Speaker 0 | 00:06.965

Hello everyone, this is Phil Howard and I want to welcome everyone listening to another mind-altering, thought-provoking, business productivity creating episode here on Telecom Radio 1. And today, I’m very happy, we have a very, very special, many of you have probably seen some of his both ridiculous and… Let’s get real LinkedIn posts that many are a fan of and others, well, let’s just say they get stuck singing Suri with a Fringe on top in front of Ira. Because, you know, if you provide lame dog smoke and mirror service in this industry, Ira is going to sniff you out. Ira, welcome to the show. Very happy to have you on today.

Speaker 1 | 00:52.030

Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited. I don’t get often, I don’t often get asked to talk to people, which is great.

Speaker 0 | 00:59.464

And that’s, you know, really, that’s what we’re in the business of doing is actually providing a means in a way for people to talk to each other. So it’s typically the people that don’t like talking to get stuck doing that job. Yeah. So just give us a brief rundown. You know, obviously you’re over at Nextiva. Nextiva is a very I see you guys as a very special player in industry. But why don’t you just tell us real quick what makes you guys so special in your opinion?

Speaker 1 | 01:25.856

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we’re in the world of cloud communications and we’ve been doing it since 2008 is when we had our first customer. And it’s interesting, you know, back in 2008, when we got into the industry, many people told us we couldn’t do it. We were too late. We had no, you know, we had no background in the industry. We were going to fail. Even three and a half years ago when they brought me in to start our channel program, I was hearing the same thing. Friends of mine were saying, are you crazy? Like. these programs have been around for eight years and you think you can come in and actually make an impact well the answer is yes i mean because at nextiva you know we really try to do what’s right all the time and in the core of who we are is amazing service it comes down to every customer counts every partner counts and for us if we don’t give you amazing service we are doing a disservice and That’s one of the big things I talk about all the time, especially in social media. We live in an industry of a bunch of me too companies, me too good and me too bad. And one of the bad ways is there’s a horrible lack of customer service or even caring about the customer. So we knew back in the early days that if we were just able to have great technology, that’s a given. You can’t be in the game without it. But later on, this concept of amazing service, it would be a home run. And. You know, it has been a home run. We’ve grown to over 150,000 customers, business customers across the United States and worldwide. And, you know, we offer cloud communication services. So voice over IP, instant messaging, presence, SMS, you know, all these things that go along with the world of unified communications. And it’s been a great run so far. And it’s there’s no end in sight.

Speaker 0 | 03:17.150

So, OK, so follow up to that question. A lot of people could poke holes in that because I can’t tell you how many presentations I have sat in on where the sales rep at the end of the presentation says, you know what, though, this is what it really comes down to. It really comes down to we care and we really provide outstanding customer service. So to be honest with you, I want to know how you provide amazing service because I was sitting in our meeting the other day where I heard that you guys actually. coined the term amazing service. And everyone wants to say that they give great customer service because we all know how important it is. And we absolutely know in the hosted voice over IP world where people are bringing their own bandwidth and they’re worried about finger pointing and they’re worrying about how we install a major location. Just, I want to know, how do you provide amazing customer service? Because I want, and I want some, you know, details here because it’s, you know, I used to do a lot of behavioral interviewing. I worked for Starbucks back in the day and they taught us always when you ask an interview question, don’t just say, don’t take, hey, we’re a people person as an answer. I want to hear actual examples, maybe a scenario where you really kind of get into the details of what does amazing service actually mean and how do you provide it?

Speaker 1 | 04:36.355

Yeah, no, it’s a great, it’s an awesome question. And, you know, I’m going to spin you back a little bit because I want to take you before the customer comes on board. Because I think that’s… That’s just a result of things we do to make sure that we ensure amazing service. So the first thing I would say is it starts actually in our interview process of our employees. I mean, what we’re looking for in people is people who have the genetic DNA. amazing service so we ask a lot of very very tough questions in the interview process and what we’re trying to weed out is do you really believe in amazing service or are you just talking about it or even worse do you not care at all so it starts there the second step is ensuring that in the business that people love what they do because think about it for a minute You know, you’ve been on the end of this, and I’m sure many people listening to this podcast have been on the end of this. You call into a business, and you get some knucklehead on the phone, and they sound like they don’t want to deal with you. It’s like a chore that they even answered the call, and you may have a real legitimate problem, and it’s just irritating. You know, it’s probably because one of two things, either that person’s just having a bad day, or maybe the environment at that workplace sucks.

