How Can Businesses Grow During Covid-19

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:

Keep your 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.

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.

Refocus your goal – 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.

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:

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

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.

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.

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.