Nextiva: Beyond UCaaS — Platform Selling Key for Future Prosperity

(Pictured above: Nextiva CEO Tomas Gorny at NextCon 2019 in Scottsdale, Arizona, Nov. 4.

NEXTIVA NEXTCON — Nextiva on Monday unveiled the latest innovations to NextOS, its customer experience management platform, and will roll out an all-new partner program in January.

The announcements were made at this week’s Nextiva NextCon 2019, in Scottsdale, Arizona. The partner conference has drawn more than 1,000 attendees.

Tomas Gorny, Nextiva’s co-founder and CEO, told attendees that businesses that don’t know, understand and remember their customers won’t be around much longer. He said his company has invested more financial resources than the profits of all of its competitors combined to help businesses struggling to get a complete picture of all of their customers.

“What we need is an all-in-one solution,” he said. “All of our communication and customer management needs to be connected, and in one platform and one place. We created one place in business where all of our communication – voice, email, chat, [text] – live together with customer management tools such as customer relationship management (CRM). The ‘InBox’ is designed for productivity and communication to operate in perfect balance.”

With InBox, which is being added to NextOS, the “complete picture” of the customer is brought into focus and can be immediately updated as more communication data is gathered, Gorny said.

NextOS also includes latest automation and analytics capabilities, he said. With NextOS, Nextiva‘s purpose is to “democratize innovation so every business has a chance to win,” he said.

“The upcoming year will be very exciting,” Gorny said. “We’re reintroducing a new smarter and more powerful NextOS … and this is just the beginning. Today, with our partners and our customers … we are on the ground floor of a great opportunity.”

Carl Katz, Nextiva’s vice president of channel sales for North America, said the NextOS business communications suite in its entirety will be out before the end of the year and “it’s going to mean a lot of additional opportunity for partners.”

Nextiva’s Carl Katz

“Right now with the UCaaS market, price compression is continuing and pricing per seats is declining, and at the same time demand for solutions are increasing,” he said. “So the new product portfolio is going to take us from a $20 billion total adjustable market to over $100 billion total adjustable market, with … CRM, webchat and surveys in addition to the UCaaS. It’s all included to make the customers more sticky so they’re not going to want to go through CRM migrations, they’re not going to want to change their chat server, and it’s going to be on one pane of glass without integrations, which is critical. So it’s a tremendous opportunity for partners that are looking to create solutions and help customers increase their productivity, and gain a competitive advantage in their market.”

In UCaaS, everybody’s competing on price and land-grabbing the market, and Nextiva wants to “get out of the UCaaS race to zero and get more into platform selling,” Katz said.

“Communications platform as a service (CPaaS) is the newer technology allowing us to create solutions on one pane of glass without integrations, and keeping the customer stickier and solidifying the partner annuity for the long term,” he said. “It’s a critical time right now for our partners, our customers and suppliers to come out with this kind of solution in order to …

… change the conversation and really find that solution for customers. We are differentiating ourselves because no one else has this unique technology and this insight with their customers, our customers’ customers, utilizing this business analytics and intelligence to give [partners] insight into their customers’ satisfaction and journey.”

Nextiva is still a UCaaS company and is adding 12 new products to its UCaaS portfolio, such as single sign-on, an active directory and a video collaboration tool, Katz said.

“We want to get in the door with UCaaS, be competitive with that, which we are … but we’re tying the bow around the whole thing and saying we can offer all these services because we’re an innovative organization and we’re not thinking one-dimensional,” he said. “We have a long-term vision for success, which is not just eat up as much market as you can get right now — but let’s sell people platforms. It’s CPaaS, and then we’re adding components within, constantly enhancing the product.”

The new partner program will provide additional investments into partners in the form of demand generation and other avenues for the partners to utilize Nextiva based on their level in the program, Katz said.

“We have a new marketing program and we’re expanding the reach of our marketing program also by bringing on regional marketing managers to help our partners with not only demand generation, but maybe helping them with their website and assisting in go-to-market strategies, etc.,” he said. “We’re rolling out a new sales formula to leverage all of the talent within the organization to come together to sell our new platform services, which makes it easier for the partners.”

Clem Thomas, president of Versutia Solutions, said his company has been a Nextiva partner for more than three years and “Nextiva’s been a great partner for us … and there’s a lot more growth on the horizon.”

“In the SMB space, they’ve got a solid product and it’s nice to come to an event like this and just see where the organization is taking your typical phone system, and growing and expanding it into not just dial tone,” he said. “I think the CRM and the analytics, and things like that, are more tools that set Nextiva apart from a lot of the other providers out there. Instead of getting those features in a handful of different products, having it all under one roof makes things seamless, and I think it’s going to be a win for the customers.”

Paula Griffo, managing director of VoIP Supply, said her company has been a Nextiva partner for about five years.

“What Tomas presented was a game changer for the industry, being able to do all of those applications and all those customer touches in one solution, and we’re super excited,” she said. “The biggest thing for me is the customer interaction and having everything in one spot so you can see everything related to the customer, like how a customer review would show up, how happy they were with you and the last interaction. Having all of that on one screen is beneficial to see how you would have the conversation or how you would treat the customer going forward. So I think it would help anyone who would be using that service for sure.”