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Experience AI Driven Tracking Throughout Your Customer Journey
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Welcome to FranPro Resource Podcast. If you would like to access our most recent content and to receive updates, you can register here: https://franpro.com/
Contact us here Anything@FranPro.com if you:
- Want help finding a franchise
- Would like to be featured on our program
- Would like help producing or want a podcast produced for you
- Are a franchise company and want access to our free ROI Tracker dashboard
In this episode, Lance Hood of FranPro interviews Matthew Nelson, in Solutions Engineering at Nextiva. Matthew Nelson is an incredible resource for any franchise organization. If you would like to work with Matthew you can reach him here: https://Franpro.vip/GoNextiva2
Gamefication to engage your teams and track, measure and improve your most valuable KPI's, while Call Pop displays the history of existing callers. This digital communication tech uses AI to track sentiment through the entire customer journey.
Covered in this call:
- AI tracks sentiment at each interaction of the customer journey
- AI proactively monitors social media for bad reviews
- Call pop recognizes callers and provides call history for context
- Integrates with over 300 common CRM, POS, and ERP systems
- Gamification motivates call center employees on any metric
- And more
Join us on a journey into the innovative world of advanced phone systems with our guest, Matt Nelson from Solution Engineering at Nextiva. Uncover how this revolutionary phone system as a service is transforming business communication by tracking real-time customer sentiment and journey, and providing a comprehensive dashboard with a suite of services from phone, email, SMS, to even web chat. Brace yourself for a deep dive into the intricacies of Nextiva, as Matt guides us through how it's not just a phone system, but a game-changing tool offering a goldmine of business insights.
Have you ever wondered about the power of API and AI in advanced phone systems? Matt shares how Nextiva's cutting-edge AI system recognizes caller ID, offers call context, and executes automated follow-ups. Fascinating, isn't it? We also delve into the potential of sentiment analysis, as a fast and efficient way for businesses to respond to customer needs. Hear how Nextiva's technology was pivotal during the pandemic with their mass notification feature and how their call pop feature aids businesses in managing tricky customer situations.
Discover the ins and outs of phone number porting and how Nextiva's franchise systems are deployed. We talk about Nextiva's dedicated department for franchise companies, where technicians well-acquainted with call flow and scenarios simplify and expedite the deployment process. Tune in, and let Matt Nelson enlighten you on the transformative power of Nextiva, your one-stop solution to streamline business communication and tap into invaluable data and insights. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to elevate their business communication to new heights.
Contact us at Anything@FranPro.com if you:
- Want help finding the right franchise for you
- Would like to be featured on our program
- Would like help to produce or want a podcast produced for you
- Are a franchise company and want Free access to our ROI Tracker dashboard
*Some of the companies we interview compensate us a commission if you purchase something.
Nextiva
Lance Hood (FranPro)Hi everyone . Today we have Matt Nelson from Solution Engineering with Nextiva . Welcome , matt .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Hi Nice to be here . Thanks , lance . So , matt you have . Nextiva does so many things that it is hard to put it into a singular sentence . I mean , I look at all the tracking and the AI and the analytics , but it's a communication tool where everybody gets access to it instantly , without all the hard costs . It can be as complex as a call center , as simple as all your daily communications , but storing it and tracking how people are responding , how people are feeling at every step of the customer journey and every interaction with the company . But put it into your own words what is Nextiva ?
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Well , at the most basic level , nextiva is a phone system as a service . Rather than investing in hardware to throw in a closet in your back room , you are paying for something as a service . That's the most basic level . From there we've got long ways to go A lot of room , a lot of headroom where we can talk about artificial intelligence and how that might apply to a phone system or to your point tracking a customer journey , and how you can do that with a phone system .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Right , because , if you think about it , when you're running a company , all these communications are happening that you know nothing about .
Lance Hood (FranPro)But if a system was able to transcribe that data , summarize that data , track that data track customer sentiment and everything else , you'd almost have a dashboard that would give you insights into what's going on with your company that you would have never been able to do before this time in history , because it would just be such a complex type of thing .
