Disruptive innovation and simplicity earn great customer satisfaction scores
BY BENNIE LANGENHOVEN, MANAGING EXECUTIVE, TELLUMAT COMMUNICATION SOLUTIONS
The consumer world is enthralled with Apple, and corporates are scrambling to accommodate its technologies in their enterprise communications and access fabric. The reasons are clear – beauty and simplicity of design, leading-edge hardware and software innovation, as well as ease of use and setup – all leading to great customer satisfaction scores.
In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of other strong brands that share these design and engineering principles. This new generation of vendors is leaving legacy manufacturers and developers behind with their focus on drastically reduced complexity and disruptive innovation, and their solutions often greatly reduce costs and the risk of failure.
Simplicity and innovation
In unified communications, that company is ShoreTel. Simplicity of design, operation and support weave together in a common thread to create “brilliantly simple” business communication solutions.
Products
The vendor started its portfolio design from a clean slate, without legacy complexity, basing products purely on the Internet Protocol. This makes it easy to deploy, use, manage, and scale ShoreTel implementations.
Built using open standards, it further integrates easily with existing infrastructure, and will work seamlessly with existing business applications.
ShoreTel’s unique single-image distributed architecture, using embedded switch-based routing, moreover saves on capital costs, network upgrades, implementation, training, MACs (moves, adds and changes), system management, long-distance charges and energy consumption.
Deployment
While other providers have complex product classifications and permutations, ShoreTel offers one core solution that adapts to any environment – whether extending it to include call centre capabilities or using it to whip up a streamlined live demo solution in under one hour.
Scaling up is similarly streamlined: For 50 users, ShoreTel requires one switch and one server. For 250 users, the system requires only one more switch – all other equipment is retained. At 1500 users including UC, the customer still keeps the original equipment, needing only more switches. Other vendors require at least two forklift upgrades along the way and an entirely new call control platform with additional servers for UC.
Management
Regardless of the size of the deployment, a ShoreTel system uses a single interface for all UC apps – including phones, voicemail, presence, call centre, emergency services and conferences. ShoreTel Director provisions all applications for a user at once.
ShoreTel Director is further browser-based and can be accessed from virtually anywhere, and its interface takes half the effort of other vendor systems to master.
Use
In addition, end-user ease-of-use is such that ShoreTel IT managers often report getting no help desk calls. ShoreTel Communicator offers a common interface across user types, allowing users to manage their communication and media simply and in one place.
Customer satisfaction scores
Another touch point between Shoretel and Apple is the great rating both get in Net Promoters** customer satisfaction surveys as a result of the abovementioned design principles. The Net Promoters analysis divides customers in percentage brackets of Promoters, Passives and Detractors, benchmarking leaders in customer satisfaction.
While Apple’s score is 67, ShoreTel’s is 57, meaning a significant majority tend to promote both companies – no mean feat in today’s connected, opinionated world. By comparison, Cisco stands on 50, NetApp on 25 and Alcatel-Lucent on 23.
Low cost, low risk
A new wave of innovators are using new architectures on which to base a new beginning of evolved simplicity. Companies like ShoreTel are at the forefront of this wave of change, combining it with industry standards to offer customers low-risk implementations with low total cost of ownership.
* Tellumat is the South African distributor of ShoreTel systems.
** A company’s NPS score is calculated by the percentage of customers promoting it minus the percentage of customers detracting it. Data is gleaned in a wide range of industry benchmarks, including, most recently, the social media conversations customers have about their vendors.
About Tellumat
Tellumat Communication Solutions, the converged communications specialist in the Tellumat Group, is the local distributor of ShoreTel’s brilliantly simple Unified Communications solutions, based on its award-winning IP business phone system. ShoreTel offers organisations of all sizes integrated, voice, video, data, and mobile communication on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use. Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication.
About ShoreTel
ShoreTel is the provider of brilliantly simple Unified Communication (UC) solutions based on its award-winning IP business phone system. We offer organizations of all sizes integrated, voice, video, data, and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use. Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices and partners worldwide. For more information, visit shoretel.com.
Editorial Details
Tellumat Communications
Bennie Langenhoven
Email: blangenhoven@tellumat.com