Speaker 0 | 05:57.264

Yeah, or, I mean, the famous one, did you enter a ticket yet? Any of the, I’m not willing to jump through rings of fire for you to get you where you need to be. I hate the, did you enter a ticket? That, to me, drives me nuts.

Speaker 1 | 06:13.875

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s because it’s an easy way out, right? That’s what people do when they’re not happy. They take the easy way out. So, in our world, we spend a lot of money, time, and effort on the environment. Like, as a matter of fact, this whole week, we’re celebrating our ninth anniversary. Every day, we have different things going on for our employees. It’s so good that we’ve actually, six years in a row, we’ve won the best place to work in Arizona. Because we think that type of stuff helps yield the result of amazing service.

Speaker 0 | 06:47.132

So, come on. What are you guys doing? No, real quick, though. Come on. Give me that. What’s the best thing you guys have done this week? Because I want to know. Maybe I’ll stop working for myself and come work for you guys.

Speaker 1 | 06:55.016

We’ve done some amazingly fun stuff. Like today is a throwback day where you can dress up any way you want from any bygone error. But the funniest one ever, you guys should go to YouTube and look up this keyword. Sexy Sax, S-A-X, man. He’s a YouTube sensation. I’m not going to spoil it for you, but we had that guy come to work one day. He runs around the office playing saxophone and all he knows is one song. Careless Whisperer by George Michael. It’s hysterical. And that was one of the coolest things and funniest things I ever saw. But you know, so you got to have a great work environment. And then once you can have those two steps, now you can actually start talking about amazing service and holding yourself accountable to it. So not only do we talk about it, we hold ourselves accountable to it every day. So what we do, we have hundreds of statistics, we look at our clients, and I don’t want to bore you going through all of them. But two very important, or let’s go through three. Three very important things are, number one, whenever somebody calls in and speaks to somebody at Nextiva, they’re always going to speak to someone who speaks a language, who’s sitting here in Scottsdale, Arizona. Nothing offshore. Second thing is, if customers are calling in, I don’t care if you have a big issue or a little issue. It doesn’t matter to me because we should treat them all the same. And one of the statistics that we look at, we hold our teams accountable to, is answering 95% of the calls within three rings. Super critical to us that if you have a problem as a customer and you are calling in, we can’t let you sit on the phone for a half hour stewing on it and getting more and more irritated to get somebody who’s in another country to answer the phone and can’t even help you. So we hold ourselves accountable to answering 95% of the calls within three rings. Do we always do it? No, we don’t always do it. Sometimes we’re at 88%, sometimes we’re at 97%. We’re always in that range and we’re very cognizant of it. But probably the most important thing is that you can answer calls quickly. But if the person who’s answering the phone for the customer is not capable of handling the customer, guess what? Answering that call within 18 seconds means zero because you’re still irritating the customer. So we hold our people accountable to resolving 85% of the calls the first time the customer calls in. So they’ll stick with customers. They won’t just let you go. They won’t take the easy way out because they know they’re being held accountable to resolving 85% of the calls the first time. So it takes all those things, building the foundation up through tracking to make sure that you’ve got it down. And then anyone listening, you want to check it out, go online, go to YouTube, go to review sites. You’re going to find… Unbelievable comments and videos about us. As a matter of fact, we got several hundred video testimonials on YouTube of customers who are not scripted. They just tell you like it is. So, it’s really, you got to do everything. You can’t just take bits and pieces and expect it to work.

