February Webinar Recap – Gold Advantage Support Plan and 2018 changes

SHoreTel Webinars

February Webinar Recap – Gold Advantage Support Plan and 2018 changes

Gold Advantage Support Plan and 2018 changes

By Mike Dolloff, Vice President of Sales & Marketing and Chris

Recio, Director of Contact Center & Advanced Applications

You know we love sharing knowledge bombs with you guys and we’re back with another webinar that does just that. I got together with the other Chris at Inflow, Chris Mitchell, and together we discussed the exciting changes to our support plans that are happening in 2018.

You guys know we go above and beyond when it comes to support and we’re delighted to announce a new support plan called Gold Advantage(link: https://inflowcx.com/support-programs/). On top of this, we’re also introducing new features to your existing support plan. Chris and I covered our new support plan and our 2018 upgrades in detail in the webinar, but we’re going to recap all of the key points in the blog post in case you missed it.

Let’s get started: Introducing Gold Advantage

From January 1 2018, we added a third customer support option that has been in the works for several months. We call it Gold Advantage.


Gold Advantage fits in between our two current support systems Gold and Platinum. Everything that’s in Gold is available to somebody in Gold Advantage. Everything in Gold Advantage is available to somebody that’s on Platinum support.

On Gold Advantage you get everything in the Gold Support, in addition to several key features such as:

  • Use of VXSuite outside of a ShoreTel System
  • Advanced call recording
  • Custom prompts for music on hold
  • Disaster recovery
  • Contact Center Success Management

Let’s break each of them down below…

VXSuite outside of ShoreTel System

The VXSuite is a tool we’ve vetted and evaluated for several months. It not only allows us to secure remote access to be able to support customers more quickly, but also to provide our monitoring capabilities so that we can generate tickets on different system events. This means we can be ahead of the game as different system events happen.

As a Gold customer, we will monitor your ShoreTel system. But when you’re a Gold Advantage customer, you have the ability to use The VXSuite outside of the ShoreTel system. This allows us to do some additional network monitoring, device monitoring, and achieve additional alerting capability for customers.

The platform that’s used is called VXPulse. In the case above, I’ve set it up to monitor my whole ShoreTel Connect environment in my data center. The green bar underneath the router means that the router’s up and connected. If it were red, it would show that it’s lost connectivity to that device.

As you can see the system is also monitoring the session border controller for SIP trunking, the virtual switches and VMware, the mobility router, the headquarters, ShoreTel server on the very bottom, the production ECC, and there’s even a supervisor PC.

In total, Gold advantage customers can:

  • Report on routers and network switches
  • Set up automatic alerts for your most important servers whether they are ShoreTel or not
  • Track CPU usage, memory usage, hard drive capabilities, status, services etc.
  • Have automatic emails sent to IT contacts

Advanced Call Recording

Gold Advantage customers get a fully featured advanced call recording solution that you can use for scheduled call recording.

There’s a heck of a lot that you can do from the dashboard, including:

  • Searching for calls based on a number of criteria (date, number, name etc.)
  • Add notes to a call (these are also searchable)
  • See who was on a certain call
  • Replay calls with skip functionality
  • Export a call as a WAV file

We’re also working on future add-on options that will be available further down the line. These include scoring functionality and speech analytics.

Custom Prompts for Music on Hold

The Gold plan already offers auto‑attendant menus or messaging within a queue. But we’ve upgraded Gold Advantage and Platinum customers to now get custom music on hold. That same service we offer, that’s now extended into the messaging part of your phone system, your music on hold.

Disaster Recovery

Gold Advantage customers (and Platinum users) will now be provided with a disaster recovery solution in the cloud in the form of cloud auto attendant capability.

Let’s be frank, there’s a major problem when you’re reliant on incoming calls if your building loses power. But with cloud auto attendant capabilities, you can have the carrier either automatically set up a forward or manually set up a forward of your main number to a DID that Inflow provides to you.


This means that instead of customers hearing a deadline, they can hear a prerecorded message from your company instead with instructions on what to do.

CCSM

Lastly, we’ve added in something that’s been a stand‑alone product and will continue to be for a lot of customers unless they upgrade—Contact Center Success Management.

With Gold Advantage or Platinum, you now have access to an on‑site, two‑day assessment every year.  During this time, we will be digging deep into your operation, the technology, interviewing people, sitting on the floor, observing and gathering as much information and understanding of what your business is trying to do and how they are using the contact center. We evaluate all that and then write a really detailed report of our recommendations,

We get outside of the just talking about future functions and into the operations and the business drivers. We have the capability with our resources internally to do that, and this extends that to a lot more customers, which we’re really excited to do. So many good things come out of those conversations and so many fantastic opportunities.

What’s new to the Inflow Gold Support Plan

As we said at the start of this post, the new Gold Advantage plan isn’t the only change we have made. We’ve also upgraded the Inflow Gold Support Plan.

One Dashboard: Inflow Analytics, powered by Brightmetrics

Inflow Analytics has been a great tool to provide further insight for making future decisions and for planning reasons. But we wanted to make the core metrics accessible in one spot, in one report, in one dashboard, so you can just take that from day one and start using it. To achieve this, we’ve worked with Brightmetrics to include three real-time dashboards for all of our support customers, at no additional cost.


If you have an enterprise contact center solution, real-time dashboards can really come in handy to give your agency and your supervisors an idea of what’s going on in real time with the queues that they’re members of. This could be displayed in a Web browser on their computer, up on a TV or a projector in their call center. The best thing is that dashboards are not licensed on a per user basis. We build one dashboard and you can let 50 different people all open this dashboard up on their computer or put it up on the TVs.

From the dashboard you can see:

  • The number of queued calls
  • How many agents are logged in and where they are logged in to
  • The status of agents
  • Total calls answered
  • Total calls today
  • Abandonment rates

We think this will help provide much better visibility within your call center. Agents will have more accountability and will be able to make better decisions about the smallest things—such as the right time to go for a break

Even if you don’t have Enterprise Contact Center, you can still utilize real-time dashboards if you have workgroups. You can get the same data displayed for your workgroup.

If you haven’t already started utilizing the real-time dashboards, feel free to reach out to our support team and they’ll make sure that they get you enabled and push out a couple of our sample dashboards and you can customize and build the additional dashboards to whatever works best for your company.

VXSuite for ShoreTel System

Gold customers will also have access to VXSuite, but it will be limited to monitoring your ShoreTel system. This means we will only be able to monitor your ShoreTel switches and your ShoreTel servers. We would not monitor your router here, or any third party servers or anything that are being used.

Platinum users get it all

Don’t forget, guys, that Platinum support customers get all of the new features discussed in this article and more.

Call us to schedule an individual demo of our support plans and we will help you find one that fits your needs or call your account manager if you are looking into upgrading your plan.

We Have a Slew of Other Insightful Webinars

We frequently host complimentary webinars that show in real-time how to configure ShoreTel systems and go through various best-practice scenarios.

 

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