ShoreTel (News - Alert), a vendor of Pure IP
Unified Communications (News - Alert) products, has announced that plastics supplier A. Schulman has replaced the phone systems in ten North American facilities with a ShoreTel distributed unified communications product.
Unified Communications (News - Alert) products, has announced that plastics supplier A. Schulman has replaced the phone systems in ten North American facilities with a ShoreTel distributed unified communications product. The ShoreTel product allows Schulman to use its wide area network for voice communications, resulting in reduced long distance costs, enhanced communications and, company officials say, "improved employee productivity and collaboration."
for voice communications, resulting in reduced long distance costs, enhanced communications and, company officials say, "improved employee productivity and collaboration."A. Schulman sells plastic compounds, color concentrates, and additives for plastics in a number of specialized applications. The phone system at the company's headquarters had reached its end of life, company official say, and the systems at nine other North American facilities were also outdated.
In its search for a product, the company wanted call routing, call reporting, a common telephony and a voicemail platform for all facilities, and 4-digit dialing. John Broerman, director of information technology at A. Schulman, called the ShoreTel implementation "one of the smoothest I have ever been involved with," and said they were able to come up with "an easy, cookie-cutter approach for each additional facility."
, call reporting, a common telephony and a voicemail platform for all facilities, and 4-digit dialing. John Broerman, director of information technology at A. Schulman, called the ShoreTel implementation "one of the smoothest I have ever been involved with," and said they were able to come up with "an easy, cookie-cutter approach for each additional facility."Schulman has deployed 600 ShorePhone IP telephones and 24 ShoreGear voice switches at ten sites, eight in the U.S. and two in Canada. At each office, all that was required was to determine the number of phones and switches and then deploy the system.
Broerman also plans to integrate ShoreTel with the company's CRM application to make customer data available on incoming and outgoing calls.
In January ShoreTel announced its Microsoft (News - Alert) Dynamics CRM Integration application. The ShoreTellians say it integrates ShoreTel's call management and control capabilities with access to customer data.
The application is intended to help provide increased effectiveness, shorter response times, and improved account management, company officials say.
Basically the product integrates the phone communications and customer tracking. It links an incoming call to either an existing customer record or one of several new record creation screens. Users can dial out directly from the Microsoft Dynamic CRM application using the embedded ShoreWare Web Dialer app, or they can dial out using a call manager and have an associated CRM record open.
Users can customize search settings to enable lookup of both standard and custom CRM entities and attributes, and each user can control how the integration software responds to calls and lookup results. The application doesn't require any modifications to any Microsoft components and users don't need to coordinate product updates.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
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