Hosted PBXs Customers Love: Nextiva, RingCentral

By John Malone, President and CEO, Eastern Management Group

Hosted PBX providers are just waiting to sell new systems to business customers. Some of these vendors are exceptional, others acceptable, and more than a handful are no better than just OK. Ferreting out the best is a whole lot easier when thousands of IT manager customers rate their vendor for all to see.

Customer Satisfaction Research

In a new PBX global customer satisfaction study, the Eastern Management Group had 3,000 IT manager customers judge their providers on 10 customer satisfaction measurements, in three groups:

•  Product
  Measurements: Technology & Product, Reliability and Management Tools
•  Vendor Experience
  Measurements: Purchase Experience, Installation, Support and Contact Center Experience
•  Customer Delight
  Measurements: Value, Overall Satisfaction and Recommend to a Friend

I’ll focus on Recommend to a Friend, one of the 10 customer satisfaction measurements and arguably the one most important to customers. The two UCaaS vendors receiving the highest customer scores for Recommend to a Friend were RingCentral and Nextiva.

Our study evaluated 23 widely used vendors of hosted and cloud systems. The full research results are in our report: 2018 Premises and Hosted PBX Customer Satisfaction.

Hosted and Cloud Systems

Recommend to a Friend Leaders

Eastern Management Group considers Recommend To A Friend the capstone measurement in the customer satisfaction study. It is a customer distinction, a pledge of confidence and loyalty to their vendor.

Nextiva — Designed for SMBs looking for a UCaaS system, a visit to the Nextiva web site shows the emphasis on value. The price per seat is affordable for even small businesses – many Nextiva customers have just one or two employees.

Nextiva has made a smart move into a largely untapped market; as our research shows 52% of U.S. businesses are home-based. Nextiva also has a significant number of customers whose businesses range from 50-100 employees. Small business target-marketing places Nextiva smack-dab in the largest UCaaS systems marketplace.

Customers give Nextiva an exceptionally high net promoter score (NPS), a recognition that may instill confidence in small businesses that may yet be unfamiliar with Nextiva.

Nextiva received top honors in 4 of 10 UCaaS Customer Satisfaction Measurements.

RingCentral — I recently attended a trade show where RingCentral showcased some of the numerous accolades bestowed on the company: first in this, best in that. Customers like doing business with RingCentral, and profess this sentiment openly.

In our survey, RingCentral took top honors in …