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Huge list of enhancements...
This is the list I sent to Shoretel...
1. Have the Shoretel Director show the current build and version at the top of the page somewhere after you are logged in. Typical scenario when I call in is that I already have the director open and then have to exit and go back to the log on page in order to supply tech support my version and build info.
2. Have a link inside Shoretel Director that launches a remote session. This would just streamline the process and would mean less time that your reps need to spend on the phone waiting for a remote session to be established
3. Have preferences inside the Shoretel Director. Example would be, on the individual users section, I always want to display all users. I do not like it that it always defaults to 25 users at a time
4. Have a spot somewhere in the trunk groups to store trunk provider information. This would be very beneficial to have the information right there when you are troubleshooting. This would include :
a. Company Name
b. Contact
c. Phone number
d. Circuit ID
5. Integrate with Active Directory. You may have to extend the schema a bit, but most of the information you store in Shoretel, has a home also in Active Directory. With Exchange so tightly integrated with AD, I can see many ways it could benefit Shoretel down the line.
6. Develop a tool that enables us to simulate call flow and different scenarios. The tool would basically collect all the information from your Shoretel system and create a demo environment on a server with “virtual” servers and switches simulating your production environment. It would be a huge help for us and I believe would reduce call volume in your TAC. It would be great for testing disaster recovery plans, testing new call flows and running “What if?” scenarios. Some scenarios that it would be useful for include:
a. Call flow based on what hour of the day it is. The tool would let you plug in a fictional time of day. You could then select if a call comes in on this line, at this fictional time of day and is destined for this workgroup, show me how the call travels and where it ends up.
b. What would happen if a call comes in destined for a workgroup and all agents are logged out? What greetings will the caller hear? Will the call eventually be transferred to someone outside of the workgroup?
c. What happens if a call comes in destined for a remote location and a WAN link is down? Did PSTN failover work properly?
d. We have 4 PRI’s. 2 come into our main branch and 2 come into a remote location. They are setup as 46 channels each. We are setup with our phone provider so that if both PRI’s are down at one location, the call is transferred to the other PRI at our remote location. What happens when calls come into that remote location? Are they directed to the correct auto attendant?
e. What happens if the HQ server is down?
f. What happens if a DVM is down?
7. Develop a way for the IP phones to display some type of name on your DHCP server when they grab an IP address.. It could either be the MAC address of the phone or just “Shoretel IP Phone”. Currently, if we look at our DHCP server for leased addresses, Shoretel phones show up with no description.
8. Develop a report or the ability to see how many calls a user on the system receives. You can run a report on how many calls a user receives or makes, but it does not include calls that went to voicemail. We have several users that receive a large number of calls. Most of them end up going to voicemail. When we run a report on user activity, we are not seeing how many calls were sent to that extension. We are seeing how many calls were answered or made by that user. There is no way to capture how many calls went to voicemail. This functionality is there at the workgroup level, but not for an individual user. In this scenario, IT was asked to show management how many calls and voicemails were going to user. We were unable to do that. Seems simple, but functionality is not there.
9. We run in a Citrix environment. By default, the Personal Call Manager history is saved to %system root%\documents and settings\user\application data\shoretel client...... At any day, a user could be on a different Citrix server than they were the day before. This means that their history from the previous day will be on a different server. It would be nice to be able to specify on the PCM that history is to be stored at a specific location.. \\networkserver\directory
10. The new mobile call manager is great. It should be expanded to run on Windows based devices. Not only select Blackberry devices.
11. Give the ability to trace a call. There is no way for an administrator to see what happened to a call. I would like to be able to see that a call came in, got Auto Attendant A, the caller hit 3, went to this Q, sat there this long, pressed 0 and went to the operator and was then transferred to a supervisor and got the supervisors voicemail.
12. Ability to install server and DVM’s on a virtual machine.
13. Build new, or partner with a better ECC provider. Easy Run’s product is light years behind ShoreTel’s as far as manageability goes. Examples of issues we have include:
a. Poor reporting. I will not go into detail here. I am sure you are aware of the shortcoming. Let me know if you need me to elaborate.
b. The ability to tag a call as a certain type. We would like to have the ability for a call center rep to plug in a code after a call based on what type of call it was. This would be similar to a wrap code. This would allow us to generate a report that shows, typically, this type of call takes 5 minutes and this type of call take 2 minutes etc.
c. If a call gets transferred to a Queue in the ECC and then back to the base Shoretel system, we have no way to trace that call as it flows through the system.
d. Since we are a small call center (7 agents), the ECC is overkill for us. It is difficult to configure and we never feel confident making changes to it.
e. The call scripting tool is difficult to use and not user friendly at all.
