How Tricoci Uses Nextiva to Manage Business Communications Across 1,300 Employees

The reason Tricoci switched to Nextiva is twofold. First, the company had just split off from a larger entity in 2018 and had to completely revamp the phone system. Second, when Abud came on to be the Vice President of Information Technology, he wanted to make Tricoci a truly scalable company.

He chose Nextiva because it was a complete voiceover IP platform that Tricoci could use without having any on-premise hardware. “We were coming off of an on-premises system that was very outdated, antiquated, and hard to maintain,” Abud said. “When we weighed the features of Nextiva versus competitor phone systems, it truly was the best fit for our company. We wanted to go with something that was state-of-the-art, and Nextiva certainly fit that bill.”

According to Abud, ease-of-use also played a crucial role in his decision to switch to Nextiva. “The reason we chose Nextiva over all the other phone systems was ease of use. Nextiva’s willingness to really make us feel important and make the onboarding go smoothly for us from start to finish was critical. They made a promise to us that they would make the implementation go as smoothly as possible and they held up to that,” Abud said.

One of the ways that Nextiva has proven its scalability with Tricoci is by rapidly enabling the company to go remote. During the summer of 2020, Tricoci had to quickly transfer 40 people to work remotely and answer calls from their homes. With the Nextiva system, they were able to do this flawlessly with very little hardware investment. The company had its call center remotely running within a few days.

Another feature Abud raves about is the Nextiva admin dashboard. “One of the greatest features that Nextiva has is the ease of adding extensions,” he said. “We do this frequently at individual salons when we want to add another phone to a break room or another room where there previously wasn’t a phone. With an old phone system, this was a much harder thing to solve. You had to run power lines and a phone line to that area, whereas with the Nextiva system, it’s all wireless. We can have a new station or extension up in minutes.”

Tricoci employees use Nextiva in a variety of ways during their day. The Palatine support center lets Tricoci team members use Nextiva to answer daily calls, join a conference, or call into a meeting — whether it’s by deskphone or the app on their mobile phones.

According to Abud, all of Tricoci’s salons have phones, whether they’re at the front desk, in the manager’s offices, in the back, or in the break rooms. They also have a full call center with handsets and the NextivaONE App installed.

“One of the best features that our employees like about Nextiva is the NextivaONE App,” Abud said. “They can make an outgoing call from their cell phone, and it can be masked to their desk phone numbers so that they keep the privacy of their personal cell phone hidden from someone they’re making outbound calls to, such as a guest or a vendor. It truly is a great way to make phone calls and sound like you’re sitting at your desk.”

Communication between Tricoci employees is also extremely important. If there are any problems at any of Tricoci’s salons, Abud’s team needs to know immediately.

“Our team is using Nextiva all day long,” Laiderman said. “We can merely dial an extension and our team members receive the call on whatever phone they have access to.”

“Nextiva has made location-to-location communication very easy here at Tricoci,” Abud said. “Whether it’s our salons or our guest service center here at Palatine, Nextiva makes it very easy to call between our offices, do one-touch dialing to any of our salons, and call our guests outbound, which are so critical to us as a service business.”

Abud is especially complimentary of Nextiva’s one-touch dialing capability, which his team uses liberally to conduct internal communications.

“One of the great benefits of using our Nextiva system is that we can reach all of our locations with a click of a button. There’s no more long, 7 or 10 digit dialing nowadays. It’s all one touch dialing. Our salons can reach each other with the touch of a button. Our guest service center can reach any of the salons within a touch of a button. And that really makes it easy for us to stay in contact with each other when we need to get a hold of each other and talk about appointments or special arrangements for our guests.”

Abud is also a huge fan of the call park and callback features Nextiva provides. “One of the great Nextiva benefits we really take advantage of at our salons is the call park feature, where we can park a call and anybody can pick up that call at any of our stations at any of the salons,” Abud said.

The callback feature has also proven especially useful to his team. “Our call center loves the callback feature, which is really instrumental for us when our call volume gets heavy. We don’t have to make our guests wait on the phone. They can press a number and leave a callback number — and they don’t lose their spot in line. Our guests truly appreciate that feature,” Abud said.

From an admin standpoint, Abud’s team also leans heavily on Nextiva’s supervisor dashboard, which gives his team visibility across the company’s call performance, wait times, and so forth. “One of the great features that we really like is the ability to run all the metrics that our guest services managers need to run their call center properly — from call volumes to wait times to abandonment rates,” Abud said. “These are key metrics that help us improve our guest experience. They are crucial to us.”

Having access to this data has given Abud the ability to optimize Tricoci’s business processes from appointment booking to guest follow-up. “Nextiva gives us the ability to run all of these reports and metrics on the fly and automate the reports so that we get a report on how well we did at 7 am every day in our inbox.”

Nextiva’s value to Tricoci also extends to staffing. According to Abud, “Tricoci uses call metrics very closely in staffing our entire guest call centers. It’s very important for us to have accurate call volumes, record them, and report on them quickly and accurately to our call center managers and staff.” Nextiva’s call metrics provide great insights to Abud’s team when they are planning out their expected guest volume at their individual salons. “We can plan our entire work weeks based on the call volumes of the same time periods from prior years and prior holidays. The ability to have all those metrics at hand is huge for accounting for our busy and slow seasons.”

Tricoci has ambitious growth plans for 2021 and beyond, including expanding the company’s locations beyond the Chicagoland area. “We would love to start building our brand outside of Chicago. We recently had our product launch in August of 2020 with fabulous new products — shampoos, conditioners, hairbrushes, and so forth. We’re very proud of our products, and we want to get the word out,” Abud said.

In dealing with thousands of customers around the country, Veterans cannot afford to deliver a poor experience. Downtime or outages can mean the difference between their veterans receiving the aid they need and total isolation. To that end, the Veterans leadership team recognizes the value of Nextiva’s reliability and uptime to keep their operations humming at all times.

Abud praises the ease of adding new locations with Nextiva as a key growth driver for his business. “It was just a really big win for us in our technology. We couldn’t do those things with old phone systems. That’s one of the main reasons we went with Nextiva: for that scalability, quick turn-up, and growth.”

Reliability and uptime also play a key role in supporting Tricoci’s upward growth. Abud is thrilled with the results Nextiva has provided thus far on those fronts. “I’m happy to report that we’ve never had any outages with the Nextiva system in the three years we’ve been a customer,” Abud said. “If you have a strong fiber backbone like we do, you can rest assured that the Nextiva system will run pretty flawlessly and without downtime.”

Abud is excited about Nextiva’s impact on the overall customer experience that Tricoci is able to provide their clientele. He cites Nextiva’s ability to create a memorable customer experience at scale as a key value-add of the technology. “For us at Tricoci, it’s extremely important that the guest experience is great, no matter what part of the journey they’re on with Tricoci. We want it all to be best in class, whether it’s our technicians, our products, or our technology. And Nextiva offers us what we want in a phone system. It’s always reliable for our guests. It’s never down, and the guests can always reach us no matter what. And if, if it’s after hours, they can always leave a message and rest assured we will get back to them to book their next appointment,” Abud said.

Abud chalks up his success with Nextiva to great technology and a true sense of partnership between Tricoci and the Nextiva team. “Nextiva has been a great partner with us. I cherish all my partners that truly want to be a partner to us and not just a vendor. I think Nextiva has gone above and beyond to really make us feel like we’re a partner with them and not just a client-to-vendor relationship. From their sales reps that always reach out to me and check in to their customer support department that’s always been available for us, we truly feel it’s a great partnership to Tricoci and will be in the years to come,” Abud said.