We have been Shoretel customers for several years on their Sky platform. The first 6 months of service was shaky, but Shoretel improved and everything was great.
Starting sometime last year (early 2016), we noticed that it was taking a much longer time to reach a support agent; hold times going from less than two minutes to well over 30 minutes. We didn't think much of this, as the service worked great and we rarely had to call. When we did mention our frustrations at long hold times, we were assured that the problem was only temporary while they trained all of the new employees they hired.
In January we were sold on changing the Sky service to Shoretel's Connect platform, as we were told the CRM integration was more robust and there were hundreds of additional reports we could run for metrics. We made the change in April, and it has been non-stop problems since then. For the first 7 weeks on the "Connect" platform, there were backend database synchronization issues going on that kept locking users out of the queue, portal, and their phones. Finally after discovering the problem, we were told that it would be another month before the fix was implemented.
Even after the fix, the problems did not go away. Daily we have users that are unable to log in, users that get kicked out of phone queues, phones that get logged out/disconnected, mobility applications that don't work, softphones that fail to see USB headsets.
Shoretel's support, during all this, sadly did not improve; but got worse. Every call I have made, has resulted in a minimum of 30 minutes on hold before getting a rep on the phone. During a recent issue, we called in and were told we were 132nd in line; after 30 minutes we were 123rd in line.
Overall we wish we had not migrated from Sky to Connect, especially since there is no reverse migration available. Had we know how bad Connect was, and how unimportant we would be treated, we would have never switched. I suppose it is possible to not have a bad experience with Shoretel, as there as several good reviews out there. My question to anyone that asks is, do you really want to take the chance?
