For far too long, business communications have been a tangle of problems with varying degrees of complexity, held together by limited, often awkward attempts at solutions.
For the time being, ignore the fact that we need to coordinate, make decisions, and analyze the actions we take based on the communications we have, both inside and outside our businesses. Just think about how many communications channels we need to access on not just a daily, but sometimes a minute-by-minute basis: We need email, phone, voicemail, text, website messaging, website chat, fax, and sometimes special internal communication channels.
Think about all the passwords. Add up all the time it takes to check each channel, then multiply that time by the number of instances each day when you check in. Now consider that you don’t simply have to get and share information in these myriad communications; you also have to take action.
It’s staggering. It’s inefficient. And it doesn’t deliver ideal results, especially when we’re working to wow customers.
How do we even begin to conceive of fixing such vast, complicated problems? Think about the number of apps that “solve” some limited aspect of communications needs. One app might work great for managing voicemail, but it may be terrible at reliably routing calls to your mobile phone. Or you may love the way your website’s chat function works, but spend far too long making notes in client files to keep them current based on the most recent chat.
As it turns out, there’s really only one way to solve the problem, but it takes a bold visionary with a track record of success to do it.
Tomas Gorny started from scratch.
Gorny, CEO of business communications company, Nextiva, decided there was no solution that could pull existing fixes together in a reliable, efficient way. So he did it his own way…predictably democratic, predictably revolutionary, and unsurprisingly powerful.
At Nextiva’s annual NextCon conference in October 2017, Tomas announced the limited rollout of NextOS, a unified communications/customer relationship management/analytics tool unlike anything else on the market. While you might expect a solution as robust as NextOS to be profoundly complicated, in fact, Gorny’s goal was quite the opposite. Gorny said, “Everything Nextiva has developed was driven by a steadfast determination to simplify how businesses use technology to communicate. With NextOS, we are empowering businesses to provide optimal customer experiences and we have created a new standard in workplace communication.”
So what exactly does NextOS do? In short, it delivers a powerful, intuitive, and integrated platform for business communications that gives even small companies an effortless ability to deliver excellent, consistent customer service based on incredibly sophisticated automation and analytics.
Specifically, NextOS delivers the following:
- Workflow automation that gives companies the ability to operate more efficiently.
- Predictive modeling that gives decision makers the ability to forecast more accurately.
- Nextiva Service CRM, a database of all customer history and communications that stretches across all channels and provides real-time relationship updates.
- Nextiva Chat, which provides browser-based live chat for both customers and employees.
- Nextiva Surveys, offering powerful tools to solicit customer input.
- Nextiva Analytics, which give insight into all aspects of communication and deliver information like the future potential value of a given client.
While large corporations have been able to create custom solutions that pull together some of the same services NextOS does, those solutions have been completely out of reach for small and midsized businesses. NextOS is an absolute game changer in that sense, leveling the playing field so that any company will be able to leverage cross-channel communication and insight only sophisticated analytics can provide.
Why is unified communications so important? Gorny’s answer is simple. He said, “Customers want to be remembered. They don’t want to start every conversation all over again.” Meeting that expectation is a big challenge, though. Maintaining and updating client files to reflect every touchpoint and every interaction with every client is far too daunting a task for most companies, whether your client list numbers in the dozens or in the thousands. But we know that history matters.
The genius of NextOS is that it’s all there, and it’s done effortlessly. Every chat, every call, every email, every order, every complaint…it’s all together, all up-to-the-minute accurate, and it’s available in an intuitive interface. In an increasingly competitive world, filled with expert marketing and clever brand building, it is the companies that deliver an authentically better customer experience that will thrive. NextOS is just the sort of platform that facilitates excellence in customer service.
And NextOS is more than just a call center solution, more than just a database, though that database is vital. The predictive modeling and analytics components of NextOS are the real genius. What if you could do more than just fulfilling your customers’ needs? What if you could anticipate them?
That’s just what NextOS can do.
Gorny explains that “patented NextOS technology solves the communications crisis by giving [users] a real-time view of customers and the ability to track the entire customer journey.” And it goes further. Founded on Gorny’s belief that “knowledge and automation will drive the future of work,” Nextiva’s team built software that helps take the guesswork out of finding the best ways to satisfy clients.
To fully understand just how profound NextOS is, consider a hypothetical situation. Your company sells widgets, both online and from a physical retail store. Not only will your biggest wholesale customer be able to walk in the door and work with a cashier who has access to the client’s history, but that customer can also pick up the phone and speak with a rep who can see every communication, every discount, every order, and every complaint. The customer can send an email, which is folded into the history, added to the information that aggregates in the database that tells you everything you need to know in real time. In addition, NextOS can help you predict what that client will want to purchase and give insight into how to better manage the relationship, driving both sales and client satisfaction.
For example, think about how NextOS and its workflow automation could benefit this widget company when it comes to customer returns. If a customer returns an online purchase using a form on the website, NextOS automation makes the process simple and reliable. But more importantly, it can tailor responses in a way that is enormously beneficial. For example, if a first-time customer makes a small purchase and returns it, the appropriate response might simply be a refund. But if that first-time customer places a large order, returning only a single widget, then the best response – based on the potential future value of the client – might be a refund and a replacement at no charge, combined with a discount offer for future purchases.
What’s most useful (and impressive) is that NextOS can automate the process. You and your staff don’t have to waste time managing returns personally. You don’t have to try to figure out what the ideal response is to protect future business. NextOS streamlines the entire process and makes it not just easier, but better.
Gorny’s team at Nextiva spent years building and perfecting NextOS, and they did it in order to make powerful tools available to companies of any size. Though it was initially rolled out for a small group of companies, Nextiva is looking to expand its reach, and businesses can signup for the software via Nextiva’s website.
How certain is Tomas Gorny that his solution is the one businesses have been waiting for? He is “confident that NextOS will solve the communications crises for every business.”
