ShoreTel: ShoreTel Releases ShoreWare Contact Center 5 for Highly Available Sophisticated Call Center Capabilities That Make th

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - February 19, 2009) - ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: [ SHOR ]), a leading provider of Pure IP Unified Communications (UC) solutions, has released ShoreWare® Contact Center 5, the latest version of its contact center application suite designed to help organizations dramatically improve customer service and sales workflows. This new release expands the range of contact center features for organizations of all sizes -- from small retail outlets to large enterprises with high-performance and highly available inbound or outbound multimedia and multisite requirements.

ShoreWare Contact Center 5 introduces key innovative functionality that makes this application one of the easiest to use and administer in the industry, and ideal for organizations looking to deploy a highly available, scalable, sophisticated contact center solution.

New features include increased capacity; hot-standby redundancy for disaster recovery; and new supervisory functions for managing agents and tracking customer service issues. The built-in outbound dialer in the ShoreWare Enterprise Contact Center application boosts the system's capabilities, making it an effective tool for improving productivity.

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

-- ShoreWare Contact Center 5 increases agent productivity and responsiveness, enabling superior customer service, technical support and sales program management. Self-service capabilities enable customers to perform tasks such as reviewing billing options and checking balances, while retaining the option to reach a live agent.

-- The ShoreWare Contact Center 5 is an all-in-one solution with integrated Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and comprehensive reporting capabilities make contact center deployment and management easy.

-- The application suite leverages ShoreTel's [ proven ][ distributed telephony platform ], allowing agents to be located anywhere, including home offices -- with ShoreWare Contact Center 5, the highly productive, cost-effective virtual contact center is now a reality.

-- By using [ ShoreWare Call Manager ] in conjunction with ShoreWare Contact Center 5, agents and supervisors gain a unified desktop application for all communications, including inbound and outbound calling, telephony presence, instant messaging, and video.

FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS

-- NEW -- Support for up to 600 simultaneous agents and 2,000 total configured agents helps ensure businesses can scale to meet future needs. -- NEW -- Hot-standby redundancy helps ensure rapid disaster recovery and provides protection from wide area network (WAN) failures. -- NEW -- Supervisors can easily manage agents in a Web chat session with the ability to monitor, whisper, barge, and coach the session. This improves customer experience with rapid response to escalations, and provides training assistance. Supervisors also can send targeted, group- related, real-time information and messages using the enhanced Agentboard application. -- An intuitive, graphical script builder enables businesses to easily modify applications to meet changing business conditions, which helps ensure that the best agent responds to the caller's unique requirements. -- An integrated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system enhances the customer experience, and provides more self-service features for callers. -- Predefined standard reports help drive down costs by providing the information supervisors and managers need for effective planning, without requiring them to build customized reports in external reporting packages. The open interface for detailed interaction information also supports advanced analytics, providing the business intelligence necessary to address customer complaints, or for agent training. -- Remote agents use the sophisticated Office Anywhere features of the ShoreTel UC system to ensure call quality and retain access to the system's enhanced productivity features. Organizations have greater flexibility to access labor pools in remote locations, and operate follow-the-sun call routing at a low cost.

For a detailed description and full list of features for ShoreWare Contact Center 5, click [ here ]

QUOTES

Kevin Gavin, vice president of marketing, ShoreTel: "Tough economic times demand careful investment in technologies that reduce operating costs, help retain customers, and make people more productive. ShoreWare Contact Center 5 provides comprehensive contact center and unified communications capabilities that dramatically increase productivity and enhance customer service. And when it comes to reducing costs, our bundled capabilities, simplified management and ease of use lower the total cost of ownership and protect the investment for the long term. The ShoreWare Call Manager application also boosts agent productivity by integrating all UC applications in a single unified client."

Jake Larsen, Contact Center Manager, MonaVie: "MonaVie's contact center has grown quickly to about 150 concurrent agents that now use ShoreWare Contact Center as the gateway to our distributors, and we are excited about the new functionality in this latest release. Since our agents are the lifeline to our vast network of independent distributors, it's essential that our contact center can scale to keep up with growth, and is up and running all the time. ShoreTel continues to deliver the features we need, such as rapid scalability and hot-standby redundancy, so our contact center agents can be responsive to these important people."

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ShoreTel: ShoreTel Releases ShoreWare Contact Center 5 for Highly Available Sophisticated Call Center Capabilities That Make th