Driving Service Commerce - All-In-One Solution Expands Marketing Capabilities for Local Service Businesses to Automate Customer Retention, Referrals & Reviews
NEW YORK, March 8, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Booker, the leading platform for service commerce, announced today the acquisition of Frederick (hirefrederick.com), an intelligent marketing automation platform for appointment and class-based service businesses. The acquisition expands Booker's leadership in fueling the service economy, and helps fulfill its promise of helping service-based SMB owners improve their customer satisfaction and retention, leading to greater revenues and greater freedom to focus on the work they love.
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Booker provides SMBs with a sophisticated but easy-to-use platform to run and grow their business, which spans booking, CRM, staff management, POS, and more. As part of the Booker platform, Frederick adds another, easy-to-use layer of intelligence to automate marketing to customers. Within minutes, Frederick automatically syncs with a business's management system to access historical customer and transaction data along with utilization information. This informs when a business has open slots in their calendar, so Frederick can promote those openings through highly targeted, two-way text and email campaigns. As a result, SMBs can identify and sell unused inventory, optimally priced to the consumers most likely to buy it. This type of yield management functionality has been available in industries like travel for years, and offers a significant improvement over broad email blasts and often-unprofitable, one-size-fits-all promotions.
"Booker has had experience integrating with Frederick as a software partner, so we knew first-hand that it provides a level of intelligence and effectiveness that is leaps and bounds ahead of its competition. Frederick's intuitive, data-driven marketing gives business owners a real opportunity to reclaim the thousands of dollars lost on empty chairs and slow days. It also provides important insight into the quality of service delivered, which can be used to drive reviews, feedback and referrals," said Josh McCarter, CEO of Booker. "This is the new face of what we call 'service commerce.' It encompasses an integrated suite of commerce and marketing tools that enables service businesses to attract and retain customers, book appointments, optimize customer satisfaction, improve yield management, and take payments in a single, simple solution."
To drive increased positive online customer reviews, Frederick offers a new approach to seamlessly collecting customer feedback, leveraging the Net Promoter ScoreSM (NPS®) methodology. Frederick helps SMBs achieve higher NPS scores in two ways. First, it automates collecting and posting positive reviews, and provides a feedback loop to owners so they can enhance the customer experience and head off negative reviews. It also provides a system to incentivize and manage customer referrals. This is especially critical as SMBs trend toward a higher emphasis on customer retention and referrals over new customer acquisition as a more cost-effective channel for business growth.
All told, Frederick customers are seeing average revenue growth of 30 percent year over year, and significant yield management improvements - with customers booking 45 percent more appointments per month than industry averages.
"The ROI from Frederick is awesome," said Stephanie Agakian of The Bodhi Body. "As the career adviser at a massage school, when students ask me how I market my business, I pull up my dashboard and show them. I love this software!"
Frederick will continue to retain its existing brand and provide integration with other business management solutions, including those in other verticals. As part of Booker, Frederick gains instant access to the company's established brand reputation and expansive customer base, which includes more than 110,000 professionals at more than 10,000 locations across the US.
"Joining forces with Booker allows us to boost our reach and credibility much faster than we could have done on our own," said Corey Kossack, Co-Founder of Frederick. "Booker is truly a powerhouse in the industry, and is aligned with our mission of helping SMBs run and grow. Together, we can offer the kind of end-to-end management and marketing platform that every service business needs to be successful."
The acquisition also accelerates Booker's strategy to enter new markets such as automotive, a key initiative following the company's $35M Series C funding round last March. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. More than 200 Booker customers have already started using Frederick as part of an initial internal rollout.
About Booker
Booker is the leading technology platform in service commerce, delivering an end-to-end platform for business owners to compete in the rapidly growing market for local services. Booker offers SMBs an all-in-one solution with online booking, CRM, staff management, and POS. Booker makes it easy for SMB owners to run and grow their businesses, providing them greater freedom to focus on the work they love. Headquartered in New York City, Booker is used by more than 110,000 professionals at over 10,000 locations. For more information, visit www.booker.com.
Net Promoter, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered service marks, and Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld
SOURCE Booker
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