Nextiva Analytics: Is the VoIP Feature Worth the Upgrade?
Corey McCraw is a staff writer covering VoIP and Unified Communications. Corey has over a decade of experience in marketing, tech writing, and corporate communications and has even penned content for the former First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative.
Rain is a staff writer at Fit Small Business focusing on sales, such as VoIP and video conferencing.
This article is part of a larger series on VoIP.
Nextiva Analytics is a powerful tool for monitoring customer satisfaction and agent performance offered as part of Nextiva’s unified communications platform—called the NextOS. It enables businesses to generate call activity reports and access survey analytics, staffing requirements, and gamification tools, but does require you to upgrade to an Enterprise-level plan, which costs $32.95 per user.
If your business does not experience heavy call traffic or does not want to track voice metrics like average handle time, this feature may not be worth the cost of upgrading your business phone service. However, Nextiva Analytics is a value for call centers that want to leverage Nextiva’s business phone service’s other benefits and use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure agent performance and improve the overall caller experience.
Metrics You Can Monitor Using Nextiva Analytics
Nextiva Analytics tracks essential call center metrics and KPIs to enhance efficiency in both customer and employee experiences. Additionally, it helps identify opportunities for improvement to ensure that your business is maintaining the top-notch quality of service.
Nextiva Analytics lets users set up views to display metrics that are the most important for the business. (Source: Nextiva)
Here are some of the many call center metrics and KPIs it comes with:
- Total number of calls: Its value is the sum of all types of calls received in the specified period. Types include inbound and outbound calls.
- Average speed-to-answer (ASA): Its value can be obtained by dividing the total number of calls from the total number of wait and ring times of the calls answered.
- Average handle time (AHT): This is calculated by the sum of the talk, hold, and wrap-up time divided by the total number of calls answered.
- Average wait time: This metric is the total number of wait times divided by the number of calls answered. Average wait time in queue is also available for those with the automatic call distribution (ACD) feature.
- Number of calls completed service level: This is the number of ACD calls completed within the requested service level. Calls completed at the service level are those where the talk time plus the hold time is less than the performance parameter specified by the user.
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): The total number of all customer satisfaction scores is divided by the total number of answered post-call surveys to obtain the percentage.
Nextiva captures many more metrics focused on agent and call center activities and employee and customer feedback. Those interested may contact its sales team for more information.
Nextiva Analytics Key Features & Benefits
Nextiva Analytics is packed with a wide range of tools for measuring call activity, call center metrics, and incentivizing continuous improvement. It also makes this information easy to digest using customizable dashboards and reports.
Nextiva Analytics is able to do this with the following features:
Feature | Description |
|---|---|
Reports include real-time or historical data about one or more agents or call centers. | |
Dashboards display a collection of reports as tables or charts and metrics as tiles for easier monitoring of their progress. | |
This tool presents customer and employee feedback and helps uncover trends, improve performance quickly, and track how they feel in real time. | |
Display your top priority metrics on large screens or televisions to help your team monitor real-time statistics. | |
Ensure that you have enough agents during call spikes through analytics tools, such as trend analysis and filters. | |
Engage employees to encourage healthy competition through gamification features, such as scorecards and custom wallboards displaying agent rankings. |
Let’s discuss each in more detail below.
Reports
Nextiva’s reporting tool provides a view of data, such as call activity summaries, through graphs, charts, maps, and other visuals. You can utilize standard templates or customize reports, selecting which metrics and periods to display. You can also export these reports into an Excel file as needed.
The Nextiva Analytics dashboard displays real-time and historical information of your call center activities. (Source: Nextiva)
Businesses also track marketing campaign effectiveness through analytics. For example, you can assign a specific number for every campaign to easily track its success in attracting leads. Additionally, those running multiple regional or national campaigns can utilize reporting filters to determine which performs better and where. The data gathered and displayed by Nextiva Analytics then helps businesses decide which areas to target more.
