No sensible company wants to unnecessarily complicate the products or services it offers to its customers. The problem is developing and delivering those products and services is rarely straightforward, especially when trying to shrug off VMware while embracing AI.
Nextiva describes itself as an AI-powered customer experience platform, but its roots are in the unified communications business, handling the business calls, video meetings and messaging that underpin the customer experience, particularly for small businesses.
As senior director of IT Eric Andrews told The Stack at Everpure’s Pure Accelerate conference earlier this year, over the last five years the company has transitioned into “more of a SaaS company offering business communications but extending that into CRM applications, SMS texting, [and] call centre functionality.”
More recently, it has made acquisitions, including Simplify360 and Thrio, that set the stage both for international expansion and for developing its own AI-powered call centre and CRM services.
The aim is to give its mainly small-business customers a single comms and customer experience platform. That includes helping them configure their own Nextiva services in order to simplify and automate interactions with their own customers, such as providing account balances or scheduling a landscaping appointment.
“We present a unified inbox,” says Andrews. “It's not just email, it's all the communications that you would interact with your customers.”
But even if the objective is to offer customers a seamless, easy experience, it’s perhaps not surprising that the company’s own infrastructure is – if not complicated – certainly diverse.
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