Supporting Businesses & Service Providers During COVID-19

COVID-19 has disrupted “business as usual” around the world. At Bitly, employees from each of our offices have transitioned to remote work. As we learn to adapt to a new normal, we’ve been busy helping customers do the same.

We’re working with them to establish solutions so they can continue to engage with their customers effectively. In this post, we’ve highlighted a few of the most common use cases we’re seeing at the moment. If your business can benefit from a solution like the ones below, get in touch. Our team is ready to help.

Contactless Payments & Exchanges

With social distancing has come a need for businesses to provide ways for customers to make purchases with little to no person-to-person interaction. 

For example, we’re working with a nonprofit that issues student scholarships. Typically, they have parents endorse the scholarship checks in person. Now, the nonprofit needs to provide a way to have checks endorsed virtually. 

Since in-person endorsements are no longer possible, the organization needs to leverage new channels to communicate with parents.

Solution

By sending out email and SMS notices with unique Bitly links in them, the nonprofit can securely and efficiently point parents to the right place to sign their students’ scholarship checks.

The organization needs to generate 50,000 unique links per month. Using the Bitly API, customers can scale up their communications to create thousands—even millions—of unique links safely and securely.

Some essential businesses remain in operation to provide goods and services to customers, like one multinational consumer retail company.

The business needs a solution to enable a cash and credit card-free payment method so customers can make purchases safely.

Solution

Using mobile deep links powered by Bitly, businesses can seamlessly route customers from an offline experience to their mobile apps to complete a transaction. 

Deep links also give businesses control of their mobile customer experiences, and can drive important metrics like app opens and conversions. 

Virtual Customer Service

Businesses of all kinds are having to adjust their customer service efforts to provide support that limits face-to-face interaction. This has been the case for many of our customers, including a major American telecom conglomerate.

The business helps customers with at-home setup and product troubleshooting, and wants to transition to remote support to reduce in-person appointments.

Solution

Our customer wants to offer clients the ability to receive remote support via video conference. To do this, they’ve partnered with Twilio to send out SMS service notifications and plan to use branded Bitly links in each message. 

Using Bitly links gives brands more space to include a clear, informative message in every SMS notification. They can also associate their account to a custom domain to create branded links. With your brand in your links, people are more likely to click them.

We’ve had customers in healthcare services contact us needing to increase their link limits to handle a higher-than-normal volume of SMS messages.

Solution

We can quickly increase customers’ link volumes to suit their needs. Using the Bitly API, they can safely and securely shorten large volumes of links without hassle.

We’ve also had prospective customers come to us for help with enacting telemedicine appointments for the very first time. For example, a nonprofit healthcare system is currently using email to send links to patients, but they feel SMS could lead to more effective communication.

Solution

Bitly works with many teams to implement this very use case, and can get you up and running quickly. Businesses use Bitly links in all sorts of SMS communications, including customer support updates, order statuses, service delays or changes, appointment reminders, fundraising and location-based promotions.

Another customer wants to implement Bitly in their follow-up communications to patients. Specifically, they’re going to begin sending patients SMS messages with links to join a video conference with their doctors.

Solution

Healthcare teams can design unique virtual patient experiences. Using Bitly links in their communications, they can point patients practically anywhere online, such as their appointment scheduling app, private patient portal or their selected video conferencing service.

Internal Communications

34 billion work emails go straight to the trash—including business critical communications—which presents a unique challenge in these times when getting someone’s attention isn’t as simple as tapping their shoulder at their desk.

Most businesses have increased internal communications during COVID-19, to keep employees up to date with the latest HR policies and to share company updates. As a result, businesses want to understand engagement with important company communications—including email newsletters, questionnaires and surveys, content shared on the company intranet and sales enablement material.

Solution

By using Bitly links in their communications, HR teams, management and executive teams can understand employee engagement. Plus, they can add UTM parameters to their links in Bitly so they can compare engagement metrics between teams. This makes identifying teams that aren’t highly engaged as simple as reviewing the link data in Bitly. With this information, managers can follow up to make sure their teams are reading important company information.

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We understand that it’s more important than ever to be able to interact with your customers safely and efficiently. Get in touch with our team to learn how Bitly can help you implement a custom solution that’s right for your business.