Nextiva Phone Systems

AggieMike88

AggieMike88

Touchdown! Greaser!
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The original "I don't know it all" of aviation.
Anyone have any experience with the Nextiva Phone system?

My knowledge gathering on a badly needed improvement over my NEC box on the wall continues. Nextiva had a glowing recommendation from one of my buddies in the auto parts recycling business.
 
[..bump..]

( is anyone using this? )
 
Mike I have a friend using this in his law office and loves it. We want to switch to VIOP and he recommended. Nextiva. I called them and set up a demo for my partner which they blew off. They then sent an email asking what we thought. Kinda aggravated me. Anyway I then asked for a recommendation from the IT director at my County Bar Assn. He suggested going with my carrier's VOIP program which is Verizon. He runs the Bar Association's entire program which is pretty big and is pretty happy. He also said that if you go with your carrier if there is a problem the carrier can't point to a company like Nextiva and visa versa.
 
We evaluated a bunch of systems and I've never even heard of that thing.

After doing a lot of haggling, Avaya wanted the business so bad, we went that way. Huge discount off of normal pricing on an IP Office. We couldn't even beat it with a commercially supported Asterisk system.

Thing hasn't skipped a beat since it was installed in October of last year.
 
Small update... went with Nextiva after some local digging found customers of theirs around me happy with the company.

After selecting service level and features, I more than doubled my features and was able to save about $150/mo from my existing bill.

Install and onboarding happening this next week. Will post another update and review once we 100% running and I have had a few days with it.
 
We went from Northern Telecom (which I understood well), to ShoreTel (a inexpensive IP phone) to CISCO at our job. Everybody knows the CISCO. The Nortel phones are a little long in the tooth but good values if you can get them cheap.
 
I need to find a buyer for the NorTel system that was removed from service a few years ago.

I need to ask Dad if he has photos of the original operations shack and single phone he started the yard with in 1982. Then, the inventory system was a 7inch thick Hollander book and a rack of these tags like a library card catalog.


Essentially a manual version of today's database and query systems.
http://www.commercialforms.com/medi...6e5fb8d27136e95/a/s/as5310_2012_cropped_1.jpg
 
Update:

Porting the numbers from Charter/Spectrum went faster than anyone expected. And both me and my assigned Nextiva onboarding manager didn't see the notice from the porting department that the numbers had moved on Tuesday and my call center system was now live. Explains why phone traffic was dead and when I checked, we had a big bucket of voice mails.

So today was first day that we were live and had someone in the call queues and able to receive them.

208 total phone calls per the reporting software (a new to me feature... I likee much much!), and it was reportedly a light weight day. The supervisor dashboard I have where I can see times and queue activity only had a few blips of undesired states, but that's mostly because there was only one agent where two would have been better.

Training the new agents on our yard software, sales concepts and techniques as applied to our industry, and other bits has been happening since last Monday. Today was phone and phone system training, and that went really well. The Nextiva trainer we had in the afternoon even found some useful features on both the systems and the phones that had not been enabled and quickly "flipped the switches" to turn those on. Now the agents are able to do a few necessary functions muuuuch easier, and a few through soft key buttons on the phones.

I continue to be pleased with my experience converting over, and am looking forward to some improved productivity with this system.

If anyone is considering VoIP, and is looking at Nextiva, get with me for a direct referral, as we both will get a good deal if you go in on that vector.
 
@denverpilot

I found it's possible to link the system to an external database and make a query on that database. This is to see if the caller ID# on the inbound call matches a known number to us and then put up the information from our database on phone's screen (and screen pop once we get there).

Nextiva says once they know the what/where/how of our side, they can help connect their side.

What is needed to make the caller ID convert from a personally 10-digit cell phone number always used by my auto repair shop customer and show the name of the business he is associated with? We have the directory already with that info and can put out as a CSV or Excel file.
 
AggieMike88 said:
@denverpilot

I found it's possible to link the system to an external database and make a query on that database. This is to see if the caller ID# on the inbound call matches a known number to us and then put up the information from our database on phone's screen (and screen pop once we get there).

Nextiva says once they know the what/where/how of our side, they can help connect their side.

What is needed to make the caller ID convert from a personally 10-digit cell phone number always used by my auto repair shop customer and show the name of the business he is associated with? We have the directory already with that info and can put out as a CSV or Excel file.
Click to expand...

Yup. Integration to existing data sources is where it's at on these newer systems.

I'm surprised the business that uses the call flows the most in our companies hasn't asked yet for a menu option to have the caller enter their case number if they have it, so it'll screen pop our system to the page the agents need.

Assuming they let me stick around into next year, that's probably worth bringing up as a development project. It'd pay for itself pretty quickly in time saved / not needing additional agents.

We got our annual renewal on all the support on the system today and it was only marginally higher than the old system that did nothing at all other than ring phones, and total dollars wise it wasn't even a blip on their total revenue or profits. Gotta love the prices on these things.
 
Mike - The telephony integration I see the most is where the phone tells the PC what number is calling and the ERP uses that to pop the contact data on the PC.

Are you also using the "known numbers" for some prioritization in the call routing?
 
rolivi said:
Are you also using the "known numbers" for some prioritization in the call routing?
Click to expand...

One side note. I'd caution against this. People call from multiple numbers these days when there's a phone in every pocket. Their experience won't be consistent.

If you want a particular awesome customer to jump the line, just order another DID and give them a special number to call. Use the dialed number to route to their special sauce customer service.

Makes them feel great when you tell them why they get a new number and it works from any phone they can grab anywhere. DIDs are cheap cheap cheap. Heck, give 'em their own 800 number if you want to pick up the tab on their calls to you because they make you so much freaking money compared to the others. There's always a few customers like that.

If and when they become deadbeats someday down the road, just re-route their DID into the standard queue. :)
 
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