Nextiva NEXT - NEXT Studio · Support Portal

Accessing NEXT Studio

NEXT Studio is Nextiva’s visual no-code/low-code platform that empowers users to create, configure, and manage end-to-end customer experience. It offers a drag & drop canvas to build Journeys, Workflows, Functions, and AI-powered Chatbots across voice, chat, SMS, email, and social channels—all without writing code.

If you do not have Administrator rights within NEXT, you will not see the information described below.

In addition to the steps below, you can also access NEXT Studio via the Admin home area, and within the left hand panel of the Administrator Settings area. These are both accessed via the gear icon in the bottom left hand corner of NEXT.

Log into NEXT via https://app.nextiva.io/lioncc/.
- Your log in information was emailed to you from no-reply@nextiva.com. This email is triggered when a user is created in NEXT.
Select the S icon in the left hand navigation panel.
You will now see the various NEXT Studio pages. Use the left navigation panel to select different areas of NEXT Studio.

How to use NEXT Studio

Before using or building workflows within NEXT Studio, it is important to understand what it is for and how to use it.

What NEXT Studio is for

NEXT Studio is the area where you can edit or create experiences for your customers to interact with before they talk with your company’s technical or customer support team. You can set this up for any and all channels that you use for your business. It helps you map the complete path of how your customers interact with you.

What are channels? Channels in NEXT include:

Calling
SMS
Live chat for your website
Email
Social media platforms - messages or comments

Each channel you want to setup will need its own workflow and functions, which feed into the overall customer journey. These are explained further below, in the Workflow, Functions, and Journeys areas of NEXT Studio.

When an Administrator for your company initially went through the NEXT onboarding steps, they likely set up your company’s phone number, email, and some of these other channels. By doing that, they laid the foundation to use NEXT Studio. See Onboarding for Administrators - NEXT KBA if you want to learn more about the onboarding setup for a NEXT account.

All of these methods of communication that your Administrator initially added during the onboarding process had Workflows and Journeys automatically created. It is your task to go into NEXT Studio to edit them as needed, or create new ones to tailor it to your business needs.

Definitions of areas within NEXT Studio

Feature name	Definition
Journeys	A Journey combines flows, AI Employee Skills, chatbots, and functions to manage customer engagement across channels like phone, email, chat, text, and social media. It provides a centralized, visual interface to organize and automate your customer communication. It includes workflows, functions, and can also include AI employees or a chatbot, as described here.
Workflows	Workflows are similar to step-by-step instructions that tell the system what to do when there is an engagement, like when a customer calls, sends a text, or emails. Click here for more information.
Functions	Functions are reusable tasks that do something specific—like looking up customer info, checking store hours, or sending a confirmation message. They’re deterministic, meaning they always give the same result when given the same input. You can use them across different Journeys and Workflows to save time and stay consistent. For more information on functions, click here.
AI Employees	The AI Employees section within NEXT Studio is for an AI bot to interact with your customers through your phone system or SMS. It simulates human agents to provide natural, helpful responses and resolutions. Click here for more information.
Chatbot	The Chatbot section within NEXT Studio is specifically for the live chat on your website or your company’s mobile app, for customers to interact with an AI bot before they speak to a human. A chatbot builder is a visual or low-code interface that allows users to create and manage automated conversational agents. You can find more information about configuring a chatbot here.

Example of how NEXT Studio can help your business

Here’s an example of when and how to use NEXT Studio:

Let’s say you own Bill’s Burger Joint. You pay for a dedicated phone line where customers can call in to place orders, check on your hours, check on the status of their order, and find out where you are located. You also have a phone number that is used to send out automatic SMS to your customers when they place an order, when it's ready for pickup, and if there are any delays. Bill’s Burger Joint has a website, too, where there is a live chat widget for customers to use to ask questions as well.

With these 3 channels of communication - calling, SMS, and live chat - your customers love that they can connect quickly with your staff to place orders and learn about your new offerings. However, you are a smaller business and only have a few staff members working at any given time. You don’t want to employ someone to only answer and respond to customers, so you would like to set up an automated system, so that your customers can go through a menu and listen to certain information before they ever speak to your staff. For SMS and live chat, you would like the questions the automated system is asking to help hone in on what the customer wants before they speak to a staff member.

With this in mind, you navigate into NEXT Studio to set up these automated systems. You can edit an existing journey and the default workflows with it to get it to fit your business needs. Functions are the reusable building blocks to help create or edit a Workflow. Multiple Workflows can exist under a Journey. You can have a workflow for each channel (SMS, calling, live chat, email, social media) that you use at Bill’s Burger Joint. You can save time by editing the existing workflows and journeys, but if you have additional phone numbers or emails that you add later on (post onboarding) you can manually create those Journeys and/or Workflows, which are helped by using Functions. Whatever your primary phone number and email are, those will be your default Workflows, under your default Journey. Learn how to accomplish these tasks in the instructions below.