Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Unified CX with Nextiva: How UCaaS, CCaaS & AI Connect Voice, Chat, SMS and Contact Centers
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Welcome to the Tech Matchmaker, the show where contact center challenges meet their perfect tech match. I'm your host, Gina Gibson, and in just 15 minutes, we serve up the smartest, coolest innovation shaking up the contact center industry. Whether you're searching for your next solution or just love staying ahead of the curve, we've got the insights to keep you in the know. Let's dive in and discover what's next. I promise you it's going to be fun. Thanks for hanging out with us on the Tech Matchmaker. I hope today's spotlight sparked some fresh ideas and real solutions for your contact center. Want to dive deeper into the tech we featured? Hit up the show notes for all the links and extras and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if there's a challenge you want us to tackle, don't be shy, reach out. I'll catch you soon with more innovation, more use cases and more ways to keep your business moving forward. So I'm really excited to hear about the new upcoming features. And I think we did get a little bit of a sneak peek last week, Aaron, but into the AI and automation and how big of a role that's playing now in contact centers. What can you share with us about how Nextiva is incorporating that or has incorporated that into your platform that helps increase that agent productivity and customer success? ⁓ Good afternoon, everybody. Today we are chatting with Aaron Meyer, who's the Partner Manager with Nextiva about cloud-based communications. Aaron, welcome to the podcast. Aaron Meyer: Hey, thanks for having me. Good to see you. Gina Gibson: Good to see you too. start with the basics. Tell us all a little bit about yourself. Aaron Meyer: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I've been at Nextiva for about 10 years now. A couple of months will be 10 years almost on the dot there. And it's been a really good road with Nextiva. I've seen this grow quite a bit in last 10 years. A little bit about me personally, I'm a husband, been married for almost 13 years here and a father, we have almost three year old, he'll be three tomorrow actually. I have to keep that in mind there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's what we're finding is that the use cases for that have become wide and varied. So it's up to us to create an environment in which we've woven AI throughout the platform, but it's configurable enough that the client gets to choose exactly where they want to insert that for their agents, for their frontline workers, for pretty much for their customers as they call in. What we're finding now is probably the greatest adoption for AI is on the front end. Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Aaron Meyer: But yeah, that's pretty much me in a nutshell. I was born in California, lived in Hawaii for a little bit, and I've been in Arizona for almost 30 years now. So I definitely call this home. for AI to take a call, a text message, a ⁓ website chat, be willing to interact with people on social media and have that be one of the first interactions that customers have the company. That does a couple of things. One, it makes the experience extremely ⁓ for management across the board. They know they can rely on the AI to deliver a certain experience to everybody. They can tailor that ⁓ even get the AI to do certain things depending on the use case. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Tell us, give us your elevator pitch on next EVE, Aaron. Aaron Meyer: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Nextiva, I think a lot of people in the industry will know that it's been making a lot of waves in the CCAS and CX ⁓ of history has been spent in just plain voiceover IP when I first started, or the space, but more and more, we've been expanding reach, not just on the product side, but also on the infrastructure side. but it also alleviates a lot of work from those frontline workers who were otherwise taking a lot of messages. A lot of that becomes confusing, not just for the customer, but from the frontline worker. Where AI comes into play is that it's not just able to handle a lot of those, but it's also able to track them, able to compile them and reporting and make sure that we're giving that unified experience across multiple channels. A customer might come in from your website, they might start to text you, they might start to call you, they might hang up and call back again. on the personnel side to get in a lot of that more enterprise space. And we've been doing extremely well recently. than just the product though, Nextiva has been able to expand and grow, but we're still very much known ⁓ our customer service. We get rave reviews online all the time and from our partners and from our customers ⁓ how we're able to handle their business. And that boils down a lot to the fact that Nextiva is still privately held. There's just a different feel. We're able to track that the entire way to make sure that their experience is a good one, know, holistically. Now, I think a lot of the use cases have boiled down into making people more productive. And that's where Nextiva has ⁓ on not replacing people. It's a key conversation to have, but making sure that the people that we have are free to do other things, are able to develop, you know, to deliver an experience. And so we're doing further development. We just launched ⁓ Agent Assist. and dealing with Nextiva than a lot of larger companies out there. We're known also for our flexibility because we own our entire product stack. We're able to be extremely flexible with features and functions, and we're able to get people a lot of bang for their buck, reducing their spend while also increasing what they get out of their system, the platforms that they choose from us. about a month ago for our contact center platform. That's something that's also native to Nextiva. It's a product that we can provide and it's something that we're able to deliver again and make those contact center agents a lot more productive and a lot more knowledgeable than they were in the past. Just reducing overall, the overall slip ups that we might have while ⁓ interacting with customers or business partners, reducing training time. There's a lot of different use cases where we can start to weave in AI exactly where our customers want it. But yeah, that's kind of like the 32nd on Nextv, but it's a very exciting space, like I said before, and we got a good future