How Franklin Street Used Nextiva to Achieve 30% Revenue Growth

The importance of high-quality phone communication is evident in Franklin Street’s call volumes. Each day, the company gets approximately 1,500 incoming and outgoing calls, mostly from its sales team to prospects and clients.

“For Franklin Street, communication is critical,” said Franklin Street Chief Information Officer Tom Rybak. “Our bread and butter are the people that we interact with. We don’t make a product. We are in the people business. And when it comes to communication, nothing beats a phone call. So Nextiva is huge to us.

Accessibility is very important for our agents. With the usage of the NextivaONE App on their mobile devices, they’re accessible to their clients 24/7. Every Franklin Street employee is also able to text with their business phone number now as well.

Tom Rybak

Chief Information Officer at Franklin Street

With phone communication at a premium for his company, Rybak spent 2018 searching for the perfect cloud communications platform to replace his legacy on-prem phone system.

“The first reason we adopted Nextiva was to get rid of our on-prem telephone system,” said Rybak. “We wanted a cloud-based system that we could deploy from anywhere on any internet connected device. We also wanted the ability to manage the devices that were on our network, change those devices, and then increase the number of those devices at any time, without any upfront cost to us.”

The specific features Rybak was looking for were a mobile client that he could install on a cell phone or any other mobile connected device, a soft client that he could install on laptops, and the ability to track calls with gamification.

“Accessibility is very important for our agents. With the usage of the NextivaONE App on their mobile devices, they’re accessible to their clients 24/7. Every Franklin Street employee is also able to text with their business phone number now as well,” said Rybak.

According to Rybak, Nextiva solved the company’s needs by providing a cloud communications platform that offered the specific mobility and visibility functionality his team needed. “Nextiva’s technology helped us scale our business by removing the need for on-prem equipment and allowing ease of scalability, build-out, and deployment,” said Ryback. “My department has been able to hand off a lot of that backend work to Nextiva.”

Franklin Street’s positive experience with Nextiva began with its onboarding. The Nextiva team made what could be a complex migration from on-prem to the cloud into a simple, fast, and painless process. “One huge benefit of Nextiva was the migration from our on-prem system to the cloud,” said Rybak. “They made the experience pretty seamless. Porting of numbers worked within the first day that we attempted it. All of our agents got their numbers back in the cloud system. And the experience was absolutely painless.”

After onboarding with Nextiva, Rybak watched the cloud communications platform rapidly become a critical part of his team’s daily operations. “The day-to-day usage of Nextiva between our agents is huge,” said Rybak. “There’s a huge culture of competitiveness here at Franklin Street. The ability to display the daily calls that these agents are making has been huge to create a high-performance culture and keep it going. We’re very competitive and we want the best guy to win.”

According to Rybak, his team’s favorite feature has been the gamification component of Nextiva. “We broadcast our call numbers out to the entire company for everybody to see our top callers. That gamification portion impacts the culture here. Seeing those interactions and stats has been pretty huge for everybody.”

Reliability was also a critical factor for Rybak’s decision to go with Nextiva. Franklin Street’s topline revenue depends on cold calling, which means that his reps need a system that never goes down and makes it easy to conduct outreach.

One huge benefit of Nextiva was the migration from our on-prem system to the cloud. Porting of numbers worked within the first day. All of our agents got their numbers back in the cloud system. The experience was absolutely painless.

Tom Rybak

Chief Information Officer at Franklin Street

“Our business depends highly on cold calls,” said Rybak. “We’re reaching out to people that we don’t know who we’ve never worked with. To keep the business going and to keep new clients and new opportunities in front of us, cold calling is huge. And you can’t do cold calling without a phone system.”

In his three years using Nextiva, Rybak has been extremely pleased with the reliability and uptime that Nextiva has provided. “Reliability has been huge for us. Again, our whole culture depends on cold calling. Our phone system depends on calls coming through and going out. Uptime has been fantastic with Nextiva. We’re far exceeding the ‘five nines’ that we were promised. That’s awesome.”

Reliability is not a given for Franklin Street, given the company’s location in the hurricane hotspot of Tampa, Florida. Rybak explained the unique challenges that companies located in a natural disaster hotspot such as Tampa face.

“Business continuity was huge for us, as was disaster recovery,” Rybak said. “We’re a mile away from the Gulf of Mexico. A hurricane coming through could render our offices unusable. So the ability to use the cloud has been huge.”

Reliability has been huge for us. Uptime has been fantastic with Nextiva. We’re far exceeding the ‘five nines’ that we were promised.

Tom Rybak

Chief Information Officer At Franklin Street

In the era of remote work, Nextiva has also provided some additional unforeseen benefits, such as allowing for Franklin Street reps to work remotely at their leisure.

“Working from home has also been very important to us,” said Rybak. “As times change, we want the ability to tell our employees to go home and work. All you have to do is plug your phone into the power and your Ethernet, and you’re up and running. Or if you have the client installed on your laptop or your cell phone, you don’t have to do anything. Just work from home and it’s as if you’re receiving or making a call from the office.”

As Franklin Street has scaled, the cloud capabilities of Nextiva have made it simple for Rybak and his team to onboard new headcount and get sellers up-and-dialing as soon as possible.

“Scalability is also important to us. The ability to reach out to Nextiva and say, ‘I need 50 more licenses today’ and get those licenses without any upfront costs has taken a load off my hands. I have the ability to just click a button and get more users on board.”

For Rybak and his IT team, Nextiva has freed up a ton of time for him to focus on strategic initiatives versus performing mundane upkeep and maintenance of a traditional phone system. “We have a staff of three in our IT department managing the technology for 325 employees. With Nextiva, the backend work that we would need to do has been taken away from us. I don’t have to worry about the little pieces, how the backend works, whether or not we have enough storage for voicemails, and so on. Nextiva handles all of that for us. It allows me to focus on the bigger picture, which is future growth and expansion of the company.”

As Franklin Street grows, Nextiva will continue to play a vital role in their expansion. “Nextiva has been a great partner in our office expansion process,” said Rybak. “It literally has taken the worry out of my head when it comes to expanding our office. We just moved our office in Jacksonville. I took the switches and the firewalls, plugged them in, got the internet circuits done, and was good to go. I didn’t have to call. I didn’t have to make any IP changes. It just worked.”

Nextiva has taken the complexity out of administering our phone system. It’s not rocket science. It’s a phone system. And Nextiva does it perfectly.

Tom Rybak

Chief Information Officer at Franklin Street

Reflecting back on how Nextiva has impacted Franklin Street’s IT infrastructure over the last few years, Rybak was pleased with Nextiva’s alleviation of formerly time-consuming and arduous processes. “This was our first off-prem move and it relieved a lot of pressure off of us. Back in the day, we kept PBXs in-house. Now, everything is cloud-based and we do not have to worry about the equipment that’s sitting there.”

At the end of the day, Rybak is thrilled with how easy Nextiva has made business communications at Franklin Street.

“The bottom line is that Nextiva makes it easy. It has taken the complexity out of administering our phone system. It’s not rocket science. It’s a phone system. And Nextiva does it perfectly.”