Nextiva Scores A $200 Million Goldman Investment, Plus More Customer Service Software News

Behind nearly every great act of customer service lies the support of great software. If you want to serve, engage, and retain the customers who will fuel your business success, you’d best have the right technical backbone. Get this right and you’ll be capturing essential information about every customer, have that information at your fingertips, and be able to seamlessly make use of it in a nuanced way to provide a superior, sustainable customer experience. 

Ideally, great customer support software will make life better for your employees as well. A Bloomberg exclusive today revealed that Nextiva, an Arizona-based communications and customer management company, has landed an investment of $200 million from Goldman Sachs and a valuation of $2.7 billion. In the announcement, Nextiva CEO Tomas Gorny made the point that a wish list item of every modern company is for software that will free up workers from having to “juggle between all of the applications [up to 15 such siloed tools] just so that they can communicate with customers.”

Likewise, Danish-based Dixa, which offers a platform designed to facilitate extended engagement between customers and brands (what Dixa calls “customer friendship,” in homage to the Danish concept of hygge) recently received an infusion of $105 million in Series C funding (the largest investment in the company’s history) in a round led by General Atlantic.

The recent filing for a future IPO by Freshworks, with a valuation goal of nearly $9 billion based on $340 million in annual sales, likewise shows the potential of this industry.  [Author’s disclosure: Because my customer service consulting practice is in this space, I’ve had relationships with some brands mentioned in this article.] Is all this new money going to lead to a glut or even a bloodbath? Apparently, the answer is “not yet.” Each of these platforms, as well as the giants in this space—Salesforce, Zendesk, Microsoft with its DynamicsCRM and Teams platforms—and even Zoom (which has expanded now beyond video meetings), has its own loyal customers, and there seems to be, so far at least, room for all.