Amazon Connect vs. MiCloud Connect / ShoreTel (discontinued) vs. Talkdesk

Our company is a startup that is just starting to get wholesale customers. When we realized our customers needed support using our products, we set up a Contact Center via Amazon Connect. It has been very useful in allowing us to scale up very quickly, and provide services to our company as if we were a large corporation.

Incentivized

Mitel is excellent at allowing me as a user to setup up custom call routing in response to rapidly changing work flows. If I need to work from home for a period due to medical or other reasons, logging into Mitel and setting my office phone to ring through to my home or cell is quick and simple. Changing back is just as quick.

Incentivized

As a growing company, we did not have customer service contacts set up like a traditional contact center, even though we were trying to operate like one. Talkdesk made the transition simple to orchestrate the new setup, allowing customers to have their contacts answered quickly. As Talkdesk has continued to roll out new products such as Copilot and AI Autopilot, we are implementing and continuing to realize the benefits.

• It helps us connect with ServiceNow as a direct integration.
• It allows us to document everything from the chat with ticket documentation in real time.
• It allows us to track agent and case activities.

Incentivized

• The system up-time has been 100% over 3 years.
• With separate systems and two locations we used to have to fake the system into 4 digit dialing by forwarding all remote extensions to DIDs. Now with Shortel extended to the remote location we have true 4 digit dialing.
• The Shortel desktop application makes managing calls and call routing a breeze for even our most novice users.

Incentivized

• Talkdesk excels at reporting. It offers a wide range of reports, such as Aux, AHT, and productivity reports, which are great for monitoring performance.
• Talkdesk has speech-to-text analytics. This is an AI transcript system. The AI detects speech and transcribes it.
• Talkdesk is easy to integrate with other apps. Such as Calabrio and Zendesk.

Incentivized

• On reports and analytics, [I feel] Amazon Connect is slightly behind, and it should be perfected.
• [In my experience], Amazon Connect lacks social platform integration, which is convenient and resourceful currently.
• [I believe] Amazon Connect should include a queue management feature, for the call centers and customer help.

Incentivized

• There are persistent problems with the app's functionality on mobile devices.
• At times, the web conferencing service may have delays. It appears to be less stable than competing approaches.
• Using a headset instead of the microphone and speakers integrated into a desktop computer slows down the softphone's performance.

Incentivized

• From experience, customer service is terrible, we've had 5 account executives over 18 months, extremely difficult to get timely answers to pressing issues.
• Integration with other tools, such as ServiceNow, is not truly integration (in my opinion). There was a marked difference between what the salesperson communicated during the evaluation period and what we actually got once we purchased and implemented the product.
• We continue to have stability issues which force our agents to restart the Talkdesk client. I frequently receive vague error messages ('something went wrong') that can be frustrating as there's no actual detail to what happened. To be fair, it has improved since we implemented the tool, but if you were to ask our agents what frustrated them, Talkdesk would be at the top of their list.
• Being a multi-channel platform was one of the things that drew us to Talkdesk; however, the chat channel lags way behind voice in customization and reporting.
• Lack of training resources. The 'Talkdesk Academy' is often very out-of-date. Would be nice to have actual webinars or online training (even paid training) for various functions of the tool like reporting, WFM, IVR, etc.

Incentivized

Although the price is higher than some of the other Hosted systems out there, the value is definitely worth a renewal. Everything is relative: there are some companies out there who need phones, but don't necessarily care how they work, the functionality/features available/durability etc., they just care that they have phones that make and receive calls. There are other companies that are completely reliant on phones and certain functionality that is provided by the system. There are even some companies who are straight up dependent on the phone system and are losing tons of money anytime they are down, ShoreTel is the perfect fit for theSMB client who sees value in a solid,robust, reliable and high functioning phone system

Incentivized

One of the best tools our there to tackle alot of our needs or issues within the organisation's and is value for money as you find alot of the features already in bedded and the Ai features are user friendly no need for additional training and Talk desk support when any issues arise is amazing

Incentivized

It is reliable system. It has own IVR, Database(DynamoDB) Backend(Lambda) support of multi channel(email, chat & voice) Integration with some of the biggest CRM system

Incentivized

I have not used a wide array of communication software, but this far ShoreTel/MiCloud has been the simplest and easiest to get into. My work employs several temps at certain points throughout the year, and they use this piece of software frequently, and new hires seem to have little to no issue using this software. Additionally, this is our primary telephone communication infrastructure, and I have yet to encounter any issues when signed in and regularly using it handling external calls to our department.

Incentivized

As a user, the Talkdesk system is pretty easy. However, as a leader or an admin, the system can be difficult to navigate. Talkdesk appeared to integrate different solutions into their environment. While the overall skin of the environment is pretty seamless, it's easy to see that some solutions are segregated off into their own area of the Talkdesk ecosystem. This is pretty evident with Identity, WFM, and System Analytics, where you have to navigate to their respective areas to pull reports and gather data. Where many other reports are available in Explore

The system has gone down on us MULTIPLE times. We asked them to move us to a different cluster. Shoretel declined. Basically we had problems or outages every month of the year from June 2012 to date. Our old phone system was just that: OLD, no bells or whistles. But it was up every day and I never had to think about it much until it was time for an upgrade. That's how I want Shoretel to be. I want it so reliable that I never have to think about it.

