How Unified Office Meets the Communication Needs of Restaurants
Restaurants and dining establishments have unique communication needs. Aside from having to deal with a high volume of customers calls regarding orders, inquires, and even complaints, they also have to ensure efficient communications among staff members at the same time. Traditional telephone systems usually cannot handle such demands, leaving customers frustrated and seeking service from competitors. Fortunately, leading providers today now offer communication solutions specifically designed to help solve the communication challenges of restaurants. One such provider is Unified Office.
In this article, Ray Pasquale, CEO of Unified Office, shares why cloud communications have become a necessity for many businesses in the restaurant industry and further highlights how Unified Office is fulfilling the communication needs of restaurants today.
Helping Restaurants Meet Changing Customer Needs
Restaurants and dining establishments need to deliver an exceptional customer experience in order to retain customers and patrons. A slow and inefficient customer experience (whether it’s taking orders or answering customer inquiries) can instantly put off customers, especially in an environment where people demand everything to be done quickly and efficiently. This is what Pasquale calls the “push-button” culture.
According to Pasquale, the mid-2000s gave rise to the push-button culture predominantly due to the wave of millennials entering the workforce. And by push-button culture, Pasquale means that people have developed into impatient beings, and are conditioned not to have to wait for things. “Everyone is looking to buy goods and services in real-time, on-demand, and there is a steady shift to mobility and smart devices in addition to the desire to do business virtually,” Pasquale said.
Therefore, it is important for businesses to cope with the rapid pace of technological and behavioral changes in the marketplace in order to stay ahead. And one tool that can help businesses stay competitive and successful is a robust communications system. “Voice communications remains a strategic component of a business' operations, and must be reliable and highly adaptable to the rapidly changing marketplace and workforce habits, thus...the need for VoIP-based services has intensified,” Pasquale added.
How Unified Office Delivers Value for Restaurants
Phone service providers often offer solutions that cater towards office-based businesses and on-the-go workers looking for mobility. However, Unified Office knows that although restaurants and dining establishments operate differently from office-based companies, their need for efficient and advanced communication solutions is the same. Thus, on top of offering SMB services, Unified Office offers a range of solutions to help restaurants stay competitive.
Unified Office’s virtual communications service Total Connect Now and patented Visual Performance Suite™ (VPS) are managed communications services that provide business-class VoIP communications and business analytics to Quick Service and Full Service Restaurant owners. These solutions help owners and managers gain better insight into their business operations, track key service performance metrics, and deliver actionable intelligence in real time.
Here’s how Unified Office’s managed VoIP and business analytics solutions provide value to restaurants:
- Capture order calls during peak hours - Unlike legacy fixed-line telephone services, Total Connect Now helps establishments capture revenue (especially during peak hours) by enabling incoming order calls to enter the store and be queued with an on-premise auto-attendant. According to Pasquale, Domino's is one of Unified Office’s biggest clients, and they choose the company’s managed VoIP and analytics solution because it helps them manage high call volumes, reduce wait times, deliver quality customer service, and even monitor their food safety.
- See store team effectiveness in real-time - Unified Office not only helps stores manage calls, it also helps increase the effectiveness of teams through the VPS “wallboard” displays. The wallboard shows “in store” real-time call status as well as service performance KPI’s (“speedometers”). “In the case of Domino's, everyone can see orders, take in as many as they want, can let customers engage with an IVR and/or chatbots to engage user while on phone, etc. Unified Office is exposing communications visually to show all the things that are happening,” says Pasquale.
- Executives get real-time control - Multi-store franchise executives and key operations staff can view all store KPIs via a centralized web-based portal. This capability allows them to compare store by store performance, and establish measures to optimize store and service performance.
- Managed service - Unified Office handles everything for users, from dealing with on-site equipment, broadband, and network services. This helps establishments stay focused on their business, not on IT.
- Enjoy business continuity - Businesses enjoy non-stop business continuity with Total Connect Now’s geographic cloud redundancy and highest quality routing. It ensures all calls are captured by providing automatic failover from primary broadband to wireless 4G/LTE broadband backup, which is considered a far superior technique than single call re-routing to an alternate destination.
Unified Office also recently announced a new addition to its award-winning product line, the Total Connect Now Operations Performance Suite (TCNOPS).
Designed for both quick service and full-service restaurant establishments, TCNOPS helps franchise owners and store managers improve operational performance using Unified Office’s new Internet of Things (IoT) operational performance suite. The new solution integrates alerting and reporting functions for business critical information into Unified Office’s patented Visual Performance Suite (VPS), advanced analytics platform.
In a release, the company said, “TCNOPS is a natural evolutionary step to the Unified Office award winning TCN business communications platform. TCNOPS extends beyond simple real-time basic monitoring to proactive and predictive analysis, which can eliminate component failure before it becomes a problem.”
On top of their restaurant-oriented voice solutions, Unified Office offers managed VoIP and business analytics solutions catered towards helping businesses who want the most out of a communications solution. "We want VoIP to go to work on your behalf and generate both revenue and profits. We are all about adding value to communications." shared Pasquale. To learn more about Unified Office and their managed VoIP and Unified Communications services for SMBs, visit their website.
About Unified Office
Unified Office is a trusted provider of SDN-based Hybrid Cloud managed VoIP and Unified Communications services to SMBs. Total Connect Now, the company’s feature-rich, device-agnostic business communications service, leverages the latest in VoIP communications technology and cloud-based infrastructure to improve SMB workforce productivity and restaurant operations. Unified Office’s solutions are available primarily through their channel partners.
