Monday, December 28, 2020
Reflections on 2020: Nick Hedges, MomentFeed
Every year, we feature the year end reflections of founders, CEOs, investors, and others in Southern California's high tech community. We'll be posting these throughout the next two weeks. Today, we have Nick Hedges, CEO of MomentFeed (www.momentfeed.com). You will be able to get to all of these posts on our 2020 reflections here. Are you a founder, CEO, or investor who would like to participate? Contact our editors for details.
What was the biggest news for you/your company this year?
In 2020, the pandemic radically changed the customer acquisition process for many consumer-facing industries. This presented MomentFeed with an immense opportunity to help multi-location consumer brands meet the challenges brought on by an overnight shift in consumer shopping patterns. We successfully accelerated our product innovation schedule to deliver, in record time, solutions to meet these challenges. This included business-critical features to indicate if a business was “temporarily closed” or operating in a limited capacity, e.g. “no dine-in, but open for take-out and delivery.” As well as major innovations like our AI-driven customer sentiment analysis, to help our clients listen and adapt to quickly changing consumer behaviors and expectations.
It's been a tough year for many due to the pandemic; how have you or your company adapted to the business environment?
,p> This year it’s been all hands on deck at MomentFeed to help multi-location, brick-and-mortar brands adapt quickly to meet challenges. As brick-and-mortar businesses closed and re-opened at limited capacity, our team of digital marketing strategists updated hours on more than 1.3 million local listings, a record number. We also updated more than 43,700 attributes as new amenities became commonplace, like curbside pickup and contactless delivery. And we saw a record number of 278 million clicks to local web pages as more consumers looked to connect with businesses locally.In addition, in this new digital first world, nearly every type of purchase from what’s for lunch, to where’s the nearest ATM, starts with a ‘near me’ search on Google, Yelp, or one of the many other discovery networks. MomentFeed clients were well-positioned to amp up their digital presence and continue to remain visible online, even when consumers weren’t passing by their store offline. MomentFeed also became a great way for multi-location brands to keep a pulse on customer sentiment, with visibility into online reviews. As restaurants, retail, banks, and other brick-and-mortar businesses implemented new operational models, they were able to get immediate visibility into customer feedback, responding and adapting quickly, thus protecting brand reputation in a volatile time.
What was the biggest lesson you learned this year?
The power of people and the importance of community. I was humbled by our talented team who went the extra mile for customers, working long hours to enable clients to pivot and meet their consumers’ changing needs. And by the MomentFeed team members who were behind our ability to bring major innovations to market in record time, despite the disruption of transitioning to working from home and countless other pandemic related challenges during the year.
We were also in awe of our brick and mortar client companies who showed incredible grit to keep their brands in business -- quickly adapting to meet their regional customers’ unique needs and proved they were valued community members across hundreds, sometimes even thousands of communities across the US. These hero brands were pushing into uncharted territory, testing and finding new ways to serve and satisfy customers when their businesses were upended by Covid.
What are you most looking forward to in the technology/startup world in 2021?
Seeing our client brands emerge stronger and more effective in engaging prospects on a local level and understanding the individualized customer care that will move the needle in customer satisfaction for each of their locations.
The shift to consumers starting nearly every purchase with localized organic search appears to be permanent for brick and mortar businesses, so we have an immense opportunity to innovate in 2021 to help our client brands continue to adapt and succeed. The centerpiece of our roadmap for 2021 is even more significant enhancements that: enhance a multi-location brand’s local presence; allow brands to understand their customers even better; and improve engagement to build the standing of each brand location as a vital community member with a stellar reputation.
Nick Hedges is the CEO of Momentfeed, and is a 20-year veteran of the Internet and software as a service (SaaS) industry, Nick comes to MomentFeed having been President and CEO of Velocify, the leading consumer sales acceleration platform. Nick helped orchestrate the successful sale of the company to Velocify partner and leading cloud-based platform provider for the mortgage finance industry, Ellie Mae.