In a separate announcement, but in conjunction with its 7.5 release, ShoreTel continued to amp up its product portfolio by announcing a strategic distribution agreement with Syntellect, to sell Syntellect’s Customer Interaction Management contact center solutions. This is a superb fit for ShoreTel, who has been storming the IP telephony scene with its scalable, software-based, systems, and unified communication solutions. Until now, ShoreTel has had three contact center solutions – Workgroup and Contact Center, which are for the SMB market, and Enterprise Contact Center, which effectively goes up to 300 agents, but didn’t scale past that and wasn’t as feature-rich as many larger customers have demanded. Syntellect’s contact center offerings will give ShoreTel an extremely competitive offering in the higher end market, and fill out their portfolio.
Syntellect’s CIM solutions seem to be the perfect fit as both companies offerings are software-based, distributed, multi-node solutions that can be administered from a single point. With this addition, ShoreTel’s customers will be able to scale to thousands of agents, which they were previously unable to do. This will also give customers access to other critical Syntellect applications, such as speech-enabled, self-service solutions (a core competency of Syntellect) and iVault; their completely searchable repository of customer interaction history. Additionally, Syntellect has a pretty compelling feature set, including a personal favorite of mine, which I haven’t seen anywhere else – Task. Task is the ability to route a task, in queue, the way that you would a call, or email, so that an agent can designate some task that needs to be completed, associated with a call, and all the time associated with completing that task gets tracked along with other contact center statistics.
Oops. I almost failed to mention that this is a fully reciprocal agreement.
One last ShoreTel related note, my husband and his employees now have ShoreTel’s Mobile Call Manager on their Blackberry 8800s, but I opted for the Blackberry Pearl, which it is not out on yet. I’m hoping ShoreTel adds the Pearl to their supported list soon as I’m pining to have MCM on mine too.