Lance Hood (FranPro)And then you have all that historical stuff where you can troubleshoot things that are happening either because of your sales process because you see these trends happening in general or due to individuals , where you see somebody's having extremely good success and you want to take that person and maybe learn from them and replicate it , or you want to take people that need to be kind of retrained so that they can respond in a way that matches the people who are having more success . The other thing that I see , though , is when customers come in and they interact with the system . They're coming in because of , either maybe , an ad right , so they're responding to marketing , and those people we could tell how responsive different marketing sources are , or how people are coming in and responding to that customer service . We can start looking for all these trends and work on the business , all because of your communication system that's using AI to pull this into a usable data .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)So yeah , absolutely . In fact , the traditional means of communication for most businesses is you've got an email inbox , you've got maybe stuff coming in off of your website , web chat and that's a different system , a different window that you have open , and then you've got your voice calls and your reports from your phone system , and it's always been traditionally really difficult to correlate all of that data . And what you find with a company like Nextiva is that , exactly like you said we'll take a look at it here in a little bit a dashboard that brings all of that data into one view , into a single view , where you have a threaded communication and you can really start to assess how people are communicating .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Right , because if people are just using their personal cell phones , you're losing all that data , so you're blind on what's happening . And then the other thing is is if they leave , the customer's point of contact is that cell phone which is now transferred to a new company . And I can tell you I've called many franchise companies . You know they don't , their team members don't stick around indefinitely , and so now they're part of someone else and they're getting all these phone calls and they might even be disgruntled . So I think , having a system like this , it's just more effective for a company . So let's go through the customer journey and the different services you provide along the way in a way that it's easy for people to grasp each step of the way what's covered .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Sure , sure . So in the beginning , what we like to do is lay out a map of what a customer's needs might be , especially in a franchise environment . We need to determine what does the corporate office look like , and then what is the template going to be for those individual franchise locations . Once we've laid that groundwork out , it becomes exceedingly easy to duplicate a location and this is something else we can take a look at in a live demo here in a little bit where you've got templates that are pre-built , where you can literally deploy a brand new location in five minutes flat . Now there's always question about hoarding of phone numbers . If there's existing phone numbers to port , that's always the longest poll in the tent . 30 days is typically what that's going to take . Now , nextiva is a phone carrier , so if we're issuing new phone numbers , then it becomes incredibly fast to deploy new locations . We're talking a matter of days , not a matter of weeks or months .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Nice , and so we're talking . You guys do phone , you guys do like chat . What are all the different services communication services that you guys will provide Sure so ?
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)the primary interface or dashboard that we look at . It's a phone first and foremost , but in that dashboard you have the ability to connect any email account , whether that's Outlook or Gmail , whatever the case might be . You also have the ability to send and receive SMS , mms , text messages from your business phone number , which I view is really critically important , because it goes back to what you said If you issue an employee a cell phone , or if you have them use their own cell phone and they take that number with them , well , where do your customers end up ? They end up going back to that person that they know and that phone number that that employee has . So we think that is really a critical component . In addition , we have a dashboard that can handle social media as well as your web chat and bring that all into a single interface so that , no matter how your customers like to communicate with you , it's being done by an employee using a single interface . Single pane of glass makes things much , much easier for the employee , but then , ultimately , the information as a business owner that you can derive from that is also critically important .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)How many text messages did we get into our sales queue today ? How many web chats did we get ? How many emails did we get ? How many Twitter mentions were there today ? Were they good or bad Twitter mentions ? Do we need to take some kind of proactive measure to combat bad reviews on social media and again pulling all of that into a single interface ? To me , that's the strength , that's the power of the product .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Yeah , because otherwise things that aren't pulled into a centralized place where they stick up and you can check the pulse on everything , they become invisible and then you're less likely to check it if you have to manually do all these one-off items and it just gets more and more complicated . So pulling them all into a central dashboard means that you're going to actually watch , measure and improve what you're doing . So part of that is your reputation management .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)It is , and that's actually a new product for Nextiva . It's not homegrown we purchased a company and we're in the process of developing that and integrating it with our current product set . But it's a very unique product in that it can monitor all of social media and proactively notify you , using AI , proactively notify you if there's perhaps some bad reviews , whether that be Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever social media is out there , so that you can respond in an instant and get on top of that . I think studies have shown that even if you have bad mentions or bad reviews , if you're hyper responsive to those , the customers are likely to stick with . So I think that's an important component .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Yeah , and probably also more likely to rescind it or amend it because they feel heard and taken care of . And the longer people stew , the more needles they look to poke in you because they're stewing about it , and so quicker is important and if you're getting that and proactively reaching out , I mean that's worth a lot .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Yeah , I agree . I agree , and one of the things that we haven't even talked about yet we realized that there are customers out there who already have their own CRM , their own point of sale system where they store all of their customer information . We're not trying to displace that , in fact , just the opposite .