ahead of us as well. Gina Gibson: Absolutely and I know synonymous with Nextiva is a unified customer experience management kind of you know statement and so for listeners who might not be familiar with that term ⁓ could explain what unified customer ⁓ experience management means and why it matters for businesses today? I love that. And Nextiva services customers of any size, I believe, but from a small me like SMB market up to the enterprises. Are there any certain verticals that you see benefit more from like see the biggest impact from your platform or is it across every vertical or what do you see in that space? Aaron Meyer: Yeah, absolutely. And that's been a big topic because I think it means it means a lot more now than it did even three to four or five years ago. People weren't even using acronym, not not really in the way that we use it today. But ⁓ lot of businesses nowadays, even businesses would never expect, ⁓ need lot of that unified customer experience and a lot of. ⁓ Like I said before, we're fitting into a lot more use cases and verticals than we ever have in the past. That's definitely growing, but we still play very, very well in some very specific verticals. Medical is a huge one for us, and that's one that benefits from our customer service probably more than anyone else, because you have a lot of medical personnel that are highly trained, but not in communications. They're going to need someone to hold their hand and make sure that their system is doing exactly what they need it to. a lot of tools that they just never would have in the past. We're seeing a lot of traction with things such as, know, small contact center seats looped into an overall UCAS center or UCAS platform while also weaving in AI here and there. A lot of that it's making making waves or, you know, a lot of people need that even in the SMB to mid market side of things. And next you would be able to meet meet them exactly where they want or they want to do business. So to give you just a couple of examples there. every single time. And so that's one where we've shined quite a bit for quite a few years. And so a lot of our product, or ⁓ I think pretty much all of it by now, is HIPAA compliant. We can sign a BAA and they can know that, their system is entirely compliant. They can lean on us from the support side of things. We also play very heavily into legal, financial, lot of the use cases where there's a lot of compliance needed in those industries there. ⁓ have a lot of SMB to mid-market customers. We're talking small ⁓ in ⁓ restaurant or in the industrial or even in the agricultural space ⁓ absolutely do need continuity in different channels. They need to know when their customers are contacting them via text message or website chat or of course over the phone as well. Because our system, again, we can weave the AI in to make sure that the system is staying compliant, and that we're able to redact certain things, that we're able to make sure that that front-end consistency is consistent. you go. ⁓ Across board. Retail is another huge one for us. And of course, we're actually making a lot of waves in the BPO space as well, where our system again, very highly configurable. And we can make those agents extremely efficient. and they want to be able to track that entire experience from start to finish. And that's what Nextiva is providing in those spaces. And we've been able to do at a killer price for a lot of those folks that are just starting to want to be competitive in that overall unified customer experience from Marketplace. Gina Gibson: And Nextiva combines, I mean, on the platform, and I think you kind of alluded to this, but I know there's voice, there's chat, there's SMS, there's video, email, all in the unified. How, and you alluded to it earlier saying, you we started as a voice provider. was that evolution like? And like, what's next? Like, what's the next cool thing that you guys are adding in? Cause I know AI is definitely a big player in there and yeah, tell us what's, what's coming up. I love that. Do you want to share an example with us of one of your success stories or a couple of success stories and kind of where the customer was and where they ended up, you know, the efficiencies gained from utilizing? Aaron Meyer: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. ⁓ cases, we have a lot of case studies on our website where people have used our service in all sorts of different ways. ⁓ like to focus on the SMB to mid-market side of things because that, while we do fit into the enterprise space extremely ⁓ it like the SMB to mid-market customers get forgotten ⁓ a of the time. Yeah, absolutely. The evolution from where we used to be, I when I first got hired at the company, we were about 300 people all in Scottsdale, Arizona, all occupying a single floor in a building off of Chaparral ⁓ now we're, ooh man, about 1600 teammates we are worldwide. ⁓ So just opened up offices in India, in the ⁓ UK, have now. companies kept keep going up market. So I like to like to relay some some current use case or some recent use case scenarios from smaller companies where we found a lot of success in making their communication system ⁓ hyper I'll share one from a restaurant actually out ⁓ Utah that it came about because we were trying to make a reservation ⁓ with these folks. was visiting Utah one down in Guadalajara. And so we're definitely expanding our reach across multiple different market spaces there. Now, what that means from the product standpoint is that we are getting into a lot more use cases than we ever have in the past. And so Nextiva, we were known for just slinging, you know, just ⁓ dealing phone systems left and right. We did very, very good at that, ⁓ but going to kind of be And we called around to several different restaurants. ⁓ None them had AI employed. And so it was a third restaurant that I called where someone actually picked up the phone and they gained a thousand dollar ticket ⁓ at end of the night. Come to find out that one of the first two that I called was an existing customer of ours. And so I didn't that previously. And so ⁓ we contacted and like, hey, we tried to call you. you know, what's the accurate or the illustration that our co-founder always likes to use is that it's just like Amazon used to sell books online and that's what they were known for. That's what Nextivo is known for. And now we're going to be known for unified communications. And to that end, we have some very big news coming up. can't tell you exactly when, but hopefully by the end of this quarter, we'll have a lot to provide on that unified