Have you been asked to do more with less lately? Economic conditions have created pressure to cut costs. But, it can’t come at the expense of added value. For many, moving from an on-premises PBX to a UCaaS solution creates immediate cost savings. In addition, it also enhances the employee experience while boosting productivity.
What’s not as obvious is that cloud phone systems are also sitting on a heap of untapped value. The data in your platform can be used to drive operational efficiencies and improve business decisions. But a recent report shows that not all analytic capabilities are the same across UCaaS vendors. Before we dive into that, let’s dig into the importance of analytics in the first place.
Why are analytics so important to a business today?
1. Analytics save IT both time and money
When many of us moved to hybrid work, the number of support tickets soared. IT was no longer troubleshooting a single phone system or a single network. Instead, they were navigating complex cloud networks and user endpoints. Without real-time quality-of-service (QoS) monitoring, IT has limited or no visibility into where issues might arise or how to fix them. With RingCentral’s extensive suite of QoS reporting, IT can have a clear understanding of everyone’s experience and fix issues proactively. This helps reduce the mean time to resolution for support tickets so employees can get back to being productive faster.
RingCentral includes extensive QoS monitoring and alerting.
“With the QoS reports, we have analytics to drill down into each city to see how we can maximize our network to support heavy volume of calls.”
2. Data-driven decisions change the game for any department
Business leaders from sales, marketing, customer service, and others can use their phone and meeting data to make better decisions.
For example, an inbound sales team could measure call volume to make critical staffing decisions. Marketers could use special numbers to track the success of their campaigns. Customer service managers can monitor live call queues and reallocate resources on the fly to keep customers happy.
At RingCentral, we believe better business decisions are possible with quality, built-in analytics that are comprehensive and easy to use.
“RingCentral’s reporting gives us more visibility into our call-queue teams than we’ve ever had. We use data points such as percentage of calls answered, and average hold time, both to improve agent performance and to support requests for more resources.”
3. Analytics help you see problems before they start
Tracking trends over time can give you a better idea of your resource needs at any given point in the year so you can plan strategically for the next busy time.
These numbers can also save the day on customer service issues. If you start to notice higher call volumes and longer wait times, you can adjust resources and alleviate the log jam as soon as possible. That way, customers are happier and less likely to take their frustrations to public review sites. And in a world where customer experience reigns supreme, who doesn’t need an extra leg up on providing more proactive service?
“We found additional benefits in RingCentral’s analytics: we can always see how we’re performing, and that helps us discover issues and opportunities we probably would have missed.”
New report: Not all UCaaS analytics are created equal
While the UCaaS market has a lot of options for businesses of all sizes, many of these platforms fall short in the very important area of analytics. Some providers don’t retain enough history. Some require complex integrations with third party tools. Some don’t have enough flexibility to get meaningful insights. Oftentimes sufficient criteria isn’t used to evaluate the analytic capabilities of vendors until it’s too late.
Because we know how important analytics are to running a better business, we asked the Tolly Group—an independent agency known for providing unbiased benchmarking services—to compare RingCentral’s analytics to several other UCaaS providers. The results were music to our ears: Tolly found that RingCentral was the clear analytics leader in almost all the categories they considered. Their criteria covered several key areas including monitoring, optimization, analysis, alerting, and APIs.
Here’s an overview of the report:
The Tolly report provides extensive detail across all vendors as well the solutions tested, competitor interactions, testing goals and methodologies.
4 key takeaways from the report
Here’s what Tolly found in their analysis of RingCentral’s UCaaS analytics features:
1. RingCentral is the only solution designed for both IT and business users
This is more important than it seems. Gone are the days of managing-by-intuition. A broader community of people need data and insights to run their business. Democratizing our analytics that go beyond IT turbocharges the value you get from your UCaaS solution.
2. Our QoS analytics suite is extensive, automatic, and included
Why charge more to make sure the platform is running as promised? Giving as much information as possible to IT ensures the highest return on investment. We also include adoption and usage analytics that not only show who is using the system, but who is not.
3. We make our interface simple and powerful.
Jumping between different interfaces or applications to get a simple answer is maddening.
Our single interface for summary statistics, intuitive drill-to-detailed, and real-time insights doesn’t require extensive training or skills. We keep it all in one place and make it easy to use.
4. We provide superior flexibility
Just because our analytics are easy to use doesn’t mean they’re rigid. Our customers love to build custom KPIs, dashboards, and insightful views of their data delivered right to their inbox, browser, or mobile device.
Get the facts on better UCaaS analytics
We’re pleased as punch to have this report validate what our customers have been telling us for years: That we have the best analytics on the market!
Stay tuned for a webinar coming soon where you can hear Tolly Group founder, Kevin Tolly, discuss his findings.
Get a copy of the detailed report here!
Visit us at www.ringcentral.com/analytics
Originally published Sep 15, 2022, updated Nov 03, 2023