API and AI in Nextiva's Approach
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Nextiva is a very open company . What you'll hear in the industry is do you have an API ? Well , an API is just a method of one computer to talk to another computer , one network to another network , and what you find is that Nextiva is very much an API driven company . So we do development every day , and the result of that is you'll find Nextiva is already compatible with things like Salesforcecom or Microsoft Dynamics or Zendesk or Zoho . The list is enormous . I mean , we're talking 300 commonly used CRMs , point of sale systems , erps that are out there that we can already interface with today and store all of that data we were just talking about . Push that into your records database , whatever that might be .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Right so it can seamlessly fit with what you're already using . It just becomes the communication tool . You got it Exactly and you even you know I learned from talking with Eric that you guys have , like you know , the automated follow ups , like where people get like a survey , you know post conversation survey , so that you again get that additional touch with people on how they're doing , how they're feeling and the AI . So what I get to is the AI reads , it converts all the voice into text and then it assesses the sentiment or feeling of the people in the text and rates it , and so you can track the customer's journey on how they're feeling about your company at all times . But also , I mean , you have all these , these places to really research that data that you would never want to lose , because this is this is key to your business . This is really the I think it's the most essential stuff , and that AI makes it simpler by going through it for you .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)You bet that sentiment analysis is a key component . You just said it knowing how your customers feel , how they perceive you . It's important to stay on top of that and the quicker you respond , the happier , ultimately , that your customers are going to be . And I think that sentiment analysis is one component . I would tell you that there are many , many , many other use cases that are just as useful , and I'll give you a good example .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)During the pandemic , when COVID first came along , we had a lot of hospitals and assisted living facilities , even veterinary clinics , who needed to en masse notify their customers whether or not it was all right to come in . And if a customer was going to come in and visit , do they need to remain in the parking lot ? Do they need to be masked ? And most companies didn't have a way to do that . Nextiva offers that . That's part of our interactive voice response system . You can send out those text message blasts , those voice phone calls , from an AI , a bot , that says hey , I recognize you have an appointment today . When you get here , please stay parked in the parking lot and call this phone number . I'll follow this message up with a text to your cell phone number . What is your cell phone number . I think use cases like that that don't even normally occur to folks . That's what a system like Nextiva prepares any business .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Yeah , I love that . So am I missing anything ? I do like the call pop . That's cool if you want to talk about that , but also anything to do with how the AI flows through from the beginning to the end and the background . And then I want to talk about call centers , but can you start with the call pop ? Sure , sure .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)I think one of the most fundamental functions of a phone system these days is recognizing instantly who's calling you , why they might be calling you , having some context around that phone call . That's what call pop is about . Some people might simplify it and describe it as caller ID , but it's more than that Because , remember , this phone is a piece of software on your computer as well as a desktop and it rings in both places . But when it rings through on your computer it quite literally provides a call pop . So a window pops open and that window you're seeing not only the caller ID of that caller but you're seeing the history of that caller . Did they send you an email yesterday ? Did they send you a text message yesterday ? What's the last voicemail that they left you ? And seeing that all in one place , you immediately know oh , he's calling about his order . I forgot to get back to him yesterday and just having that little bit of context , it makes your folks answering phones a lot , a lot more efficient .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Right , what's their last sentiment ? Was it a frowny face ?
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Yeah , Exactly and you can really derive that , and that goes right into the AI and the sentiment analysis . So when that call comes in , imagine that a artificial intelligence is listening to that call in a completely secure and compliant way , and it's listening for not only keywords but it's listening for inflection up or down inflection . It's looking for volume and pace and , like any AI , it learns over time what most of your calls are like , and so you can begin to flag abnormal calls . When somebody gets excited and upset , maybe that phone call needs to escalate to a supervisor or automatically bridge in a supervisor so that they can take over that call . So you open the door to all of that with a product like that . Steven .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Wait so you can have it , listen and suggest to a supervisor to potentially enter that call to help intercede and save that situation .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)In real time . Yeah , you got it .
Lance Hood (FranPro)That's incredible . No-transcript . Yeah , yeah , wow . And then so let's say , as a franchise company , you guys work with quite a few franchise companies and so I see it as they have their business of you know they're talking with potential franchisees and so they have communication standards and follow up sequences and you know customer journey there . But then they also have , and then they have , support for their franchisees .
