ShoreTel Ensures Tourism Organizations Keep Pace During Peak Travel Season

SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 26, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple unified communications platforms including business phone systems, applications and mobile UC solutions, continues to provide communications solutions that help travel and hospitality organizations keep pace with customer demands during the busy summer travel season, now in full swing.

ShoreTel's roster of customers that serve the tourism industry includes companies of all types, such as resorts, travel agents and visitors' bureaus. For these customer-service based organizations, having a reliable ShoreTel UC platform is especially critical during the summer months, historically one of the busiest seasons of the year for the tourism industry. This summer will be no exception – according to a recent survey from the American Automobile Association, two-thirds of American adults plan to take a leisure trip this summer, with one in three planning to take three or more jaunts.

ShoreTel offers a brilliantly simple UC system that provides exceptional reliability, ease-of-use and management at a low total cost of ownership, which is critical for hospitality organizations that strive to offer a superior experience to summer travelers at a competitive cost. At the heart of the ShoreTel UC platform is ShoreTel Communicator, a call manager interface that allows real-time management of various communications channels, including voice, IM, video and conferencing, ultimately enabling hospitality organizations to offer a better and more responsive experience to travelers.

Besides ShoreTel Communicator, call routing and hunt group are other key features that travel industry companies rely on every day to deliver excellent customer service. ShoreTel's scalability also gives hospitality organizations the flexibility to make changes to their system without incurring significant costs.

"Phone deployment in a hospitality setting is very different than a corporate environment. We have to account for check-in and check-out, wake up calls, and all the requirements that go along with that," said Brian Binge, director of information technology at Breckenridge Grand Vacations."ShoreTel allowed us to create transparency between the technology and guest phone usage – it is fantastic!"

"Top-notch customer service is especially critical to the travel and hospitality industry, where word-of-mouth and online reviews can 'make or break' a travel agency or hotel property, so it's fitting that we have many customers in this sector relying on ShoreTel," said Don Joos, senior vice president of business operations at ShoreTel. "Our portfolio of unified communications offerings ensures that customers in any industry can exceed service expectations of their end-users."

Here's what some of ShoreTel's leading customers are saying:

• "The ShoreTel system enables us to maintain excellent service levels as well as provide total reliability for customer communication across our 15 offices and 500+ staff members. During a recent travel disruption due to volcanic activity that saw our highest call demand ever we reduced our call waiting times down to just 3 seconds."
  – Michael Hare, CEO, Portman Travel
  
• "I chose ShoreTel because I needed a system that is robust enough to meet the demands of our business and easy enough for me to manage on a daily basis without being forced to speak 'phone.' Now I have a lot fewer headaches when dealing with the administration of the phone system. Most important of all, ShoreTel allows us to have multiple hunt groups and cycles for routing calls during peak periods."
  – Patricia J. Knight, vice president of finance and operations, Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau
  
• "Our ShoreTel system has improved the quality of the sound and everyone especially likes the application that makes it easy to work with remote systems, even from any smartphone. ShoreTel plays a key role in our business and has provided us great benefits in our operation in order to give our customers top notch service." – Hugo Tovar, IT manager, Palladium Hotel in Cancun
  
• "With travel advisors all over the USA, I needed a solution that could transfer calls or have them answered as if they were physically in our office. We coordinate travel for many Major League Baseball teams and they need immediate access to our advisors. When an advisor was in a brown out in another city, we were able to re-route all the calls to other staff members with no inconvenience to the traveler."
  – Mark Moorhead, owner & president, The Travel Agent, Inc.
  
• "When we completed the analysis, we determined that ShoreTel provided us with a future-proof, well-supported system with many advanced features to allow the business to grow and enable employees to work more efficiently. With the ShoreTel system, we have much simpler and more personalized way of managing our rooms and our guests." – Daniel Davis, ICT manager, Lasseters Hotel Casino

Related Links & Conversation

• Subscribe to ShoreTel's blog.
• Follow ShoreTel on Twitter and Facebook.
• Read ShoreTel Customer Success Stories.
• Bookmark this Unified Communications Glossary
• #ShoreTel, #UC.

About ShoreTel
ShoreTel, Inc. (NASDAQ: SHOR) is a provider of business communication solutions whose brilliantly simple unified communications platforms, applications and mobile UC solutions promise a new rhythm of workforce engagement and collaboration. With costly complexity eliminated by design from its award-winning, all-in-one IP phone system, UC and contact center solution, and its industry-leading hosted phone system, workers enjoy a freedom and self-reliance that other providers can't match. Users have full control to engage and collaborate, no matter the time, place or device, for the lowest cost and demand on IT resources in the industry. ShoreTel is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and has regional offices and partners worldwide. For more information, visit shoretel.com or shoretelsky.com.

ShoreTel and the ShoreTel logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of ShoreTel, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

CONTACT:
Katie Maller
[email protected]
408-962-2786

SOURCE ShoreTel