the Contact Center, and routed to Kipling even though they did not enter through the TAC1 service.   Hopefully, we can now count the phone calls Agent Kipling is handling that otherwise would not be reportable!

In Figure One  we can also see that we have set an “Overflow” counter that,  should anyone be in the Kipling Queue for 10 seconds they will over flow to the TAC1 queue.  What is interesting is that when you overflow in the ShoreTel Contact Center,  you don’t leave the queue you are in, you basically add another queue containing agents that have a cumulative effect on the call.    Should that “overflow” not result in an available agent and the caller continues to wait for service, you can actually set a second timer that would “overflow” (e.g. expand the number of agents ) to yet another queue.

In Figure two, you can see the original call in the Queue for Kipling.  After the pre-configured overflow interval is met, the call is distributed to the “overflow” queue but is also available to the original queue.  You can see this in Figure Three, by noting that the call is now in queue in both the Kipling and TAC1 queue.   In this way if an agent becomes available, in either the original queue or the “overflow” queue, the call will be answered.   Had we set up a second interval timer in the Service, we could expand the number of Agents to include the additional group specified by that timer.  This is one of the more interesting, if not misunderstood capabilities of the ShoreTel “overflow” concept!

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Lately the subject of ShoreTel Route Points and IRN’s has been getting a lot of “mind share” from those working with them.   Two questions:  How many Route Points can a ShoreTel server support?  How many IRN’s can an ECC support?  How many DNIS numbers can a ShoreTel support.   Seems like a simple set of questions, but the answers are something like “herding cats”.    Route Points are used in a ShoreTel system to accomplish call routing and TAPI connectivity between the IPBX and the Enterprise Contact Center, for example.   Let us assume, for purpose of illustration, that you have a large call center and you want to track the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns.   You determine to do this by tracking DNIS numbers.  Each DNIS represents a different advertising campaign.  Recently, I came across a client who was creating a route point – IRN pair for each DNIS number.   Nothing particularly wrong with this, but using the DNIS map would have required only one Route Point if the DNIs was pointing to the same Group of Agents (e.g. Service) in the Contact Center.

The Contact Center, currently can only map one DNIS number per IRN.  It is my understanding that ShoreTel may be moving toward 1000-1500 DNIS numbers in future ECC releases.  So if you want to run report about DNIS you might have to look in two databases: (a) the ShoreTel MySQL CDR database on the IPBX; and (b) the C2G database on the ECC.  You will need to use the GUID if you want to tie the two databases together to get the DNIS and Agent Events and Wrap codes.   If you bring the DNIS into the IRN,  to enable DNIS reporting in the ECC, you can see the list of IRN’s could get very long and there is a  limit.

I suspect that DNIS has a limitation as well.  My thinking is that DNIS numbers would live in the various SG switches.  So the ultimate answer to how many DNIS numbers you can have may be memory constraint and  configuration specific (e.g. different for each configuration).    If you have any input on this, I would welcome it!   At the end of the day what we know is that you can create Route Points all day long in ShoreTel (though I have not attempted to find the real limit).  If the Route Points live on the ShoreTel server the real limitation is the 254 simultaneous media streams that a Microsoft Server can support.   If you point 12 PRI’s at one server and you have the potential of having 276 simultaneous phone calls, bad things are going to happen.   You need to spread your media stream over multiple servers.   In the contact center, you generally shape media streams (e.g. IVR ports) to 150 per server.

The “devil is in the details”.

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