Speaker 0 | 10:05.054

Hmm. So I was talking with a partner of yours the other day, a partner that sells internet services. And that partner is also a partner of mine. And I use him to deliver internet services in very hard to reach areas. And I know that he had done a few, actually quite a few deals with you guys. And I asked him, you know, just point blank, quite frankly. Tell me what happens after the sale because a lot of companies, when they start to become very successful and they fill the pipeline, they fill it very fast. And I’ve had these conversations with many CEOs and presidents and VPs of operations. I said, hey, look, I will bring you plenty of phones to install. But when I bring you a lot of phones to install and they start to overflow. Are you going to be able to handle that? And are you going to be able to handle it in a timely fashion? So I asked this partner, honestly, tell me the nightmares. Tell me some of the mistakes. Tell me the, give me the nitty gritty. Where, where has anything gone wrong? And I have to be honest with you. He said nothing. I don’t hear anything. And that’s, that’s really a dream come true from a partner standpoint or from a indirect sales standpoint, because once, once a partner makes a sale, he doesn’t want to have to deal with any issues. He doesn’t want. After we’ve done all the consulting work, after we’ve done all the digging and all the, you know, everything to get the customer exactly this custom solution that’s going to work great for them. We want it to go and work just that way. And we want it to install smoothly. So if I don’t know if that’s true or how you’re doing that or where you run into issues on the install, but that’s typically if someone’s going to have a problem, it’s going to it’s going to be a problem up front. So I want to just maybe just hit on a scenario, if you don’t mind. Let’s just take. I throw an eight location medical facility at you with 250 phones and they’ve got a crazy busy medical staff with people running around everywhere. How do you conduct an onboarding or even just, you know, once that deal is signed, how do you do your onboarding? How do you do your training and how do you manage a smooth transition?

Speaker 1 | 12:22.283

Yeah, awesome question. It’s funny, I just ran actually from a meeting here in our office with one of the biggest healthcare providers in the United States. We’re doing… hundreds of locations for them, thousands actually. And we’re having a great experience with them. But so here’s the deal. Again, the dirty, one of the dirty little secrets of the industry is most of these guys, they go to customers and they paint the world a rosy picture. And one of the worst things I think, and you hear this all the time, is it’s plug and play. It’s plug and play. Really? Really? I would say baloney, ridiculous comment. You know, if anyone ever tells you it’s plug and play, you should be thinking plug and pray, because it’s not true.

Speaker 0 | 13:15.350

I’ve said that numerous times, and that is, I don’t know who started, who spread that term around. But yeah, I’ve definitely said that numerous times.

Speaker 1 | 13:23.577

Yeah, it’s not true plug and play. There’s so much complexity to what we do. So again, it all stems from having the right processes in place. So it starts with having great sales engineers on staff and trained channel managers on staff. People who understand how to ask all the right questions, how to uncover all the right customer needs. It’s not just as easy as saying, Mr. Customer, oh, okay, you have eight locations and 250 phones. I’m going to do a quote. That’s the wrong way of handling it. Because you know what? There’s a lot of complexity that no one’s talking about that could come and bite you in the butt later and have that customer completely irritated. So it takes doing great due diligence with the customer, making sure that we’re understanding their network, understanding their data connectivity, making sure we understand all their needs in their business, and creating the appropriate solution. There’s nothing worse than finding out in the middle of onboarding that you missed. some major, major thing that they needed. It’s not going to turn out pretty. I can tell you that right now. So you got to do your homework up front. You got to do the due diligence. You got to have the phone calls. You have to have the discovery, all those types of things. Then you’ve got to have processes in place like we do to actually onboard that customer. So we have people in the onboarding team who they have specific responsibilities. Project managers who are like the air traffic controller. They’re the one who makes sure all the moving pieces are all coordinated correctly. Then you have people that, you know, implementation managers. These are people who… Once the customer signs on the dotted line, they get with the customer and go through everything that’s on the order. And again, another touch point to make sure we’re not missing anything. They help the customer collect all the right letters of authorization and paperwork and user lists and all that. Then we have people who all they do is build out the account once we gather all that information. So they’re building out project managers is navigating the whole thing. And then of course, you know, we can do, if customers want it, we can do installation services. We can do training multiple ways. Either, you know, some customers just want to do it over webinar. Others want people local, you know, maybe somebody to come out to their office if they’re, you know, a big, big location or even a small location. But, you know, their phones are really important to them. And then once all that’s done, we still haven’t confirmed that the customer is happy with us yet. But at some point, once it looks like, and it feels to us like it’s all running and they’ve been trained and. phone calls are coming in then we go to the customer we say hey are we done is this the way you want it and if they say no we need to do some polishing on it we’ll polish it up make some tweaks and changes and then once they say yes then we then we we let them go and we move them on to our account management group and our account management group will take the pulse of the customer from time to time to make sure they’re happy keep that amazing service and and do all the right things to keep a customer happy Most of the stuff I’ve described in many companies is non-existent. They don’t do any of this stuff. They take a quote for eight locations, 250 phones. They just don’t even ask any questions. They send out a quote. Somehow, miraculously, they get the deal. Then they ship the phones out, and then they have no process behind the onboarding. And we wonder why customers complain all the time.