14. Improve the “dashboard” available for supervisors to monitor workgroup activity. We purchased the ECC because we wanted to do some IVR functions and wanted call overflow and interflow for our Customer Service Queue. We would be perfectly happy moving our call flow back to a workgroup instead of using the ECC for call queuing. Before we can do that, we need improvements made in the monitoring or a workgroup status. We would like to have the ability to see the TSF of the workgroup. We are a small contact center (7 agents). We typically only have 4 reps on the phone at a time. This is because of breaks and offline processing that they do. When our TSF drops, we typically take reps off processing and put them back on the phone. The current workgroup monitor does not display TSF because there is no TSF setting for workgroups like there is in the ECC.
15. Develop a user forum on the Shoretel website. This could be a place where end users could exchange ideas and help each other resolve issues. This has worked well for VMware, Citrix and most other companies.
16. Host regional user group meetings. This could be a quarterly meeting where Shoretel Administrators and local Shoretel reps get together. Details of new releases could be presented. Third party vendors that have solutions that work with Shoretel could also do presentations – Callrex etc..
17. Ability to sign up for build update notifications. It seem like Shoretel is releasing build updates almost monthly. It would be nice to get a brief e-mail explaining the highlights of the release.
18. Slow down the release updates. Go to a quarterly release schedule. It would give Shoretel more time to perform thorough testing on your releases.
19. Don’t charge us for additional workgroup call reports. These are simple Crystal Reports. It seems ridiculous to say “If you really want detailed information from your phone system that you invested over $100,000 into, buy these reports that took us 10 minutes to make”
20. On call history on phone, show internal callers by name not extension #.
21. Make a user friendly way to adjust the volume on a per user basis beyond what is available with the volume control on the phone. The only way I know how to is to edit some file that gets downloaded to the phone. This should be a feature that is available to end users through the PCM. If not, it should be an easy adjustment that can be made on a per phone basis through the Shoreware Director. We have several end users that have hearing difficulty where this has come into play.
22. Make trunk line weighing an easier option to configure. Currently you need to go in to the Shoreware Director with some special key combination and then use -5 or -10. It is cryptic and should be easier to configure.
23. Make a printable system directory. People still like paper list hanging from their cube for some reason.
24. When creating a new user, if you copy a user, it would be nice if the e-mail address would not copy over.
25. Provide a data dictionary of how the database fields link so customers can easily create their own custom reports.
1. Have the Shoretel Director show the current build and version at the top of the page somewhere after you are logged in. Typical scenario when I call in is that I already have the director open and then have to exit and go back to the log on page in order to supply tech support my version and build info.
2. Have a link inside Shoretel Director that launches a remote session. This would just streamline the process and would mean less time that your reps need to spend on the phone waiting for a remote session to be established
3. Have preferences inside the Shoretel Director. Example would be, on the individual users section, I always want to display all users. I do not like it that it always defaults to 25 users at a time
4. Have a spot somewhere in the trunk groups to store trunk provider information. This would be very beneficial to have the information right there when you are troubleshooting. This would include :
a. Company Name
b. Contact
c. Phone number
d. Circuit ID
5. Integrate with Active Directory. You may have to extend the schema a bit, but most of the information you store in Shoretel, has a home also in Active Directory. With Exchange so tightly integrated with AD, I can see many ways it could benefit Shoretel down the line.
6. Develop a tool that enables us to simulate call flow and different scenarios. The tool would basically collect all the information from your Shoretel system and create a demo environment on a server with “virtual” servers and switches simulating your production environment. It would be a huge help for us and I believe would reduce call volume in your TAC. It would be great for testing disaster recovery plans, testing new call flows and running “What if?” scenarios. Some scenarios that it would be useful for include:
a. Call flow based on what hour of the day it is. The tool would let you plug in a fictional time of day. You could then select if a call comes in on this line, at this fictional time of day and is destined for this workgroup, show me how the call travels and where it ends up.
b. What would happen if a call comes in destined for a workgroup and all agents are logged out? What greetings will the caller hear? Will the call eventually be transferred to someone outside of the workgroup?
c. What happens if a call comes in destined for a remote location and a WAN link is down? Did PSTN failover work properly?
d. We have 4 PRI’s. 2 come into our main branch and 2 come into a remote location. They are setup as 46 channels each. We are setup with our phone provider so that if both PRI’s are down at one location, the call is transferred to the other PRI at our remote location. What happens when calls come into that remote location? Are they directed to the correct auto attendant?
e. What happens if the HQ server is down?
f. What happens if a DVM is down?
7. Develop a way for the IP phones to display some type of name on your DHCP server when they grab an IP address.. It could either be the MAC address of the phone or just “Shoretel IP Phone”. Currently, if we look at our DHCP server for leased addresses, Shoretel phones show up with no description.
