Nextiva’s new app is built on their old platform, so there is continuity despite the new type of software.
Communications and collaboration vendor Nextiva has introduced a new type of business software, a next-generation workhub that brings together team collaboration and customer communication, to provide a common experience from a single collaboration. This new application relies on threaded conversations, which brings together all interactions from voice, text, email and video meetings into a single view with contact management, productivity tools and customer engagement tools.
“The digital workhub is the heart of what we are trying to use to promote conversations,” said Chethan Visweswar, Global Vice President of Product Development at Nextiva, who oversees all of the company’s products and engineering.
Visweswar said that they are looking to address three problems that are unaddressed by anyone in the market today: application overload between large numbers of applications requires toggling between them, and encourages both data siloes and expensive clunky integrations.
“We know that people have choices,” Visweswar said. “There are amazing tools. The challenge is that the choices and number of tools also create problems for people trying to have effective conversations where they don’t lose touch. We aggregate all of those and create threaded conversations.”
Visweswar said that this translates into a much better customer experience which is differentiated from those offered by their competitors.
“We have integrated types of applications that people use every day, like Google or Outlook,” he stated. “We also allow you to enrich the contact, which makes it much richer. It’s a pure browser experience, where all you need is a browser and a login. Those conversations are also threaded. We have built a lot of API, which we then apply to conversations.”
Visweswar stressed that this is not an aggregation play.
“We don’t aggregate messages from different channels,” he said. “We track the responses with team collaboration chat. Conversations with others are stitched in. We are preserving context and creating rich conversations, so that they are never lost, as opposed to aggregating messaging from different channels, which anyone can do.”
He also noted that the new app is built on the old Nextiva platform.
“We aren’t abandoning our roots,” he said. “We have added these experiences in the same platform. We expect some customers will come to us that way and discover things as they use the product.”
In some use cases, the Nextiva app can replace some existing apps, although it is more common for it to complement them.
There are use cases where it can replace some of those and some where it complements then
“We had a customer, a case management company, who would call people about social service cases,” said Drew Schulz, Director of Corporate Development at Nextiva. “They realized they had been using a separate text messaging tool, and that in addition to having this second app and tab, they also had a second number. Our ability to take notes on text messages without creating a new event was new to them as well. They didn’t have to have Outlook tabs open. We could remove three of their five open tabs.”
“A lot of law firms use us,” Visweswar said. “We won’t replace their CRMs, but we will wind up in their CRM.”