Speaker 0 | 16:56.015

Okay, so you brought, obviously, there’s a lot of points there. the complexity around the network, you know, what kind of firewall does the customer have at every location? What kind of switches? Do they have dual drops? You know, what kind of firewall settings do they have to have? And how does that mix with your network and the settings that you need? What about you guys are primarily a bring your own bandwidth scenario, right? You don’t provide any network. Is that true?

Speaker 1 | 17:22.340

Correct. Because we feel like that’s not who we are and we would screw it up.

Speaker 0 | 17:26.561

Exactly. So How do you play in the same sandbox with other ISPs? And what’s your answer to the finger pointing QoS game? You know, do you interconnect with people? Where are your NNIs? How about your cross connects? How’s your network perform? And how do you peer with, you know, some of the other major ISPs?

Speaker 1 | 17:48.453

Yeah, absolutely. So, and this is an amazing thing that the industry generally doesn’t do the stuff that you’re describing. So five, six years ago. We looked at this idea of QoS, quality of service, and we saw that it was problematic a lot of times with customers. And you had providers, good providers out there, who came up with solutions. And the solution was, sell the customer an MPLS T1 or MPLS circuit, tie it back privately into the carrier’s cloud, and you’re going to give unbelievable customer service. And it’s true. It works great. But the reality of it is most businesses weren’t willing to pay the money because those circuits were not cheap. So we looked at this and we said, OK, well, how do we how do we fix this problem? So we were one of the first, if not the first carriers out there five, six years ago to to look at all the major ISPs in the United States. We’re very data driven. We know everything about our customers. We know, you know, X percent of our customers use Comcast, let’s say. And so we went to companies like Comcast and time TW telecom and level three and, you know, blah, blah, blah. You can go on all the major guys. And we said, listen, we want to become a paying customer to you because here’s the deal. At the end of the day, you’re going to sell your customers bandwidth. We’re going to sell them hosts of communications. And if you know what hits the fan and the quality sucks, the customers are going to be caught in the middle. And they’re going to point it, you know, they’re going to not know what to do. We’re going to be pointing at you. You’re going to be pointing at us. And it’s just not going to be a good situation. So we want to become a paying customer. So we want to privately connect into all your networks, keep the traffic private. And that way customers can get great, you know, call quality. You don’t have to go invest in an MPLS circuit. And it should be good. We were like literally one of the first. And still today, you look at all the major providers, most of them aren’t even doing it. They’re just starting to think about it, which blows me away. Like phones are such an important part of a business. You can’t afford to have bad quality. I mean, you can’t. So, we do this through NNI relationships through all the major providers. We have nine data centers in North America, one in Canada, eight in the United States. Whoever the biggest provider is in the region, wherever the biggest providers are in the region where our data centers are at, we hook in privately too. And it’s been awesome. I mean, our customers rarely complain about call quality. Now, the other way we handle it is we have a device called an Exiva Clarity. It’s basically an SD-WAN product. That allows us to do some QoS on the inside of the network. And if there are issues, it’s like an MRI for your knee, if you blow out your knee. With Clarity, we can look into it if they’re having bad quality and find out exactly where it’s coming from. And another core differentiator for us is that when we find it, when we help the customer find it, because we don’t expect them to do it, we’ll get on the phone with them and their ISP. Not many carriers will do that.

