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Nextiva Review
Table of Contents
- Nextiva provides the same great 24/7 customer service with all subscription levels.
- It offers centrally managed multisite and location-specific routing options.
- The vendor offers brand management and customer engagement tools with every plan.
- Nextiva integrates with fewer third-party platforms than its top competitors.
- The entry-level VoIP plan does not include virtual fax or video and call recording.
- It lacks AI capabilities that rivals provide on similarly priced plans.
Ensuring consistent, secure communications across multiple channels and locations is challenging if you don’t have unified call routing and analytics tools. Nextiva’s business phone system centralizes multisite management and eliminates the barriers retail chains and healthcare networks face when implementing PCI and HIPAA-compliant communications. User-friendly features and scalable omnichannel tools round out this platform’s offerings, making it our top choice for retailers and healthcare providers with multiple locations.
The simple drag-and-drop interface makes designing your call flow easy. Image source: Nextiva
Nextiva Editor's Rating:
9.5 / 10
- Pricing
- 9.3/10
- Ease of use
- 9.8/10
- Features
- 9.3/10
- Integrations
- 9.4/10
- Customer service
- 9.8/10
Why Nextiva Is Best for Multisite Retail and Healthcare
Nextiva provides secure communications and robust tools for managing interactions across all locations, devices and channels. It maintains eight North American data centers and uses a multi-layered security approach to ensure network reliability and security, including proactive fraud mitigation monitoring.
All business phone customers benefit from Nextiva’s in-depth security protocols and technologies. However, its turnkey PCI and HIPAA-compliant solutions set Nextiva apart from competitors, making it our top pick for retail and health providers. For starters, we love how Nextiva automates PCI compliance for merchants through its advanced IVR Credit Card Payment solution.
In addition, with a signed business associate agreement, Nextiva automatically limits the functionality or turns off features that don’t meet HIPAA standards. Other business phone providers, like RingEX or Zoom, provide instructions on configuring your system for HIPAA-compliant communications. While this option offers flexibility, business owners who operate multiple locations may find the additional manual setup and monitoring tasks more burdensome.
Nextiva’s multisite management tools also caught our attention. Retail and medical groups can review call recordings for compliance and training, update or edit VoIP phones and track call volumes for all locations from one control panel. At the user level, we found its shared digital inboxes and unified communications features invaluable for customer-facing teams. Because Nextiva’s unified Customer Experience Management (CXM) platform easily scales across channels and sites, it’s an excellent business phone system for healthcare practices and retail outlets.
Usability
Nextiva provides beginner-friendly apps for admins and employees. The drag-and-drop call flow builder is one of the simplest and most user-friendly we tested in our annual review of business phone systems. This easy-to-use visual tool helps anyone design call flows across multiple locations.
We were impressed with the NextOS admin app. The interface is well-designed with concise labels. Office managers or business owners can quickly see or edit locations, licenses, users and teams from one spot. This clean design also helps retailers and health providers monitor call recordings. We liked the updated search filter options, which let admins save frequently used filters, search by time frames and sort by inbound or outbound calls.
Updates to Nextiva’s unified communication app, NextivaONE, also improve employee experiences. It lets staff customize notifications for different channels, set up advanced contact filters and create a frequently contacted list. We really like how seamless the experience feels when switching between devices on voice or video calls.
Nextiva Features
Turnkey Compliance Solutions | Offers easy-to-deploy communication systems for accepting payments and handling protected health information. |
|---|---|
Multisite Administration and Analytics | Provides centralized management for calls, interactions, users, devices and analytics. |
Call Flow Builder | Makes building and changing call flows easy for first-time users. |
Multi-channel Management |
Supplies scalable tools for supporting and engaging clients across multiple channels. |
All Nextiva plans with VoIP service support multiple locations, including multisite automatic call routing, internal transfers and call forwarding. Like competitors, the phone system unifies voice, video and text messaging. Here are the features and tools that stood out for retail and healthcare organizations.
Turnkey Compliance Solutions
The best business phone systems offer top-notch security, are PCI-certified and support HIPAA-compliant communications. But Nextiva doesn’t just “enable” compliance; built-in solutions automate it. Rather than manually configuring settings for each HIPAA communication channel and location, which is what many phone services require, Nextiva turns off or limits the functionality of unsupported features.
We also appreciate that merchants are automatically PCI compliant when using Nextiva’s advanced IVR Credit Card Payment system. Retailers and health providers can accept phone payments and offer clients self-service options without the burden of monitoring multiple locations and networks for PCI compliance.
Automate PCI compliance across retail and health locations using Nextiva’s secure, advanced IVR Credit Card Payment solution. Source: Nextiva
Multisite Administration and Analytics
Not all business phone systems support multiple locations on all plans. With Nextiva, all subscriptions let retailers and health providers add locations, users and VoIP phones from a central dashboard. You can edit hardware without visiting offices or stores and access call recordings to assess compliance or quality across locations.
We were impressed with Nextiva’s reporting tools, which show the site, call group and user details. Real-time monitoring and historical trends come with voice analytics on upper-tier plans. Customizing and scheduling options made this feature especially appealing for businesses with site and district management teams.
Compare sales or support teams across locations using Nextiva Voice Analytics. Source: Nextiva
Call Flow Builder
We like how this phone platform is structured around a convenient drag-and-drop system. Its system lets you visualize your call flow when you’re working from the demo template or starting from scratch. For new call flows, the system will prompt you to select the primary inbound number and any additional numbers you want to follow the same call flow.
