FreshLime
Customer Connectivity Made Easy with Modern Conversational Marketing

In today’s competitive SMB marketplace, the company that gets closest to the customer wins, every time. And now more than ever, that’s not as possible through an old-fashioned handshake or a quality in-person visit. The need to connect human-to-human has not disappeared, but the ability to do so effectively via remote technology has never been greater, prompting the birth of a new category in small business technology called “Customer Connection Platforms.”

At the forefront of this new category is FreshLime, a data-driven customer connection platform that specializes in effectively connecting small businesses with their customers through personalized real-time chat, text, and email.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Jay Bean, Founder and CEO of FreshLime, has shared with us how FreshLime became a success in providing small-scale industries with better business customer connection after more than 19 years of experience in digital marketing, corporate development, business operations and marketing technology development, mergers/acquisitions, and strategy for SMBs.

Will you give us an overview of FreshLime?

Years ago, we realized the significance of customer data in driving a specific amount of connection between customers and businesses. Those connections or conversations can be personalized based on the needs of the end consumer. Over the last couple of years, our performance evolved from just capturing customer information, intent, and transactions, to utilizing that data to help businesses reach out to customers more practically. We created the dialogue needed to drive more business for the thousands of small business clients we service every day. We utilize Artificial Intelligence to facilitate real-time conversations whenever customers want to talk—our WebChat tools help do that.

What role does FreshLime play in helping promote small business growth using clients’ customer data?

These days, consumers expect to have the same conversations that they do in the real world. To achieve this, companies either spend thousands of dollars on building that technology, or they choose to not utilize the tools available to help them connect with their customers. If they don’t employ chat technology, they miss their scalability and are unable to monitor all of their online channels. The FreshLime Customer Connection Platform™ helps build out those ideal conversations for them and then deploys them in the places where their customers are. Today, companies help their customers feel like they are connected, providing the information they want to make a better purchasing decision and all without human supervision or error, 24/7.

Will you explain to us how you identify the target audience for any business that you collaborate with?

Typically, we connect the data the small business already has in their CRM/POS platform into our Customer Connection Platform™.

We then extract that data and use data mining to obtain useful information, which will help enhance the customer experience. We are currently managing $3B worth of customer data which includes all customer, transactional, and marketing information. We then analyze that past and real-time data to identify and ensure business opportunities, such as identifying a previous customer based on the time they would be ready to buy again. This helps build loyalty and grows revenue from repeat visits from the customer base.

Will you elaborate on the features and functionalities of the platform, and how exactly they help your clients?

At the core of our Customer Connection Platform™ is customer data that better connects the business owner to their customers. Our Artificial Intelligence WebChat technology helps facilitate a conversation, which is a great benefit to businesses and how they engage consumers around the clock. Personalization is another factor—it is the crucial aspect to providing real-time support, and in helping businesses understand the intent of the customer to get them the most relevant information possible. FreshLime offers a prebuilt, automated platform as opposed to a business having to build the platform themselves, record all customer interactions, and then updating the content continuously. For example, if you are in the plumbing business, we have a purpose-built conversational flow when a plumbing customer lands on the website captured through WebChat. The platform will analyze the past or present data to keep the conversation personalized. At the same time, the WebChat figures out what questions to ask, and provides the business necessary information to follow up when that chat session ends.

How does FreshLime play a role in directing end-users in the direction they need to pursue?

Customer trust is built on credibility. If I need a service or product, I am still going to make sure that the business I choose has excellent reviews. So part of the dialogue in our platform when our customer finishes jobs would be to send them a review request and ask them how their experience was. Reviews are then posted on Google or Facebook so that the next customer who needs that particular product or service has credible reviews to rely on. That is how our Customer Connection Platform™ can streamline the information customers need at the time they want it.

Are there any particular key differentiating factors that give you a competitive edge in the market?

I want to mention three key points:

1 - FreshLime is the only platform that connects all small business data—marketing data and transaction data.

2 - When a chat is reported on the website or any platform, our automated Artificial Intelligence-driven WebChat technology uses the latest natural language processing. We are changing the way consumers buy from local businesses through better communication in real-time.

3 - The platform also takes into consideration the intent of the user conversation and proactively educates them. When a customer comes in and asks a question, we take the intent of those questions and then use our platform through SMS or email to proactively tell the customer why a particular company is the best company to work with.

Will you tell us about FreshLime’s future roadmap for the next couple of years?

Our motto is to bring all the conversations that happen through WebChat, Facebook, or Google into one customer connection point. Our Customer Connection Platform™ will enable businesses to manage all their conversations with customers from a single inbox on our platform. Where it goes next is allowing the consumers to transact easily with that business. Currently, B2B buying is perfected. But for the first time, we are setting a whole new standard for communication between businesses and local consumers by enabling them to interact and transact more efficiently. Anything that brings the consumers in the market closer together is what we are concerned about. Today it is driving a massive amount of interactions and lots and lots of transactions for our small business customers in an environment where remote conversations are more important than ever.