Miami, Florida – Unified Office is a breath of fresh air in the me-too world of cloud VoIP.  One of its verticals is the quick service restaurant market, providing inbound phone service for pizza franchises and other establishments where takeout and delivery are a large or the sole part of the business. The Visual Performance Suite analytics suite, announced here at ITEXPO this morning, provides a new world of information for business owners in the industry.

“You look at restaurants, they look like mini-call centers with three to four people,” said Ray Pasquale, founder and CEO of Unified Office. “Owners have never had visibility before [on their phone service]. Seventy percent of their orders are by phone.”

The average quick serve restaurant has six inbound PSTN phone lines and practically no flexibility or insight on call volume, busy signals, dropped calls, time on hold, call abandonment rates and other data. Moving from PSTN-based calling to a cloud voice service means inbound calls will never ring busy and the ability to accept inbound calls dramatically increases.

“They can go from four to six calls [inbound] to 635 calls at once. They could never service that many calls before,” Pasquale.

Visual Performance Suite (VPS) provides a real-time dashboard of data on inbound calls that can be displayed on a large screen monitor for easy access.  Data includes the number of calls in queue, how long calls have been on hold, average time on hold, and call abandonment rate. Visual and audio alerts can be set to notify employees if people are sitting on hold for too long.

Being on hold, while inconvenient for the customer, provides opportunities for upsell. The restaurant can remind callers about the week’s specials and suggest the needs for appetizers, drinks, and dessert, all delivering increased revenue per order.

VPS is a boon to franchise owners who own dozens to hundreds of stores, providing an “owner’s portal” to look at a group of stores. Owners can monitor activity for all of the stores in a global snapshot, then drill down to a region, subset, and down to the individual store     

“The results have been astounding in terms of revenue capture and profitability… It’s basically HP Open View for restaurants,” Pasquale said. “Owners can drill down and drill down to see what is happening and why.”

Cloud voice services also provide unique business continuity for franchise owners.

“One pizza store had a literal backhoe incident – no phones, no power, no pizza,” said Pasquale. “The franchise owner was able to redirect calls to a store two blocks away.  Business instantly doubled for that store without realizing what went on.  The owner was able to keep the revenue in the family.”