Why DirectBuy is Moving to Nextiva

You’ve probably heard of the company DirectBuy. It does a lot of advertising on TV. But what you may not know is that the buyer’s club now uses Nextiva technology to support its VoIP communications.

Forty-year-old DirectBuy selected Nextiva a couple years ago, after Dale Sturgill was hired on as DirectBuy’s contact center director. He was dissatisfied with the VoIP provider DirectBuy was using at the time due to the limited feature availability.

That was a real problem given the reliance of DirectBuy on phone communications. The company regularly fields inbound calls from customers about questions and orders. Sometimes customers even reach out to DirectBuy seeking design input.

So Sturgill did some research and found that Nextiva offered the features, reports, and add ons DirectBuy was looking for.

For example, DirectBuy staff members use the Nextiva app for the desktop. As a result, the experience of customer service representatives and the customers they serve will be seamless whether those reps are working in the office or remotely.

Nextiva is also providing DirectBuy with Advanced Call Recording. That enables the Merrillville, Indiana-based company to listen to calls and provide feedback for its agents, directly from Nextiva Analytics. 

But that’s just one way Nextiva Analytics helps make DirectBuy more efficient.

“The combination of stats and reports that we can see from the Call Center and Nextiva Analytics is fantastic,” said Sturgill. “Our leads walk the floor with the admin dashboard open on iPads tracking the call volume and different queues. Analytics provides us with reports that have helped us adjust our staffing needs. We are receiving real-time information that is irreplaceable, and vital to our success.”

DirectBuy is in the midst of transitioning to the Nextiva solution. Its Canadian offices have already made the move. And it expects the entire company to be on Nextiva by the end of the year.

Agents can be onboarded in just a day. And Sturgill and a few other DirectBuy staff members have been trained to use the NextOS 3.0 portal. That allows them to do call forwarding requests, change answering machine messaging, and add new users.

“The process of switching to Nextiva was as smooth as it could be,” Sturgill said. “We worked with the onboarding team to make the switch after-hours, so none of our customers were affected. It was only 35 to 40 users at the time, and we’ve since added on over one hundred more.”  

DirectBuy has a staff of more than 600. These individuals serve hundreds of thousands of DirectBuy members.