Talkdesk is very handy but, sometimes we do face issues were the system can just kick you out and not be able to do calls or receive calls but, what I like about the system once you start refreshing or troubleshooting, everything becomes normal it is a unique system and very modern we don't usually have system issues with Talkdesk.

Even though the system uses a lower bandwidth connection we have experienced a higher call quality than our previous system which required a T1 line and back up broadband connection.

reports are good until a report is a big one in size then the wait is longer and some call reports delay by an hour or so which is not ideal as we pull these hourly and need them from Work force management perspective and Quality reports are perfectly fine

Incentivized

ShoreTel Sky's support is amazing. The only reason why I didn't give it a 10 is that we still need to contact them for stuff that we should be able to do, for ourselves, within the management portal. I know their portal is being worked on, so hopefully they will get the "little things" included for self-management.

If Talkdesk had a dedicated phone support line I would have given this rating an overall 10. Their knowledge base is absolutely HUGE and at times very helpful. It's easy to search through and their customer support chat system works perfectly fine, but there are just some times that you need to speak to a human on the phone to ensure you are always on the same page.

I attended the first ShoreTel installer class in Austin,TX. It was a week of intensive study with a live lab and having hands on experience made the class worthwhile. I have taken all of the sales courses and remaining technical courses either online or self study to keep costs down. I send my techs to the first installer course in Austin as I feel it gives them a solid foundation and most of teh other courses they have taken have been online.

Incentivized

The training that was given to us was very smooth and professional. I give my trainer 10/ 10 rate the training was so smooth and very helpful she would make sure we also watch videos of how to use the system which made it very easier for us and what was interesting it is because, the system is also easy.

The training identified some things M5 (ShoreTel's cloud division) could provide, however it was only using it every day and asking the Shoretel support several questions that I got the hang of it. The training was able to highlight functions but I did not learn how to use the phone from the training.

Nothing is perfect!! Needing the ability to repeat the training so everyone was on board was important. Not real sure how many people had to repeat the training as they trained on their own and given 30 minutes at a time.

Incentivized

Each of our locations has a dedicated ShoreTel router and managed QoS. With full management, it provides us a breath of space and bandwidth to use our resources in other means. Strongly consider the managed solution as you have to maintain more technical issues when hosting with your ISP. You have to make sure your ISP can provide you the best service for voice and data. Plug and 'hope' doesn't work with just routing your phones over any Internet connection....especially when your handsets run int he 100's

We were very satisfied with the implementation of Talkdesk. The team was able to gather all the data and information about the system we had in place at the moment and delivered us a Talkdesk plan that suited our needs. We had a few calls after implementation where our questions were answered and gave us the confidence to continue using the system.

Incentivized

Amazon Connect has lots of free training available for partners and in general. So many demos are available to practice. It's free to test and gain more confidence before deploying in real world scenarios. You can use other AWS features to be integrated with Amazon cloud. Features like lense is amazing

Incentivized

Aptela. I chose M5 (ShoreTelSky) because their platform puts call quality first. Their system also uses Cisco endpoints, which are very compatible with the rest of my Cisco network. I also liked the fact that ShoreTelSky uses the internet only as a backup for transport; I use MPLS as my primary connectivity.

Call recordings, quality assessments, feedback, coaching, and monitoring, the call flow is effortless and painless, changing statuses from after-call work is updated to be qued so you cannot change after aftercall work is finished, shows you the company metrics, SLA, abandonment, number of calls taken and record occupancy for you and the team. Many more features make Talkdesk an innovative software compared to its competitors.

Incentivized

I believe that ShoreTel can be used by a minimum company size of about 25 to almost any size of a company and this can be achieved while the company grows, hence makes it pretty scalable when required. For companies which are smaller in size i.e. smaller than 25, I am not sure how useful it would be, it may be depending upon the type of business

Incentivized

talk desk has helped us massively with flexibility of one system giving us all the relevant information we need to be able to drive improvement and also good service from work force management to quality improvement to the reporting of the work and inputs going in and assess outputs to determine the success of our work and remaining development areas

Incentivized

• Amazon Collect has allowed us to scale quickly and retain flexibility.
• Amazon Collect has allowed us to provide omnichannel support as if we were a larger corporation.
• Amazon Collect has allowed us to retain productivity.

Incentivized

• At my branch alone, we are saving over $500 a month using Shoretel Sky versus the phone company we were using before them.
• Shoretel Sky has increased customer service by allowing our employees to easily transfer a call to the proper department or branch no matter where they are located instead of giving the caller a phone number to call.
• Most of our locations did not have caller ID before Shoretel Sky. That feature has increased employee efficiency because when they know who is calling before they answer allows them to professionally greet their caller and have their info up on their computer as they answer.

• Reduced hold times with callback feature = better CX
• Easy transfer option between teams where we can talk rep-rep first before bringing the caller in = less repeated information the customer has to provide = better CX
• Modified call dispositions allows for better call management & organization = less work on our end!

Incentivized