How Nextiva Streamlines Communications For Conexus Food Solutions’ Global Workforce

As one of the largest Asian food distributors in the United States, Conexus Food Solutions serves 16,000 customers across the continental U.S. Their footprint is massive: 12 distribution centers, 2 million square feet of warehouse space, and a fleet of over 1,000 trucks.

The entire operation runs on conversations. When those conversations break down, food doesn’t move. In food distribution and logistics, communication is not a business function. It is the operation itself.

The Stakes

Conexus runs a 70-person call center out of China, working overnight U.S. time to take customer orders that must ship the very next day. Their sales team contacts restaurants, grocery stores, Asian markets, and foodservice operators before the delivery window closes. A dedicated inbound team manages returns, refunds, and customer support across 16,000 accounts.

Every one of those conversations—whether a sales call confirming an order, a text to a warehouse team, or a support line handling a delivery issue—is a link in a chain that ends with food on a restaurant’s table.

A single break in the conversation breaks the entire chain.

I used to get calls in the middle of the night because the phone system went down and no one could take orders. That doesn’t happen anymore. Nextiva gave our operation something we didn’t have before: consistency.

Challenges

Conexus was running its entire operation on Cisco’s on-premise VoIP infrastructure. Every location required a dedicated VPN tunnel back to a single data center just to make or receive calls.

The legacy architecture caused numerous challenges for the Conexus team:

• A single point of failure took everything down. When one VPN tunnel dropped, phones across an entire location went silent. There was no mobile fallback, no backup path, no way to keep orders moving.
• Hardware failure was chronic. The Cisco VPN equipment broke frequently, sending IT into hours of troubleshooting just to diagnose whether the issue was a circuit, a VPN configuration, or the broader network.
• Downtime meant lost orders, not just lost calls. With the China call center processing overnight orders for next-day delivery across a 1,000-truck fleet, every hour of downtime translated directly into unfulfilled orders and missed delivery windows.
• The worst outage cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. A circuit connecting China went down for three days straight. No conversations in. No conversations out. With one branch alone averaging $100,000 in daily sales, the estimated loss reached into the hundreds of thousands.
• Their system wasn’t built for complex international communication. The China team had no alternative when their primary line failed. WeChat became the fallback. That is not a logistics-grade backup.

When the phone system goes down, orders stop. Deliveries don’t go out. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, gone, because we couldn’t have a conversation with our customers.

Solution

Conexus evaluated two providers. Working alongside Chicago-based IT partner M&J Technology, they spent about a month putting both through their paces. The decision came down to three criteria: stability, ease of administration, and the ability to keep conversations regardless of network activity.

Nextiva emerged as the clear winner for several reasons:

• Redundancy Nextiva’s multiple U.S. cloud data centers provide critical backups and eliminate the worry about a single point of failure bringing down their operation.
• Multi-device flexibility Agents across all 12 distribution centers can now carry on conversations from a desk phone, a desktop app, or a cell phone. When one path goes down, another stays open.
• Mobile fallback. In the event of a network outage, all 70 agents in the China call center can easily switch to the Nextiva mobile app and keep taking orders. Delivery windows stay intact.
• Simplified IT management. Moving off a hardware-dependent VPN architecture freed the IT team from the constant cycle of diagnosing, patching, and restarting a fragile on-premise system.
• Crystal-clear international call quality. With a dedicated MPLS line from Chicago to Hong Kong, the China call center has experienced no call quality issues since switching.
• SMS and text messaging. HR and operations teams use Nextiva’s text messaging features to quickly coordinate their internal logistics.

We operate across time zones, across borders, with a call center running overnight to keep next-day deliveries on track. We needed a platform that could handle that without flinching. That’s why we chose Nextiva.

Results

With Nextiva in their corner, Conexus Food Solutions saw a complete transformation in their communications. The conversations that keep 16,000 customers supplied now happen without interruption, worldwide.

• $300,000+ in revenue risk eliminated. A single 3-day outage under their previous system produced a loss of hundreds of thousands. Since switching to Nextiva, that scenario has not happened again.
• 70 international agents with a reliable fallback. The China overnight team has a mobile backup that keeps order intake running even when the primary network fails.
• 12 distribution centers on one unified platform. Every location runs on the same system with no VPN dependency and no hardware to manage locally.
• 900+ employees with multi-device access. Desk phone, desktop app, or cell phone. Agents stay connected to customers regardless of which path the network disrupts.
• A 1,000-truck fleet better coordinated. With logistics, dispatch, and customer support conversations running through a stable unified platform, the communication layer no longer has a single point of failure.

Before Nextiva, one network issue and our entire team lost the ability to reach customers. Now if something goes down, agents are on their phones within minutes and operations keep moving. That kind of resilience matters when you’re running a 24-hour distribution business.

Features Used

• Cloud Business Phone: Replaced on-premise Cisco VoIP with a distributed cloud architecture and no single point of failure across 12 locations.
• Mobile App: Gave the 70-agent China call center a reliable fallback when their primary network fails, keeping overnight order intake running.
• Desktop App: Extended calling capability to agents across all distribution center locations without hardware dependency.
• Call Groups: Configured to manage high-volume outbound calling across the China team, supporting the overnight order pipeline.
• Toll-Free Numbers: Dedicated inbound lines for customer support, returns, and refund management across 16,000 accounts.
• SMS / Text Messaging: Used by HR and internal operations teams for faster coordination across locations.
• International Calling: Supports the China call center with stable, consistent call quality over a dedicated MPLS connection.

When a partner came to us with the same challenges we had, international teams, multiple locations, high call volume, we didn’t hesitate. We told them to go with Nextiva. They’re now rolling it out company-wide.