Towards the end of January 2017, Plantronics, a global leader in business intelligence, announced their new service “Plantronics Manager Pro v3.9”, which will offer historical, operational, and contextual data collection on headset usage patterns and voice interactions with a subscription to the latest analysis suites. Using the Plantronics Manager Pro solutions, channel partners and customers will be able to access powerful services like business intelligence and data analysis that will allow them to easily understand trends, evaluate new options, and ensure compliance in their companies, while making decisions that help their enterprise to run smoothly. Companies will also be able to prevent and predict problems before they can occur in a shorter time than outdated methods would require.
The Plantronics Manager Pro option makes use of cloud-based architecture to help establish the quality of communication and collaboration experiences by managing the health of devices, measuring dynamics in users and protecting users. Non-business headsets with bad experience quality and limited acoustic protection are becoming common in enterprises, which unfortunately means that users experience poor collaborative solutions and often have to deal with excessive noise. However, Plantronics Manager Pro helps to manage, monitor, and maintain all audio endpoints – ensuring great experiences throughout.
A Better Experience for Everyone
The release of the new Plantronics Manager Pro v3.9 clearly represents a move by the vendor to a software-focused platform provider that will help customers to transform their business more effectively, according to Melanie Turek, the vice president and fellow of Frost & Sullivan. By utilising this new cloud solution, line-of-business and IT managers will be able to ensure call quality, and collect and evaluate business data to retrieve actionable insights about compliance, usage, people, and more. The growth represents Plantronics evolution into business analytics, which has huge potential for the future.
After all, every company relies on data analytics if they want to make strategic decisions. However, the types of insights used to improve customer service and collaboration at the point of interaction have been scarce up until this point. Christopher Thompson, Plantronics’ vice president of enterprise product manager suggests that the Plantronics Manager Pro will help to give customers and co-workers a clearer, more productive communication experience.
Customer Experience and Operational Insights
The new Plantronics Manager Pro v3.9 will build on a foundation of previous generations of technology using new technology that moves beyond basic reporting solutions to generate exceptional cost savings and business intelligence. Insights include:
- Asset analytics which expand the options for mangers to track deployment and configuration statistics, as well as firmware updates and reconfigurations.
- Usage analytics which allow for more functional information to assist contact centres and IT managers who need to understand patterns of device usage, including calls made and received, call summary data, duration of calls, and frequency of actions like volume, mute, and disconnect. This can be used in contact centre and Unified Communication settings with Plantronics USB headsets and IP telephony.
- Conversation analysis which improves customer experience and agent conversations by identifying details like the agent to customer speech ratio and the amounts of over-talking and silence. This is supported by USB audio processers and the Plantronics DA series
- Acoustic analysis which allows for a review of logged history acoustic events such as unexpectedly loud sounds during conversations and daily noise exposure averages. This can help contact centres to ensure the safety of their staff.
The Value for Reseller Partners and Customers
As part of a systematic solution, Plantronics Manager Pro can be built on a business infrastructure that follows the models that resellers and distributors are currently using. Plantronics will be continuing to offer their distributers and resellers the chance to use recurring service and software revenues, increase their profits and margins, and gather new customers.
By allowing for integration with existing managed service solutions, the Plantronics Manager Pro will help channel partners to create high-value relationships with their customers while attracting new ones, and resellers will have the ability to manage configuration and push-out settings as well as firmware updates that help customers to eliminate known problems and plan ahead, while responding quickly to service inquiries. The Plantronics Manager Pro service is now available in 143 countries as three-year or annual subscription services from Plantronics resellers.
