Unified Office Adds Analytics Suite To Communications Offering

Unified Office, a Portsmouth, N.H.-based MSP, has rolled out an analytics add-on to its own hybrid cloud-based Voice-over-IP and unified communications offerings.

The Visual Performance Suite analytics offering is part of Unified Office's flagship Total Connect Now offering, adding realtime visuals, performance indicators and intelligence for SMB voice communications. Total Connect Now is a solution for managed communications services, with voice communications, monitoring and business-continuity tools.

Adding analytics is the "next step" for Unified Office, CEO Ray Pasquale said. For clients, Pasquale said communication analytics is key to helping them generate more revenue and profits.

[Related: Unified Office Nabs New Funding To Scale Channel Business]

One client, in particular, a large quick serve restaurant company with more than 5,000 stores, has seen huge success from the new analytics offering, Pasquale said. The restaurant company has been test-driving the new analytics offering for the past eight months, he said.

The busy restaurant had only six phones to handle incoming orders, but Pasquale said the company had no sense of how many calls were missed when all the lines were busy. Essentially, the restaurant was "flying blind" when it came to how business was functioning, Pasquale said.

Pasquale said Unified Office installed its communications systems at the stores, using the analytics tools to track incoming calls, average time to answer, average abandoned calls and more across around 100 stores. Managers could use the business intelligence from the analytics to track performance and make quicker decisions.

Over the past eight months, the restaurant has seen double-digit increases in revenue and has found operational expense it is able to cut back on.

"They have visibility into things they never had, to make quicker decisions they didn't know they had to make," Pasquale said. "All that kind of business intelligence wrapped around the analytics and multimodel solution set, they're not going to get it from anyone else."

While the need for analytics in the quick serve restaurant industry is clear, Pasquale said there is a need for analytics solutions in almost every industry. Pasquale said analytics is an "essential part of your tool bag" for any business owner. "Anywhere where communication is really important [could benefit from analytics]," Pasquale said. "They don't even know how important it is because they don't know what they're missing."

Pasquale said he doesn't anticipate that need will dwindle anytime soon, especially as mobile, unified communications and Voice-over-IP technologies continue to grow.

"Unified Office, in a general sense, was built to help these businesses of all types cope with today's real-time world ... We all text, we all instant message, but at the end of the day people have to pick up the phone and talk to other people. That will probably never go away," Pasquale said.

As the MSP continues to evolve its Total Connect Now offering, Pasquale said he expects the next offering to integrate Internet communications to be announced this spring.

"We're not done by a long stretch," Pasquale said.

PUBLISHED FEB. 3, 2015