Speaker 0 | 21:01.110

That’s great. Now, is that like an Edgemark device or, you know, something that’s going to be providing Moz scores and all that type of stuff for you guys?

Speaker 1 | 21:08.193

Correct. It’s a competitor to Edgemark. Yeah, absolutely. It’s our own branded device.

Speaker 0 | 21:12.574

Okay, awesome.

Speaker 1 | 21:13.295

It’s backup. You can put a 4G card in it. We just had a restaurant who had that in very, very busy pizza place. And their internet went down. The 4G card took over. They ran their pizza shop, six phones over a 4G card. for three hours until their main circuit came up.

Speaker 0 | 21:35.846

That’s awesome. And obviously there’s a lot of ways, I mean, SD-WAN, that’s a whole nother podcast of us talking about, you know, secondary, tertiary internet connections. So moving on from that, you know, customers come to me to make their life easy. You know, if I had a number one reason why someone uses me, it’s A, to make their life easy. They might… They might have an IT staff. They might be an IT director with 10 other guys, and they don’t want to deal with, I’ve got to enter it, but I’ve got to call 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND and enter a ticket with this provider. And then I’ve got to track that down. That takes time away from their day and from what they really should be doing. Phil, I need to add 10 phones here. I need to make this change, or I need to make sure that this API works with this device. So they come to me, and I say, okay, we need to take a look at. Nextivo. We need to take a look at RingCentral. We need to take a look at XYZ provider because they provide the call center functionality that you want, or they provide the outbound chat messaging that interconnects with your, I don’t know, squeeze pages and whatever’s going on with your website. So they come to me for that. I want to know how you feel you stack up to the other major players, whether that’s perceived major player whether that’s you know information that someone finds on the website but how do you how do you feel you stack up next to the other guys that are in the magic quadrant or you know whatever it is frost and sullivan what’s

Speaker 1 | 23:11.037

your answer to that yeah absolutely so there’s a ton of great companies out there right i mean they really are there’s also a lot more that are crap and just don’t do a good job but When you’re talking about us in that upper echelon, which we’re ranked, I think, number five for market share in the U.S. And some of the ones you named are great companies, and we compete against them every day and do very well at it. But, I mean, the big thing for us, and I’ll never talk bad about specific competitors. You guys can figure it out on your own. But here’s the deal. At the end of the day, if you want a company that actually gives a… care about your customers, you’re not going to find anyone better than us. Also, from a technology perspective, we’re using Broadsoft, which is a carrier class soft switch for our voice over IP. But the big thing I want you guys to understand is the future is unbelievable with us. We are developing, and basically we have our partner and customer conference called NextCon in October this year. Last year, we had Steve Wozniak, we had Guy Kawasaki. It was an amazing conference. It’s about… how we help our partners and customers grow their businesses. But one of the things that we release there is our vision of the world of communications. And I got to tell you that the world is going to change really fast. And we’re going to be at the razor edge of that, changing the world. You know, many of these companies still can’t figure out how to make a good quality call happen. They can’t figure out the fact that you should have people in the United States answering phone calls, right? basic, basic, what I call blocking and tackling, many of these guys aren’t doing. They may have good interface and, you know, you know, whatever, whatever, you know, everyone’s got their good aspects, but at the end of the day, they haven’t figured out a lot of the basics. We figured these stuff out a long time ago. So over the next, you know, in October at Nexcon. We are going to be unveiling our next generation of telecom, or I shouldn’t even say telecom, I should say communications, because customers communicate and collaborate way more than just on the phone. There’s many different ways, and I can’t really get into a lot of details. I sort of leave it a little vague so these guys don’t catch on yet. But I can tell you, when we release it in October, I can assure you that nobody who’s listening to this podcast has seen anything like it before. And we are going to truly unify the world of communications. UCAS today, people who say they’re a UCAS provider, it’s a joke. There’s no such thing. These people aren’t unifying communications. Having voicemail to email does not UCAS. You’re not unifying anything. We’re going to fully unify it, and it’s going to be all out in October. And then one last thing I’ll say on this is the Gartner thing, you got me going on that one, as you can tell. So, guys. The reality of that is Gardner is a pay to play game, right? If you pay, you show up and it’s a lot of money. So, and many of the awards out there are like that. That’s again, a dirty little secret of the industry. Pay enough and you’ll show up wherever you want to show up.