communication space that's going to make us a basically a one-stop shop for a lot of folks. Gina Gibson: the Aaron Meyer: And guess what happened? You lost a thousand dollar ticket, you know, that's that night from a business meal. How often does that happen? We dig into their use case and it turns out that one of their frontline managers is responsible for gathering voicemails. So they don't even plan on picking up the phone. They just gather voicemails and then they call someone back when they when it seems like they want a reservation. We asked them, how many dinners does that lose you? How many how many big ticket meals does that lose you? They didn't even know. And so we were able to quickly. within a week deploy AI to several of their locations so that that AI was able to front load reservation opportunities from them. And of course they get a lot of analytics on it. They're able to track it now. So on exactly how much they were losing in the past compared to now, but it's able to gather all that information, it's able to make the reservations and they are a very happy customer and a lot busier than they were in the past because now they have something consistent to take all those interactions. also front loads a lot of their website chat, a lot of their SMS. And so just in general, their frontline staff and especially that port manager that was gathering voicemails is a lot freer to do their actual job. Gina Gibson: That's great use case. It's a great use case. Aaron Meyer: There's a lot of those. There's a lot of those out there right now. But yeah, I know you said a couple that was a long one right there. You want another. But there's a lot of stuff like that that we're able to accomplish now. the best part about it, though, for a lot of those SMB to mid-market folks, it's extremely cost effective. Basically one dinner, one big dinner pays for that entire AI experience for that one restaurant. ⁓ we're able to deliver that consistently no matter what's asked of us is that we're able to Gina Gibson: No, it's great. Absolutely. ⁓ Aaron Meyer: to deliver it at a price that they can afford. Gina Gibson: love that. love that. And are there any other emerging trends? mean, AI is on everybody's tongue these days, but are there any other emerging trends in the industry that you're excited about seeing or that you guys are preparing for? Aaron Meyer: Yeah, yeah, the further on the unification side of things, we what seeing and what we've seen in quite a lot of the industry is that ⁓ even unified customer experience is used a lot by a lot of different companies, the experience is not truly unified. ⁓ Even use Nextiva as the use case scenario here is that even though we own our entire product set. you buy Nextiva for Office and for Ccast you buy it for AI, you're dealing with a couple of different platforms right there. ⁓ And customers won't know that. But ⁓ any savvy person that logs in and tries to do something is going to realize that, I'm dealing with a couple of different platforms. And that's the same across the industry. You're pretty much dealing with multiple platforms to get that end experience. The next big for Nextiva and something that we're really excited about is a true unification across our entire product stack. And so when you're trying to go in there and you're trying to make changes or you're trying to ensure that a customer experience remains the same across multiple channels, or you're trying to hook in multiple different locations, some are using contact centers, some are using UCAS, ⁓ that entire experience is the same across the board. And so we're gonna get to a place very, very soon where you have your basic customer experience you know, for your frontline workers, for your average desk phone users, for someone using a soft phone who's working remotely, they're going to be dealing with the same interface across the board, scaling all the way up to those high-end, high-productivity users. And we'll be able to just basically pick and choose what we want to plug into that interface in order to make that experience entirely the same across the board. And we're very excited for us because it's going to allow us to... basically do whatever we need to to customize that experience to tailor to exactly what our customers need. Gina Gibson: That is exciting because especially with, as we've talked about so many AI companies and a lot of them being purchased, right, are bought up and added on to different platforms. We see that there is a little, you know, there's definitely not that cohesive kind of unified view. ⁓ I've always been a fan of James Lipton. And so to end the podcast, we do a little bit of rapid fire. So what is your favorite word? Aaron Meyer: Mm. Can't wait. My favorite word. Ooh, boy. I'll have to say adventure. I'm always down for a good adventure. Sometimes for better or for worse, I want to stumble into something to see where it goes. We'll go with adventure. Gina Gibson: Love it. What's your least favorite word? Aaron Meyer: Ooh, constrained, would say. Constrained, because to me it means less adventure, I want to say. It means less progress. It means that something's holding us back, and that's definitely not what we want. Gina Gibson: and what excites you the most. Aaron Meyer: Excites me the most huh interesting. Have to say well, you know family, know, of course, that's something that is always very exciting Like I said, we have a three-year-old that's always exciting to see what he's ⁓ and picking up and saying that day So yeah, ⁓ have to go with I'll have to go with family and ⁓ and that's that's probably that's probably the motivating factor behind everything there So hopefully that's a good one ⁓ Gina Gibson: That's a great answer. There's no wrong answers. That's the best part. Erin, if somebody wants more information about Nextiva, who should they reach out to? Aaron Meyer: Well, they should definitely reach out to you, Gina. They should they should find you on LinkedIn. They should blow up your phone. They should email you because they get a direct line to me when they when they do. But they can also contact with contact me directly. ⁓ dot Meyer at nextiva dot com. I have my LinkedIn as well. So either way, they'll get what they need. Gina Gibson: Perfect. Erin, big thank you for joining us today and giving us your time. It's really exciting to hear and I can't wait to have you guys back on after the big announcement because ⁓ is definitely something that's changing or gonna change up the space. So thank you so much for your time. Aaron Meyer: Looking forward to it. Thanks for having me.