Lance Hood (FranPro)And then the third thing is they could have a call center where they handle leads for their local franchisees and take that in through either a national number or something and divide those leads out by zip code or however they do it , which seems to me to be a very effective way of , you know , bringing that in , because a lot of the bigger companies will have a call center versus having the individual units handle their own . So if they do choose to do something like this , I mean you could have an umbrella where the parent company has their account and the sub companies handle their own inbound calling and stuff and they just use the features . But you also have the option to do like a call center where they can handle it for their franchisees . Can you explain how that would work and how prepared you guys are to help people kind of like take that next step .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Absolutely , absolutely . I view that as one of the strengths and to me that's how you might prove the value of the brand is if you do have a centralized call center . This is a product set that is fully supported by Nextiva .
Brand Value and Gamification in Call Centers
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Then the inbound calls go to agents who are available and , again , using AI and sentiment analysis to analyze those phone calls , but also proactively route them to the right department based on caller ID or zip code or , as you said , whatever , whatever logic they want to use to route those phone calls To me . Where it all comes together , though , in improving the value of the brand , it all becomes reportable . We have exceptionally robust analytic tools , tools that will show you trend analysis over whatever period of time you want to look at . You can do analysis on calls into one group of people versus another group of people , or even comparisons between two users if you're trying to set benchmarks or KPIs for an individual employee . Tying all of that together , to me , is what helps justify the value .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)And to make a really simple analogy , imagine that you have multiple toll-free phone numbers that you're using for advertising . You're posting one on radio , you're posting one on TV , you're posting another one on billboards in a metropolitan area . How do you track the phone calls and judge the success of any one of those 800 numbers ? We don't want you having to shuffle through 19 pages of a bill from a phone company to try and determine which phone number , which 800 number , got the most calls . We want you to be able to look at one dashboard , one report that directly compares all three of those phone numbers and says here's the one with the most success .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Therefore , I can conclude that maybe I put more money into my radio advertising . Imagine doing that on a bigger scale . Imagine applying that to all inbound calls that you are handling for all of your franchise locations throughout the country and determining well , you know what . This one in Littleton , colorado , they're not getting a lot of volume , but Deadwood , south Dakota , is off the charts . Why is that ? You can start to dive into that and start to figure out why are we seeing those differences and how can we duplicate success elsewhere ?
Lance Hood (FranPro)Once you get into the numbers , that's where I love it . One of the things that we haven't discussed yet , and I'm so excited to get to a demo , but I just can't stop asking you questions . The other thing is gamification . Let's talk about that , because that's a big deal . I think that we should put some energy there .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Yeah , I would tell you , even in Nextiva , in our own call center , motivation for employees , especially in a call center , is always difficult . Let's face it , it's not an easy job . One of the fun ways that we can motivate people is through something we call gamification . That's not a Nextiva term , that's an industry term . What that is we can actually take a look at it here in a little bit is creating a dashboard with a contest that maybe the employee who takes the most calls for the day is at number one . It's turning it into a game using a football theme or a basketball , soccer , whatever it might be , using a fun theme . It's a way to keep people engaged and to run contests and to keep people motivated as they're doing a job . Let's face it is difficult . Answering 200 calls a day is a difficult job . Anything you can do to make that a little bit lighter , a little bit more fun , a little bit more engaging proves to be a huge benefit to the company .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Right . Even think if you have sales reps and there's a gamification behind keeping the ball rolling for their clients and this and that , that is it's valuable as it gives you that stats and readout . But also it's kind of an indirect way to help improve and manage your people , because they start to self-manage because of that running scoreboard . Some people won't want to be on that scoreboard but they're usually because they're not going to be near the top . Yeah , yeah , I think it's a great tool .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Yeah , you can run those . It doesn't have to be the number of calls . It could be the highest average talk time or it could be the fewest number of missed phone calls Just about any metric that you can think of associated with communications . You can run those contests and turn that into a game for people .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Right . Well , let's look at some demo Sure , sure .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Bear with me here . I'm going to reorganize my screens a little bit here and start sharing with you , okay , so I wanted to start here . So this is what we call NextOS . This is the underlying platform that powers everything , and there's just a couple of things that I want to touch on in here . One you're going to find that we don't use telephone language . In here . It is very easy to understand language like who's my users , what phones do they have ?
