ShoreTel has announced that Portman Travel, one of the UK's largest independent business travel companies, has deployed a ShoreTel UC system along with a ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center in order to create a single, integrated communications infrastructure.
The ShoreTel solution allows Portman Travel to deploy cost avoidance strategies, increase productivity through significant time savings, support sustainable growth within the company and enable more dynamic, interactive customer service.
Portman Travel was looking to replace its legacy telephony system with a centralised, flexible, scalable and cost-efficient solution that met the needs of its growing business.
The company implemented the ShoreTel UC system and ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center with the help of ShoreTel’s partner, Solar Communications. The system’s distributed architecture and resilience helps improve customer service by directing customer calls to a consultant who can meet their requirements, even if the particular office that the customer called is unavailable at that moment. The time savings arising from standardisation is expected to save the company more than £30,000 a year.
“The ShoreTel system enables us to maintain excellent service levels as well as provide total reliability for customer communication,” said James Baldwin, senior vice president of technology at Portman Travel. “ShoreTel went above and beyond our criteria with simplicity, flexibility and the ability to integrate with third party applications. The new solution has allowed us to share best practice much more than we did previously because of the easy-to-use document sharing application.”
“As budgets continue to tighten, it is more important than ever for enterprises to focus on cost avoidance to control travel spend,” said Adrian Parkes, chief commercial officer at Portman Travel. “ShoreTel’s advanced video conferencing service is just one of the tools Portman will be using to help its customers reduce expenditure by eliminating unnecessary travel. We are working closely with ShoreTel to implement further innovative cost avoidance strategies across the board.”
ShoreTel Converged Conferencing empowers supervisors and consultants to better serve customers by enhancing communication across the organisation with multimedia collaboration and document sharing features. In addition, agents in the contact centre are easily moved or added and the flexible system can be scaled to meet the demands of new regional centres.
“Delivering first-class customer service helps organisations such as Portman Travel boost their competitive advantage. The ShoreTel UC solution has improved the robustness of Portman Travel’s telephony system and enhanced internal knowledge sharing practices to deliver excellent customer service,” said Tom Perry, marketing director EMEA at ShoreTel. “We are looking forward to expanding our collaboration with Portman Travel in the future to include presence.”