Suggested steps for the next action, like directing callers to your business hours, phone menu, users and teams, voicemail or transfer out, are provided. These suggested steps help you build a user-friendly system quickly. Drop-down menus with prefilled options are available to help you pick the best features for each stage, including turning on settings like round-robin distribution for your sales team. This ensures each team member receives a fair number of opportunities to speak with new customers.
Keep patients or clients informed of last-minute changes by editing phone menu greetings and call flows without turning off the service. Source: Nextiva
Multi-channel Management
Few VoIP systems offer digital channel management on base plans, and omnichannel tools are typically only found with the best contact center services. Nextiva takes a different approach by providing a digital-only package and shared inboxes with all VoIP subscriptions. We liked that small teams can schedule social media posts through their phone system and get alerts when customers post online reviews.
Nextiva can help scale customer support and engagement for retail chains and healthcare groups as well. It offers webchat, live tools and unified text messaging inboxes. When combined with the automation features of the advanced IVR system, companies can manage more channels and conversations without sacrificing quality or speed.
Nextiva’s omnichannel dashboard shows client interactions across live chat, surveys, email and more. Source: Nextiva
Nextiva Costs
Nextiva VoIP pricing starts at $36 monthly or $30 annually per user. It offers a lower-priced digital-only package as its base plan that costs $25 monthly and scales to an inbound sales and service call center at its top tier, which is priced at $75 monthly. Other discounts may be available if you enter a 12-, 24- or 36-month contract.
Our review of business phone system pricing noted that Nextiva’s plans cost slightly more than average, especially when paying annually. For example, it costs $10 to $15 less per user for entry-tier subscriptions from RingEX and Dialpad. Yet, neither vendor supports multiple locations on their base package. Both charge $25 annually for multisite plans compared to Nextiva’s $30.
Plan | Price (billed monthly) | Features |
|---|---|---|
Digital | $25 per user per month |
Group email inbox, social media and review management and digital messaging apps |
Core | $36 per user per month | Everything in the Digital plan, plus Unlimited calls within the U.S./Canada, simple IVR, 100 SMS per user, team chat, video meetings and voicemail transcription |
Engage | $50 per user per month | Everything in the Core plan, plus Virtual fax, 250 SMS per user, customer-to-team text messaging, toll-free number and 2,000 minutes, live chat, voice analytics, video and call recording and chatbot |
Power Suite | $75 per user per month | Everything in the Engage plan, plus Inbound sales and service call center, 10,000 toll-free minutes, unlimited SMS per user, advanced IVR, unified voice and digital platform and unlimited channel integrations |
Nextiva Setup
Businesses can set up accounts and settings for all locations in the NextOS admin portal. For the quickest installation, we recommend watching the NextOS videos that suit your needs. Most are short, but they all help familiarize you with the system.
In our experience, the onboarding process was straightforward. Nextiva uses your billing information to create your first location, and after you enter site details into basic forms, it populates another location. For multisite organizations with larger workforces, Nextiva offers a bulk import option for users and devices. It provides templates for both, which streamlines the process.
After assigning users to locations, you can configure site settings, like custom hold music or business hours. For most modern business phone systems, the bulk of the setup work is in building call flows. Nextiva makes this process especially easy with its drag-and-drop call flow builder that lets you visualize how calls will move through your system. You can just as simply make adjustments as needed later on.
Nextiva Customer Service
We appreciate how Nextiva serves all of its customers equally well with the same 24/7 customer support for all plans. If you need assistance, you can call Nextiva for live phone support around the clock. It also offers live chat seven days a week during peak hours, email and ticketing support options.
Nextiva’s resource center provides webinars, quick start account guides, product updates, system status information and password reset options. Users can explore helpful how-to videos, get tips on setting up a menu to greet callers and explore advanced features like voice analytics.
Still, Nextiva’s support documentation isn’t up to par with those of competitors like RingEX. The tutorials could be refreshed to reflect Nextiva’s new subscription plans, provide video transcriptions and guide users through workflows rather than require them to click through a series of short web pages. In our RingEX review, we explain how the providers’ comprehensive guides help businesses get the most out of their phone system.
Nextiva Drawbacks
Although Nextiva stands out for its built-in PCI and HIPAA-compliant communication solutions, it falls behind competitors in other aspects. While the video conferencing service supports 250 attendees, only 25 can actively participate via video, while the rest can join through audio. In our review of Zoom, we found this platform better for company-wide meetings or telehealth visits.
Nextiva also lacks the AI features that come with many phone systems. Top competitors, including RingEX and Zoom, offer video or voice transcription features with VoIP plans. Nextiva does not provide clear documentation or evidence that its unified CXM platform currently includes AI-enabled call or video summaries.
Lastly, organizations with international locations or clients may prefer a solution with unlimited global calling and support for international staff. Our 8×8 review details how this provider helps companies scale worldwide.
Methodology
We researched and analyzed more than a dozen of the industry’s leading business phone systems. Our investigations included participating in product demos, conducting independent research, and testing a variety of phone systems through paid and free trial accounts. Each examination considered factors like pricing, ease of use, features, customer service availability and implementation.
We found Nextiva to be the best business phone system for multisite retail and healthcare organizations because of its easy-to-use interface, mix-and-match plans and HIPAA-compliant security features.
Nextiva FAQs
Overall Value
We recommend Nextiva for …
- Businesses that want out-of-the-box solutions for PCI and HIPAA compliance.
- Companies looking to scale customer service and engagement.
- Management teams that need custom reports.
We don’t recommend Nextiva for …
- Very small businesses and independent contractors looking for basic phone service.
- Companies that would prefer an extensive list of third-party integration options.
- Organizations wanting AI capabilities for standard phone users.
Jeff Hale contributed to this article.