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)But , specific to our franchise customers , one of the biggest benefits is the templates that we use . The templates , what they are , are actual flowcharts that show specifically what happens to calls as they come into a phone number or a location , and it's all programmable , very , very easy to adjust and design . So here's the scenario we get this down for the initial franchise location , that initial business , and we determine you know this is going to be similar across all of my locations they're going to operate on a schedule . You need to find whatever you want that schedule to be , and then you logically start to branch out and you say here's what happens when we're open , here's what happens when we're closed . Maybe , when we're open , calls go through to a central team . They ring three times , and then they ring another team .
Lance Hood (FranPro)And if nobody answers ?
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)maybe it goes to a voicemail box . But when we are closed and there's nobody to answer the phone , perhaps we go a different route . When we're closed , maybe we give customers a menu , a choice Press one for this , press two for that , your standard everyday menu . So you map all of that out and , by the way , next to it does this for you . I'm just showing you as an example because you do have access to it . You have control over it .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)But once that initial template is done , here's how easy it is to open a new location . I literally click duplicate . That creates an exact copy . I rename that copy , so I'll call this one Denver or whatever the name might be for that location , and I adjust the phone number and then I hit the little go live button down at the bottom . Literally inside 30 seconds I just deployed a new location . Now there's still some questions about shipping physical devices , the phones , out to the sites and things like that , but technically I can go live with a brand new location just that fast . I think that's really , really powerful . These templates come in exceptionally easy and they're unlimited , so there's no extra charge . You'll find that next to it doesn't Nickel and dime folks for every extra mailbox or every extra phone menu or auto attendant . I think that's a really really neat component and this is something , by the way , that we normally do in an hour long demo with folks . We dive into all the details in here . This is just a taste of what it looks like .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)I think the other component that is really important to share is the dashboard , is the interface that you're going to use for phone calls and when an email comes in or when a text message comes in . What you're looking at on my screen . This is quite literally a phone . I've got a dial pad . I've got all of my contacts . If I want to make a phone call very simple , one or two clicks . If I have a desk phone , it's actually two clicks because I can choose to call either from the computer or the desk phone , which is the case for me , but in this case we'll just use the computer to call . I've got very simple little controls up here at the top that allow me to do all the things that a phone normally does transfer a call , put a call on hold , All of your basic things that you normally think of as buttons on a telephone .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)But here's where this becomes really powerful this phone call that I just made . If I click into that call log , what you're going to see here is literally a communication thread , Very similar to how we all deal with email . You look at an email and you see every previous email . This is the exact same thing . I'm seeing text messages that I've exchanged with this person . I'm seeing phone calls and voice mails and if I've exchanged any emails , those are all in line in this message thread here . So to me , that is what gives you that context . That's what allows you to handle your customers as quickly and efficiently as possible .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Well , yeah , and if you're going to follow up with somebody again , you just quickly scan back to the last conversations and you can kind of see what they're doing . You can also understand how they respond . They might not respond to phone , well , but if you start with a text , they will .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Excellent point , excellent point . And the other component here that we haven't even really touched on is the ability to have meeting rooms , similar to many of the video conferencing products that are out there . Nextiva includes video conferencing inside of this tool , so I can actually do a video conference with 250 participants if I like , and I can share my screen and I can record that session . So if I'm offering training , maybe for a new franchise location and the employees at that location , I might record that and then store that to a drive later and share that with them so that they have it for reference . So it really , at the end of the day , it is a all in one communication tool , and that's that's how we look at it . Rather than having all these different silos of communication , we're bringing it all into a single dashboard , single view , which makes things much , much easier for employees .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Right , and I love having all that communication there , but I really like all of the history and all of the data in there in one place and also the ability to go through and analyze that data to perfect what you're doing , because , I mean , I'm a little nervous that that Batman's iPhone is now out to the public , but we try and have some fun with our phone numbers , so we'll storm as unique contacts like that .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)But yeah , to your point . Having all of that visible in one place makes it very easy for employees .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Well , excellent . Is there anything else that you think would be of use to share right now so that they can understand it or they can get a gist ?
