Last week Yext, a service that helps businesses synchronize their listings across the Web, announced a $27 million round of funding. (We heard it was at a $270 million valuation.) Today, it’s launching a new version of that service, aptly dubbed “The Next Yext.”
Co-founder and CEO Howard Lerman says there are three main additions to the new version of Yext. First, there’s a new overview screen, which includes counters showing the total number of listing updates for a business, as well as suggestions for expanding their profiles.
Second, there are new multi-location features that should make Yext more useful for large enterprise customers. For example, if one company acquires another company and wants to change the name on all the new stores, it doesn’t have to update the information on every store individually. Instead, it can select all the stores that it wants to change, or even upload a spreadsheet with all the new locations.
Lastly, Yext has added a feature for monitoring the reviews that appear on all the listing sites that it’s integrated with. That means a business can see new reviews as they appear, and also drill down on specific review topics. So if you introduced a new item on the menu, you don’t have to visit every user review site to see what people think — you can just search for that menu item on Yext and see the score it received, averaged across every site. This feels like a slightly new direction for Yext, but Lerman says that as a company that’s already connected to a businesses’ listings, Yext was well-positioned to do it, especially since it already offers traffic and click data on listings. He adds that Yext doesn’t provide any tools for influencing those reviews.
“That’s not our strategy,” he says. “We just want to help you synchronize your local business listings and be aware of what’s going on with them.”
The new version is launching for all Yext customers today. You can watch a (long-ish) demo video below. In it, Lerman also offers a big vision for what Yext can become — in the same way that Facebook reinvented and updated the yearbook, he’s hoping to do the same to the phone book.
Yext is the market-leading location software company that lets businesses update and sync their location data everywhere. Tens of thousands of businesses, including 10 of the Fortune 100 use Yext to update their location data and instantly sync it on dozens of search engines, mobile apps, ad platforms, and their own sites. Yext – Update Once. Updates Everywhere. Yext is located in New York, NY.
Howard Lerman is co-founder and CEO of Yext. Howard Lerman is a serial entrepreneur who has helped lead three previous ventures, all of which have had successful exits. He has led Yext into the clear market leader for location software. Yext software lets businesses update and sync their location data everywhere. Howard founded and sold his first startup, JustaTip.com from his dorm room at Duke University. He then co-founded Intwine, a technology consulting firm – later selling to Datran Media...
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