Speaker 0 | 26:17.018

No different than-Whatever number of reviews. It’s like, you know, it’s like, well, I can’t say it. I don’t want to say it. I don’t know if I can get myself in trouble yet enough. Okay, let’s do something real special. I want you to do something special for the listeners here. What do we need to do? What does someone need to do? I want a ticket to that show in October. I want to give away some spots. Can we do that? Can you do something special like that?

Speaker 1 | 26:38.674

Yeah, I’m sure I could do that. We’re at the point right now where we’re, I mean, like this month, we’re just finalizing the agenda and who the keynote speakers are, but you bet I’ll, I’ll arrange for it. And maybe what we do is we give you five tickets to Nexcon. How’s that sound?

Speaker 0 | 26:53.985

That sounds great. I’ll take it. The other thing, the other thing I want to do. And this is, I’m just thinking off the top of my head here right now, because you got me going. I want to do another webinar. I want to do a webinar, a live webinar. And anyone listening to this show is going to be invited for free. And on that webinar, I want to teach people how to do their own telecom audit and review some secrets that we’re going, and we’re going to invite them to this next TV webinar. And we’re going to show it directors. what they really need to be looking for. And we’re going to do their audit for them. We’re going to pick five people on the webinar. We’ll do it live. We’ll do their audit for them for free, maybe without revealing any numbers or something, but let’s put together another webinar and I’ll send out the invite. And anyone listening to this podcast can come to that webinar. It’s going to be entirely for free and you can figure out what you’re going to do for them. Very special that. they aren’t going to get anywhere else through Nextiva, that they won’t find online, that they won’t get their whatever discount it is, wherever it is. I want you to do something special for my listeners. And we’re going to invite them to that webinar. What do you think?

Speaker 1 | 28:01.269

I love it. Love it, love it, love it. Let’s do it.

Speaker 0 | 28:04.512

Okay, so everyone out there listening, the what I’m going to do is I’m going to put together I’m going to release the webinar. And if you’d like, we’re going to release this podcast and on the podcast page is going to be like a little short quiz or an area to put your information in and when you put that information in i’m going to invite you to this webinar and before i send out the podcast page ira’s going to get back to me with what he’s going to do special for the listeners to this podcast and it’s going to be something that he doesn’t that you can’t just get by calling 1-800-NEXT-TIVA or that you can get through your normal channel of ordering nextiva Okay, so you guys, you’re going to listen to the podcast. You’re going to, on the podcast page is going to be the special deal that Ira’s going to, he’s going to call me after this podcast and tell me what that deal is. It’s going to be on that page. You’re going to enter your information in and you’re going to be invited to the webinar. And we’re going to do a very special webinar for anyone that’s interested in Nextiva. Ira, I really appreciate it. I’m going to give you one last chance. If there’s one thing that you want to share with your future customer, what would that be?

Speaker 1 | 29:11.591

I would, I would share this. We love. our customers. We care about you. We care about you growing your business. And isn’t that what really matters? You know, it’s, uh, we, we look at ourselves as a partner to you, the customer, helping you grow your business, helping you take it to the next level and helping you beat your competition at your own game.

Speaker 0 | 29:32.299

Yeah. You should want to call and talk to the people at the companies that you do business with. It should be a pleasure. It should be, I really want to call and talk with them. Yeah. I don’t even have anything to do today. So I’m just going to call and talk to my guy over at Nextiva because I just like them as opposed to dreading. You know, I really hate the fact that I’ve got to make this call today. So it was great. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you very much, everyone out there for listening to Telecom Radio 1. Ira, have a great day. Thank you.

Speaker 1 | 29:59.986

Thanks for having me.