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Yeah , one more thing that we touched on in the earlier conversation , talking about gamification One of the things that Nextiva really , really excels at is the analytics , is the reporting , and so what you're going to see me do here is I clicked on my main NextOS dashboard and I opened the reporting module here . One more click and I come into a monitoring dashboard . In this case , this is showing me employees and various metrics . If I want to turn this into a game for folks , you'll see right up here at the top gamification , and right off the bat it's calculating okay , this individual has the most phone calls .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)If I want to change that , or let's do this , let's apply a theme to it . We'll turn it into a kind of a football theme here , and then we can say you know what ? Maybe inbound calls is what I really care about , and you can see in the background . There , that's refreshed . I might pop that out , throw it on a TV where everyone can see it and all of a sudden we've got exactly what you were just talking about we're keeping people motivated and engaged , where we're ensuring that productivity goes up because people feel like they're part of a team .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Yep , it's fun and it's public . I've seen that whenever numbers are public , they improve , you know , and because people enjoy being on the top and as long as everybody's like encouraging everybody , but also nobody likes to be on the bottom , so people speed up to show up , and so , yeah , I definitely see a big value in this .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Yeah sometimes you even see these in doctors offices . For instance , they'll put it in the lobby where all of their patients can see , because they want to brag about how fast they answer the phone . So there's various applications for gamification to your point , to keep everyone more engaged .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Well , I like it . Do you have any quick ? Do you have any of this kind of example data that would show customer sentiment or any of that reporting type stuff around that ?
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)You know it's too new , I do not have it yet , or I should say I don't have a long enough runway to show anything meaningful for it .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Okay .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)But we will shortly , in the very near future , very nice .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Excellent . So now that we've talked about all that , what is the rough kind of like the steps of getting people on board ? I know you kind of touched on it , but I just want to touch on the basic steps of getting them on boarded and then I want to get a rough timeline of how long that generally takes .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Sure , you know , I would tell you , first and foremost , next to you , is very flexible . We find that working with franchisers is typically a very different process from working with the single location corporate account customer , and so I think it's important to mention that we actually have a dedicated franchise team at Nextiva , and that team excels at duplicating and building that business in a box that you can very quickly replicate . But prior to all of that , we need to understand the business and what they do and how they answer phone calls . So the initial phase is a consultation where we're going to ask you know , how do you answer calls , how do your customers engage with you ? And from there we're going to build the templates . Once we have those templates and contracts are signed , at that point a project manager is assigned and that project manager builds the account , which , depending on the quantity of users , can take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks , and during that build phase it's very consultative in nature , so we're making recommendations on best practices , things that we've seen work well for others .
Phone Number Porting and Franchise Deployment
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)But we've also initiated the porting of phone numbers and , as I mentioned before , that's typically the longest process is getting phone numbers from AT&T or Verizon or whoever it might be . That's always the most difficult process . In fact we have an entire porting department that does nothing but that they work with those other carriers to get those phone numbers over . So if there are no porting number phone numbers coming in , if it's just new phone numbers , then that shortens the time frame considerably to . We've had emergency situations where customers needed to be up within the same week . We can do that with new phone numbers . So typical process start to finish is 30 to 45 days when phone number porting is involved . Without it we're I'll say two weeks to 30 days is typical .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Okay , and you have a dedicated department that is used to helping franchise companies . That's awesome .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Yeah , we found that that was really necessary . We've been doing it for a long , long time . We found that that was necessary because the corporate office requirements are often quite different than the individual franchise locations , and what we found is that deploying the individual franchise locations requires very little modification most of the time .
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Typically , it's pretty similar from location to location , so having a dedicated account manager who one knows the corporate office but also knows the overall setup of those franchise locations . We think is really important but having the technicians on that franchise team who are accustomed to the call flow and the scenario is really critical for speed of deployment so that we can get new locations turned up very quickly .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Very nice , and is there anything that the people can do to speed up or shortcut the process of , you know , rolling into your system and using it effectively ?
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)Well , I would tell you there's one really key thing that my onboarding folks always , always ask us to get , and if you have it ahead of time , it helps . And again I hate to say it , it comes back to porting and phone numbers . If you have a current bill that shows all of your existing phone numbers that you want to port , that is going to cut days , if not a week or more , out of the time frame . If you have that in the beginning , that gives us a very clear picture of what we need to do to initiate and get that phone number port started while we're building out the accounts .
Lance Hood (FranPro)Very nice . Well , I love it . If you want to learn more about Naxtiva go here https://Franpro . vip/GoNextiva2 . Very excited to feature you , Matt . Do you have anything else you'd like to share with everybody before we go ?
Matthew Nelson (Nextiva)You know I don't , I don't . Thank you for having me . I really really appreciate the opportunity to talk to folks about the product set . As you can tell , obviously I'm biased , but I believe in the company and the product set , so thank you for having me , Absolutely .