Blue Nile Diamonds and ShoreTel find the way to customers’ hearts this Valentine’s Day

Leading diamond and fine jewelry reseller is leveraging a ShoreTel Contact Center solution across two continents so jewelry experts can better play cupid

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 14, 2011 – ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated unified communications (UC), today announced that Blue Nile, the largest online retailer of certified diamonds and fine jewelry is spreading the love this Valentine’s Day with a ShoreTel Contact Center solution. The ShoreTel Contact Center solution helps Blue Nile consistently deliver high customer satisfaction to romantics around the world, while driving higher sales.

Blue Nile, which has been awarded the Bizrate.com Circle of Excellence Platinum Award for the best in online customer service every year since 2002, recently upgraded to ShoreTel Contact Center 6 to take advantage of the advanced skill-based routing and analytics that offer a superior customer experience.

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

  • Blue Nile selected ShoreTel after an extensive evaluation, which included reviewing proposals from Cisco, Siemens and Nortel. The company selected ShoreTel because its feature-rich solution offered the lowest total cost of ownership.
  • The ShoreTel brilliantly simple distributed architecture enables Blue Nile’s IT staff to easily manage the entire system across three physical locations: two in Seattle, and one in Dublin, Ireland.
  • Blue Nile more than doubles the number of representatives that work in their call center during holidays to manage the increase in traffic. The easy to use functionality of the ShoreTel system allows them to easily bring the new representatives fully onboard with minimal training.
  • ShoreTel Contact Center helps Blue Nile representatives achieve their service level goal of answering 80 percent of calls within ten seconds. This business metric is critical for a company that prides itself in ensuring a live agent answers every call as quickly as possible- little wonder that customers keep coming back to Blue Nile once they have purchased jewelry from them.

CUSTOMER QUOTE

“Blue Nile puts the greatest care and craftsmanship into every piece of jewelry, and every customer interaction must reflect our commitment to excellence. A Valentine gift should be about love and have special meaning to the couple, not just the buyer. We want to be sure that our agents have the finest quality tools available to help customers make this very important purchase, and ShoreTel Contact Center fully supports our goal of ensuring every call is answered by the most skilled representative.”
– John Baird, Director, Corporate Communications, Blue Nile

SHORETEL QUOTE

“ShoreTel is thrilled that retail organizations like Blue Nile are relying on our contact center solutions to handle a growing number of sales, and improve customer satisfaction on these very special occasions. The rich functionality in ShoreTel Contact Center lets Blue Nile route its calls quickly and effectively, so customers reach the right agent and receive the best possible service. Forbes Magazine has chosen Blue Nile as its favorite online jeweler every year since 2000, and ShoreTel continues to rank highest in customer satisfaction for seven years in a row – that’s a long-term commitment that’s worth its weight in gold.”
– Venky Raman, Senior Product Manager, ShoreTel

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About ShoreTel, Inc.

ShoreTel, Inc. (NASDAQ: SHOR) is the provider of brilliantly simple Unified Communication (UC) solutions based on its award-winning IP business phone system. We offer organizations of all sizes integrated, voice, video, data, and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use. Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in Austin, Texas, United Kingdom, Sydney, Australia and Munich, Germany. For more information, visit www.shoretel.com.