Birdeye is a reputation management and digital customer experience platform for local brands and multi-location businesses. Over 100,000 businesses leverage Birdeye’s AI-powered platform to engage seamlessly with customers, drive loyalty, and excel in their local markets.
$299
per month
ChatBeacon
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
ChatBeacon (formerly SightMax) is a live chat tool from SmartMax Software headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I think Birdeye is great for businesses that use a CRM system that is able to integrate with Birdeye so that clients are automatically pulled into Birdeye and sent review requests. I would also say this is more suited for businesses that see multiple customers and clients weekly versus businesses that maybe only have one or two clients a month. Ex: Dentist offices get great returns, but contractors/real estate agents may not be as great.
ChatBeacon is a decent choice for on-premises chat support, but the clunky agent UI sparks no joy. If your organization can use a cloud-based solution, there are plenty of other fish in the sea
The sentiment feature is just okay. It requires custom adjustments and time to understand where it is working well and where it is not in order to get the most out of it, while other features require very little user input.
Social listening needs work. I often receive notifications for unrelated terms because of their similarity in spelling to my organization's name, so I don't use this feature.
Birdeye could have more built-in features to create digital content from the reviews.
Birdeye could also have additional reputation tools to strengthen GMB listings and to combat negative press. Review listings and rich snippets in search are great, but having a tool that measures and helps to improve overall brand health/search results would be amazing. My CEO isn’t looking at what is going right. He looks at what is going wrong. We may have thousands of positive reviews on Google, but the bad article with false information is still showing up on page one of search results. That makes for an unhappy CEO.
I think it is very easy to figure out very quickly by just playing around in the dashboard. If you have a question you can reach out to our contacts and they do a very good job of figuring out if or what is the problem and getting back to us fast.
The customer support is usually very fast in getting someone connected with you to figure out a solution. Sometimes the communication following up on how they did can be a little much, but they are just practicing what they preach and doing what they know best. People are usually very friendly and knowledgable also.
Support is a strong point for ChatBeacon - their support team is small, but you definitely get white-glove service. Zero complaints about ChatBeacon support!
Our choice of reputation management platform came down to two contenders, Birdeye and Listen360. Ultimately we chose Birdeye because of their ethical review gathering process. Listen360 had review-gating built in as part of their process, which is against Google's terms of service. We wanted to be very careful to gather reviews in an ethical way, and Birdeye was better for our needs.
Before using SightMax (now ChatBeacon), we used AliveChat, which was an OK SaaS product, but the team operating the service would frequently restart the servers after maintenance and forget to start our instance back up. ChatBeacon(SightMax) as on-prem software eliminated this concern. We've been evaluating ChatBeacon vs. other products lately, and we really like how DeskPro stacks up vs. ChatBeacon - ChatBeacon is purely a chat product, and DeskPro does web chat/phone/email ticketing.
My clients have experienced very large increases to overall SEO and SEM traffic after reviews began coming in, this has increased CTR and conversions through ads to generate more revenue than ever before.
The old-school gated review processes were wonky and required way to much time with hands-on functionality. With BirdEye the software manages almost all the work, so we can spend less time manually managing reviews.
Being able to provide local SEO and reputation management as a service option has increased our overall retainers while driving more growth for our clients. It's a win/win for relatively low investment.
Using website chat (often with an agent:customer ratio of up to 1:3 or more ) vs. phone support (with an agent ratio of 1:1) has greatly reduced support costs in every business unit.
Providing realtime feedback and links (vs. phone calls) has greatly improved the turnaround on the sales and customer inquiry processes.
