Nextiva

From the beginning there were problems. Porting and set-up took weeks due to incompetent Nextiva employees. Have been with them for 2+ years and have had recurring problems with dropped calls. Technical support is horrid! As a non-technical person, I was suggesting options to technicians. (They should offer me a job!) My latest issue was with dropped calls on my 800 number. Nextiva refuses to take responsibility for the problem and has charged me for over a month of dropped calls to my 800 number. They put me on hold for minutes at a time (on my cell phone, no less!), do not return calls and are generally incompetent! I am finally biting the bullet and am going to drop them. Can anyone recommend a good business VOIP service for my business?

AVOID THIS COMPANY LIKE THE PLAGUE!

Of all the decisions we've made for our small business in the seven years we've been operating, Nextiva was by far and away the most regretful and damaging. If I found a genie in a bottle, I would have only one wish: That I had never heard of Nextiva! We could NEVER in a million years recommend Nextiva.

I lost half my calls for four months, they tried to help but I had to educate their staff on some of the finer points of VoIP and Asterisk usage, they were pretty uneducated and never fixed anything. I switched to them because I wanted phone support, and I have since moved to Sipstation, which saved me a lot of money per month and works much better.

We were ported to Nextiva 5 days ago;Nextiva did no testing done prior to the port;our phones have been down since the porting.;We can get to tier 1 support and they cannot transfer to Tier 2 support to resolve the problem;They will not cancel the port - so we are stuck with them for now. Beware

I thought the service was great for the first month.  I then received complaints from business associates that they kept hearing sounds as though I was hitting keys on my phone during the call and found it distracting and making it necessary for me to repeat myself frequently.  Undoubtedly, potential customers heard this and chose not to tell me how bad the connection was which certainly did not help the good impression I was trying to promote.  I spent 1 month not knowing about the problem and two months trying to resolve the issue with Nextiva.  I spent hours and hours on the phone with them. I replaced the modem with my cable company, replaced the Nextiva adapter, and purchased a new router from Nextiva.  I also had numerous technical adjustments maded from Nextiva.  I was probably told 5 times that the most recent solution effort would almost certainly resolve my problem.  One tech support person said the chances of his solution being successful was 99.5%. Nothing ever helped.

I finally had to give up and move on.  When I went with another provider (my cable company) I have had no voice issues, but found out that the number Nextiva provided me was not portable.  This caused me to have to spend money to redo my business cards and advertising materials.  Businesses who may decide at a later date to call me on the old number will not reach me.

Nextiva did not financially refund me what they should have. They charged me for 3 months of inferior voice quality.  They knew they were doing this for the last 2 months. The adapter I purchased and was then replaced was not refundable because I had the original adapter over 30 days.  I only had the replacement adapter for two weeks and it did not resolve the issue.  I am stuck with a $55 adapter plus shipping that never worked.  I paid $87 for a router from Nextiva that I was assured would resolve my issue.  After 5 phone calls, they finally gave me instructions for sending it back.  I will see if they refund the purchase price of the router as they told me they would.  I am still stuck with the paying the cost of delivery of this router and also the cost of sending it back.  I have spent over $250 for inferior Nextiva services that will not be refunded.  Obviously I also am out the cost of replacing all of my advertising materials due to the lack of portability of Nextiva's number.

Clearly many Nextiva customers are not having these technical issues.  Without these issues, I would be happy with their service.  If you go with them, just realize that if you have problems, they will not make it right.

I signed up for Nextiva recently. The sales rep was responsive and quick to adjust the quote to include the changes I required. Since then the experience has not been great. Nextiva gives the impression that much of their focus is on image and sales, and much less so in the area of technical support. So once you’re signed up, it feels like they are much less interested in dealing with you. See exhaustively detailed issues below:

