Plantronics Launch Analytics Services

Plantronics have now officially announced Plantronics Manager Pro v3.9, which provides operational, historical, and contextual data on voice interactions and headset usage patterns with the subscription to new analysis suites.

With Plantronics Manager Pro, customers and channel partners can use powerful services like data analysis and business intelligence to easily understand trends, evaluate options, ensure compliance, and make better decisions. This will help their enterprise run more smoothly.

The technology will also allow them to predict and prevent problems before they occur in a fraction of the time it would take with outdated methods and will help to ensure high-quality customer interaction.

It does so by utilising a cloud-based architecture to ensure the quality of communications and collaboration experiences by assuring device health, measuring usage dynamics, and safeguarding users.

These headsets counteract the non-business-grade headsets with poor quality of experience and limited acoustic protection that are creeping into the enterprise. By using low-grade headsets, users are suffering from poor collaborative experiences and may in fact be exposed to excessive noise, and at times, dangerous noise levels.

Plantronics Manager Pro helps monitor, manage, and maintain audio endpoints. When users know they will have great experiences and are protected, they are more able to focus on the job at hand.

“The release of Plantronics Manager Pro v3.9 clearly demonstrates the vendor’s move from a hardware manufacturer to a software-focused platform provider that is aiming to help its customers transform their entire business,” said Melanie Turek, Fellow and Vice President, Frost & Sullivan.

“Leveraging this new cloud-based solution, IT and line-of-business managers can manage devices and ensure call quality. But more importantly, they can also quickly collect and analyse broader business data to derive actionable insights about people, usage, anomalies, compliance, trends and more.

“It’s exciting to see Plantronics move into business analytics, which has enormous potential for enabling true digital transformation.”

Christopher Thompson, vice president of enterprise product marketing at Plantronics, adds that, “Every company depends on data analytics to make strategic decisions. But until recently, the types of insights that improve collaboration and customer service at the point of interaction have been scarce.

“With Plantronics Manager Pro, we’re taking the next steps to assure customers and co-workers hear the smile in the voice on the other end of the call as they communicate and collaborate with each other. We’re transforming the headset from a simple endpoint peripheral into an intelligent system-level data aggregator.”

What operational and customer experience insights does the Plantronics Manager Pro provide?

Plantronics Manager Pro v3.9 builds on the foundation of previous generations with new capabilities that go beyond simple reporting to generate business intelligence and cost savings. Available insights include:

• Asset Analysis: Expands the ability of managers to track device deployment and configurations, reconfigurations, and firmware updates, and to find non-standard firmware, software, softphone, and communications client deployments.
• NEW – Usage Analysis: Provides a wealth of functional information to help contact centre and IT managers understand device usage patterns, including call summary data, calls made and received, duration of calls, device adoption, and the frequency of common actions such as mute, volume and quick disconnect. For use in unified communications and contact centre settings with IP telephony and Plantronics USB headsets.
• NEW – Conversation Analysis: Improves the quality of agent conversations and customer experience by identifying details such as the ratio of agent vs. customer speech, and the amounts of silence and over-talking. Supported with Plantronics DA Series USB audio processors.
• NEW – Acoustic Analysis: Review a logged history of acoustic events, such as unexpected loud sounds, during agent-customer conversations as well as daily noise exposure averages. This data can be used to help organisations, particularly contact centres, ensure the occupational safety of their workforce. Supported with Plantronics DA Series USB audio processors, this feature reports the performance of protections built into Plantronics headsets.

So, what is the value for reseller partners and their customers?

As part of a system-level solution, Plantronics Manager Pro is built on a business infrastructure that follows the models that our resellers and distributors use today. Plantronics continues to offer our valued resellers the opportunity to draw recurring software and services revenues, increase margins, increase profits, and entice new customers.

By integrating with existing managed service offerings, Plantronics Manager Pro helps channel partners create higher-value relationships with existing customers and attract new ones. Resellers gain the ability to remotely manage configuration and push out settings and firmware updates to help customers plan ahead, eliminate known configuration problems, and quickly respond to service inquiries.

For more information, visit www.plantronics.com