8. Develop a report or the ability to see how many calls a user on the system receives. You can run a report on how many calls a user receives or makes, but it does not include calls that went to voicemail. We have several users that receive a large number of calls. Most of them end up going to voicemail. When we run a report on user activity, we are not seeing how many calls were sent to that extension. We are seeing how many calls were answered or made by that user. There is no way to capture how many calls went to voicemail. This functionality is there at the workgroup level, but not for an individual user. In this scenario, IT was asked to show management how many calls and voicemails were going to user. We were unable to do that. Seems simple, but functionality is not there.
9. We run in a Citrix environment. By default, the Personal Call Manager history is saved to %system root%\documents and settings\user\application data\shoretel client...... At any day, a user could be on a different Citrix server than they were the day before. This means that their history from the previous day will be on a different server. It would be nice to be able to specify on the PCM that history is to be stored at a specific location.. \\networkserver\directory
10. The new mobile call manager is great. It should be expanded to run on Windows based devices. Not only select Blackberry devices.
11. Give the ability to trace a call. There is no way for an administrator to see what happened to a call. I would like to be able to see that a call came in, got Auto Attendant A, the caller hit 3, went to this Q, sat there this long, pressed 0 and went to the operator and was then transferred to a supervisor and got the supervisors voicemail.
12. Ability to install server and DVM’s on a virtual machine.
13. Build new, or partner with a better ECC provider. Easy Run’s product is light years behind ShoreTel’s as far as manageability goes. Examples of issues we have include:
a. Poor reporting. I will not go into detail here. I am sure you are aware of the shortcoming. Let me know if you need me to elaborate.
b. The ability to tag a call as a certain type. We would like to have the ability for a call center rep to plug in a code after a call based on what type of call it was. This would be similar to a wrap code. This would allow us to generate a report that shows, typically, this type of call takes 5 minutes and this type of call take 2 minutes etc.
c. If a call gets transferred to a Queue in the ECC and then back to the base Shoretel system, we have no way to trace that call as it flows through the system.
d. Since we are a small call center (7 agents), the ECC is overkill for us. It is difficult to configure and we never feel confident making changes to it.
e. The call scripting tool is difficult to use and not user friendly at all.
14. Improve the “dashboard” available for supervisors to monitor workgroup activity. We purchased the ECC because we wanted to do some IVR functions and wanted call overflow and interflow for our Customer Service Queue. We would be perfectly happy moving our call flow back to a workgroup instead of using the ECC for call queuing. Before we can do that, we need improvements made in the monitoring or a workgroup status. We would like to have the ability to see the TSF of the workgroup. We are a small contact center (7 agents). We typically only have 4 reps on the phone at a time. This is because of breaks and offline processing that they do. When our TSF drops, we typically take reps off processing and put them back on the phone. The current workgroup monitor does not display TSF because there is no TSF setting for workgroups like there is in the ECC.
15. Develop a user forum on the Shoretel website. This could be a place where end users could exchange ideas and help each other resolve issues. This has worked well for VMware, Citrix and most other companies.
16. Host regional user group meetings. This could be a quarterly meeting where Shoretel Administrators and local Shoretel reps get together. Details of new releases could be presented. Third party vendors that have solutions that work with Shoretel could also do presentations – Callrex etc..
17. Ability to sign up for build update notifications. It seem like Shoretel is releasing build updates almost monthly. It would be nice to get a brief e-mail explaining the highlights of the release.
18. Slow down the release updates. Go to a quarterly release schedule. It would give Shoretel more time to perform thorough testing on your releases.
19. Don’t charge us for additional workgroup call reports. These are simple Crystal Reports. It seems ridiculous to say “If you really want detailed information from your phone system that you invested over $100,000 into, buy these reports that took us 10 minutes to make”
20. On call history on phone, show internal callers by name not extension #.
21. Make a user friendly way to adjust the volume on a per user basis beyond what is available with the volume control on the phone. The only way I know how to is to edit some file that gets downloaded to the phone. This should be a feature that is available to end users through the PCM. If not, it should be an easy adjustment that can be made on a per phone basis through the Shoreware Director. We have several end users that have hearing difficulty where this has come into play.
22. Make trunk line weighing an easier option to configure. Currently you need to go in to the Shoreware Director with some special key combination and then use -5 or -10. It is cryptic and should be easier to configure.
23. Make a printable system directory. People still like paper list hanging from their cube for some reason.
24. When creating a new user, if you copy a user, it would be nice if the e-mail address would not copy over.
25. Provide a data dictionary of how the database fields link so customers can easily create their own custom reports.
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