How Small Businesses Can Grow During the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

The customer service platform, BirdEye, announcedOpens a new window the launch of its new product, Interactions, on Apr. 7, 2020. With the new product, small and medium businesses (SMBs) can connect and respond to customers through text messaging, web chat, and Facebook Messenger from one streamlined inbox for free.

In this exclusive Martech BuzzOpens a new window conversation, Frederik HermannOpens a new window , senior director of marketing and growth, BirdEye Inc., shares insights into how SMBs can run their businesses during the social distancing and lockdown period. He shines the spotlight on marketing strategiesOpens a new window and the tools that can be used to retain loyal customers. To weather the storm, Hermann also shares the best practices in customer experienceOpens a new window that marketers can follow.

Having spent most of his career developing go-to-market programs, product launches, and boosting channel marketing plans, Hermann now leads BirdEye’s cross-functional teams, drives revenue, and implements marketing initiatives focused on user acquisition, growth, and retention.

Here are some edited excerpts from this insightful conversation with MarTech Advisor:

MarTech Advisor: As local business owners adjust to shelter-in-place orders and navigate the uncharted waters of running a company during the social distancing period, what can they do to weather the storm?

Hermann: There are many ways small and medium businesses can prepare for the future and come out stronger from the current economic crisis. Here are three of the most important:

1. Keep current customers happy:  Loyal customers give you more sales opportunities. Be sure to communicate business changes, including hours of operations, virtual offerings, and managerial decisions to keep customers in the loop during shifting times. Communicating is more important than ever right now.
2. Boost your customer base: Get creative and hustle. Leave no stone unturned in pulling customers from competitors. And don’t stop marketing. A lot of businesses will stop the cash flow of marketing funds first, which is a mistake. Chances are that competitors will pull back on ad and marketing spend. This can give you a chance to gain market share.
3. Sharpen your pencil: Use this time to reflect on business strategy and refocus on the things you did not have time for previously. Gather, understand, and process the data to make strategic decisions for your business. For example, using BirdEye, you can monitor online reputation, update listings across 50+ sites, and check reviews across 150+ sites. You can also gather insights from the most used words in reviews. For example, if you sell pizza and the word ‘burnt pizza’ keeps coming up in your reviews, you know what to fix.
    

You can also keep a tab on competitors’ online reputation and learn from their strengths and weaknesses using competitor analysis. You can send surveys to gather feedback and request social proof (which means reviews across social media and industry-specific sites) from your entire database. You can also use Interactions, a unified messaging platform to communicate effectively across channels with all your customers from a single dashboard.

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MarTech Advisor: Which marketing strategies, using which tools, can be implemented now to retain loyal customers?

Hermann: The BirdEye platform for local businesses of all sizes can be implemented now to retain loyal customers. In fact, BirdEye is offering its new product, Interactions, free to businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Communicating with customers is more important than ever during this time. Combined with customers’ increasing affinity to text instead of call, Interactions provides business owners the tools to communicate with customers the way they prefer, capture leads, earn sales, and ultimately achieve a higher level of customer satisfaction.

Interactions is a messaging platform that enables businesses to connect and respond to customers through text messaging, web chat, and Facebook Messenger from one streamlined inbox. To make direct communication easier, customers can text any time and businesses will instantly receive mobile or desktop notifications to respond faster. To streamline the process, conversations can be assigned to experts within the company to resolve issues faster and answer questions more efficiently.

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MarTech Advisor: In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, what are the best practices in customer experience that marketers can follow?

Hermann: When businesses invest in creating a quality experience, customers notice. According to SuperOffice, 86% of customers are willing to pay more for better customer experience. It, therefore, pays to create a superior customer experience

By paying close attention to what customers are saying about your services online, you can figure out exactly where you can improve your customer experience. To improve your customer retention, it’s important to know how you can get valuable insights from your customers. These are four tools that businesses can use to build superior customer experience, helping to retain existing customers and bring in new customers:

1. BirdEye’s Natural Language Processing system, Athena: This gives businesses a detailed analysis of the exact phrases that customers are using in reviews. For example, if a lot of a restaurant’s customers are complaining about “burnt chicken”, the NLP engine will show this on the dashboard. The restaurant’s owner can then talk to his cooks and come up with a solution to prevent other customers from encountering the same problem
    
2. Competitive Benchmarking: Customer reviews can reveal more than just insights about your business. They can give you valuable insights about your competitors’ businesses as well. BirdEye’s dashboard helps you stay on top of the competition with benchmarking by looking at competitor’s publicly available review data and providing detailed analysis based on review text. You can look at your biggest competitors and see exactly what their customers like and dislike about their services.
    
3. Social Listening: Businesses can also get a closer understanding of customer opinion by looking at what customers are saying about them on social media. Instead of trying to manually keep up with social media conversations to respond to customers and gain insights, businesses can use the social listening tool on the BirdEye dashboard. Our social listening tool tracks mentions of your business and allows you to view them in your dashboard. Instead of losing track of your customer’s voice in the vast sea of noise, make sure that you can listen closely and understand how they feel about your business.
    
4. Surveys: Reviews and social don’t have to be your only source of insights. Surveys can help you see your customers’ attitudes towards your business. BirdEye gives businesses the option to send surveys to customers through email or text. This allows businesses to reach out to customers and determine overall sentiment through their responses.

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