Increasingly, deploying AI is becoming table stakes for agencies offering solutions like social media and reviews management for brands. In recent months, we’ve seen a string of announcements along these lines from some of the leading digital marketing agencies and platforms in local.
The customer experience platform Birdeye announced this week that it has extended its existing relationship with Google related to AI. Birdeye will deploy Google’s advanced AI features (including Bard and Vertex AI) to enhance its service offering. The integration of Bard and Vertex AI into Birdeye’s platform allows Birdeye to enhance a range of its services.
Here is how Birdeye explained this week’s announcement. The company has “expanded its long-standing premier partnership with Google Cloud to offer businesses an innovative way to manage customer feedback. The partnership now includes the use of Google’s conversational AI service Bard, which will help businesses understand customer interactions, like reviews and surveys, and respond faster.”
Birdeye has been among those agencies and CX platforms leading with AI. For example, back in February Birdeye announced it would use conversational AI to help its customers with surveys and reviews. This week’s announcement represents an extension of that effort. As well as a commitment to partnering with Google on its AI initiatives. We’ve seen similar AI-related announcements this year from Yext, Soci, Evocalize, and others.
Birdeye announced this week that it is using Google’s conversational AI tools to improve the speed and quality of responses to customer reviews, among other services. Birdeye will also use Google AI to extract “real-time sentiment” from customer interactions in order to deliver a more personalized customer experience.
Today we spoke with Birdeye’s President of Go To Market, Dave Lehman. Dave walked us through this week’s announcement and what it means for Birdeye.
Faster and Better with AI
Lehman noted in our discussion today that AI is not a new feature at Birdeye.
“We’ve been using AI for years,” Lehman said.
This week’s announcement represents an expansion rather than an introduction.
Lehman also emphasized today that the company isn’t using Google AI to fully automate the review response process, which he notes Google frowns upon. Rather, Birdeye is using AI to make the process faster and better.
We’re not automating it. Nobody seems to be automating this, as Google doesn’t want us to automate it yet,” Lehman explains. “But it’s very much a great prompting system.”
Lehman said AI, quite frankly, can help organizations professionalize review responses.
“A lot of times, [AI is] giving you a better, more articulate response,” Lehman explained, not exactly offering a ringing endorsement of our education system. “[Companies] usually put a pretty junior marketing person or somebody behind the counter on these things. And it’s just usually better English [with AI].”
A growing body of data shows that businesses that respond promptly and consistently to reviews perform better than those that do not. And AI is rapidly becoming an essential tool for helping companies craft fast and relevant responses to reviews, whether positive, negative, or in between.