Dashboards
A dashboard is a collection of reports displayed as tables or charts. It also displays metrics through tiles that include indicators, showing if the metric improved or declined during the selected period. While users can choose from system-generated templates, those subscribed to the business phone system’s Enterprise licenses have the option to create custom dashboards from scratch.
Users can easily drag and drop views and metrics to display the data that matters most to their business. (Source: Nextiva)
Aside from creating dashboards from templates or scratch, Nextiva also allows users to edit, duplicate, and delete dashboards. You can configure the dashboard settings to specify where you want to publish the dashboard and if you want to share it with all users or specific individuals.
Survey Analytics
Nextiva lets you capture customer and employee feedback—enabling you to create more informed business decisions. Survey analytics helps businesses in a variety of ways, including determining employee and customer satisfaction and conducting market research. Reports generated from survey responses can also be exported into a PDF, JPG, PNG, or CSV file, depending on the data you are choosing to export.
Nextiva lets you evaluate real-time survey results and turn them into customized reports. (Source: Nextiva)
Note that survey features, including analytics, are available only to users subscribed to a Business Communication Ultimate plan. Aside from analytics, this tier comes with a drag-and-drop survey builder, a custom landing page, email alerts, customization, and branding. Those interested can request a demo to find out if it suits your needs.
Wallboards
Wallboards display a set of metrics on large screens to help businesses monitor call center statistics in real time. Users can highly customize these views, including data displayed through filters, metrics, themes, and types. Wallboard type options to choose from are Users, Locations, Call Groups, and Custom Groups.
Customize wallboards to monitor the most important metrics to your business. (Source: Nextiva)
Like dashboards, users can create, edit, delete, and duplicate wallboards. Configuration settings are available as well, letting you specify who can have access to these wallboards. Aside from monitoring, wallboards are also used in employee engagement and gamification.
Staffing Requirements
Businesses need to ensure that there are available agents to address their customers’ needs. Nextiva lets you review historical data when your call center receives a larger volume of calls. You can also filter information by a variety of categories, such as specific phone numbers, locations, and call groups.
Select from data display options, including trend analysis, comparison, period over period, and call duration. (Source: Nextiva)
Apart from the usual information, such as the total number of calls on certain hours or dates, missed calls are also to look into in making staffing decisions. Check if there are also spikes in missed calls as these can be caused by the lack of available agents. Remember, a missed conversation is a missed opportunity or lead.
Gamification
If your business has on-site teams, you can utilize customized gamification wallboards on your call floors. You can set up a display of your agents’ rankings to help agents stay motivated to earn first place. These wallboards are updated in real time—helping agents stay on track of their goals and determine how they’re performing compared with their peers.
Use gamification tools to encourage engagement and healthy competition among employees. (Source: Nextiva)
Positive employee engagement keeps them motivated—leading to better business results. Metrics for the leaderboards may differ depending on the team or business needs. For example, support agents can compete over the shortest time to resolve issues, while sales teams can compete over the total number of calls made to their leads.
Not convinced that Nextiva Analytics’ features are right for you? Check out our guide on the best call center phone systems for alternatives to consider.
Why Businesses Need Tools Like Nextiva Analytics
The Nextiva Analytics feature is a beneficial tool for companies handling high call volumes. It tracks your call center’s activities, including survey responses from your customers and employees. The data it gathers and presents helps analyze trends, create better business decisions, measure team and agent performance, predict future business results, and increase sales.
Users’ access to both real-time and historical data is also impressive, alongside the creation of custom reports, dashboards, and wallboards with an easy-to-use interface. These features ensure that your business is on top of customer needs. For example, if you are seeing a trend of an increase in missed calls at a certain time, you can then assign more staff to handle the spike in call volume.
Thinking of replacing your traditional line with a cloud-based solution? Read our guide on how to set up a VoIP system to find out the necessary steps to get started.
Bottom Line
Nextiva comes with an analytics tool that captures real-time and historical data of the call center’s activities. This information helps supervisors and managers monitor customer experience and agent performance. Additionally, it provides a wide range of call metrics, including the total number of calls, wait time, and customer satisfaction.
Learn more about its whole platform by visiting Nextiva’s website.