• Uploading audio file for use in auto-attendant or voicemail -- Description in Office Manager user guide states “8 or 16 kbps WAV file”. The file upload wizard defaults to .au file type. Numerous audio file formats were attempted unsuccessfully. In order to determine the actual file format required, it was necessary to download the default Nextiva auto-attendant audio file and analyze the format. Actual required format is: Wave PCM signed 16 bit, 8000 Hz, 128 kbps, mono. I entered a support call for this via email. Ticket was closed without any reply from Nextiva support.
• Followed instructions for initial account configuration detailed in Office Manager user manual. Manual states in several places that the MAC address for devices shipped to customers by Nextiva will be available from a drop down list in the Device Assignment section under “Sites” in Office Manager. No MAC addresses were listed. Four separate support tickets were entered for this issue. After receiving the IP phone, I was unable to configure it or use it because of this. My first telephone support technician and two email support tickets were closed after the technicians told me that their “oversight had been corrected.” It had not been. On the fourth ticket, a phone support technician manually configured the phone using a remote session. She was unable to explain why the device didn’t show up in Office Manager, why the user manual states that it will, or how I was supposed to know that the instructions are wrong. The technician told me that I should feel free to call if I experience any further issues and they would help me with it. She also told me that I would “get used to” the confusing operation of Office Manager. I spent a few hours dealing with this problem. Although my phone does seem to be working properly now, I still do not have any devices listed.
• The auto-attendant configuration page plays an audio file of the default auto-attendant greeting every time the page is loaded. It’s a minor issue, but it’s annoying, and I don’t understand why it plays at all, since I have my own custom greeting selected for the auto-attendant.
• The sales rep became unresponsive shortly after the completion of the sale. He went out of his way to assure me during our first conversation that he was “my personal representative” and that he would guide me through the process and make sure that he did everything necessary to ensure a smooth transition to the Nextiva service.
• The porting department seems disorganized. After signing up for the service, I received two sets of documents that I needed to fill out and send back to them. One for each number that we were porting. I filled them out and sent them back, only to be contacted the following day by someone who sent them again and said that she needed me to complete them and send them back. I told her that I had already sent them in, and she apologized. Not a big deal, but also perhaps indicative of a less-than-professional system. Did not inspire confidence that they’re going to port our numbers correctly.
• Received an email from someone in their “Customer Success” department, checking to see if things were all right. Replied to his email, and promptly received a bounce-back stating that his email address doesn’t exist in the system.  Ironic.
• Nextiva technical manuals are poorly written. Screen shots relevant to particular tasks are all located in an appendix at the back of the manual. Frustrating to have to flip back and forth in order to take a look at what they’re describing in the text.
• Web portal lacks polish. Everything has a bit of a cobbled-together feel. Contextual help is not particularly helpful. Descriptions and conditional settings are confusing. It is often difficult to tell whether or not a setting change has actually taken effect. There are some inconsistencies in the appearance and functions. Things such as the “Save” button looking different from page to page, or being difficult to find, or appearing to be for one section on a page as opposed to saving settings for the entire page. Basic usability issues that should have been ironed out before customers were allowed to use the site.

Overall, I’m not overly impressed with Nextiva. I’m glad that I only moved one of our telephone lines to Nextiva rather than everything that we depend on. I’m a brand-new customer, and if things continue the way that they have so far, I’ll be looking for another VoIP hosted PBX provider in very short order.

I had high hopes for this VOIP after reading the great reviews. However, buyer beware!  Once you sign the contract the service quality immediately depreciates. 

 First of all, I could never get a hold of my original sales rep to place the order for my phones.  Due to his lack of support, I barely was able to set up my phones in time before the numbers were ported and mind you this takes 2-4 weeks.  Setting up the Polycom phones is very easy.  You can even find instructions online and do this without a tech.  Their level one techs are not bad.  Very pleasant for the most part and I did deal with many if not all of them. 

Tier 2 techs (for when you have major issues), good luck.  Just dont even bother waiting for them to contact you back.  They pushed my issue regarding a panasonic phone as "unfixable" and a problem with MY internet.  after 3 weeks of incredibly frustrating attempts to find someone at Nextiva willing to help, one special level one tech figured out the problem.  THEIR coding was wrong.  And it was such a small and minor fix to get this line working. 

After my second attempt and now pretty furious email, a supervisor finally contacted me to apologize for the issues.  (this is before the situation was resolved).  He assured me they would assist me and compensate me after the issue was resolved.  Now?  His email doesnt work, the sales reps email doesnt work, no replies from billing (just to get a copy of an invoice for phones ordered that they never forwarded to me), and no replies from the general sales@, billing@, and welcome@ email's. 

Seriously I have never NEVER dealt with a company so unorganized, and with such a large lack of respect for even just decent customer service.  If you are lucky and have no problems setting up, they are ok.  Otherwise, although they do not outsource, boy, they are no help. 

By the way, note that when they port your fax number, you WILL have down time.  You have to contact them when your fax number is ported so they can make changes.  And yes, they fail to tell you this beforehand.

DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY, MY PHONES NEVER WORKED AND THEY DON'T CARE.  I have had the worst experience with this company.  I ported my phone number.  They never told me I need to contact my DSL company so I lost all internet service for 2 weeks. No phones no interenet.  Once I got my internet the phones wouldn't work and they were the wrong phones.  It is very difficult to get a holf of someone. They make you leave mesaages and no one ever returns them. Once I finally got the right phones they never worked.  I have spents hours and hours and hours on the phone with them, mostly waiting to talk to someone.  They never could fix the problem and they didn't care that my phones don't work.  DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY.  I DOUBT THE PEOPLE WRITING THESE NICE REVIEWS ARE REAL. 

Nextiva is the model other phone companies should follow. Every person I've spoken to at Nextiva has been helpful and patient. I've had my fair share of disappointing experiences from phone companies but with Nextiva I've only been impressed. The way I see it is that they're real people. The closest comparison I can make of a company that rocks as much as they do is Zappos.

My business has used several phone service providers before finding Nextiva. Without question, Nextiva is head and shoulders above the competition. The call quality is indistinguishable from traditional landlines, I have yet to experience a service interruption and they offer outstanding customer service. I would highly recommend them to anyone needing a telecommunication solution in their business.