Ecosystem Expanded: Yext

Conditioned to expect a seamless digital experience by the likes of Google and Amazon, consumers have been continuously increasing their demands and expectations for an engaging and consistent digital experience across all channels.

Every day, partners, clients, customers, and employees ask various questions about businesses online — and they ask these questions in large numbers across different channels and platforms. This makes it difficult for businesses to answer them, since the information they need to deliver an accurate answer is often spread across different databases. (Additionally, it’s often the case that each digital channel is managed separately.)

As a result, companies often devote a lot of time and resources to simultaneously manage multiple single-purpose applications — without having them connected to one source of truth for all of their business information. This, in turn, leads to additional operational workflows — and to a poor experience for the end-user.

So, how can businesses tackle a challenge of gathering the information to seamlessly answer their users’ questions — wherever they happen to ask them? This is where our technology partner Yext comes in: To help businesses create seamless digital search experiences and answer more customer questions.

At Storyblok, we really love innovative solutions and are always happy to work with true pioneers in a given technology area. That’s why we are over the moon to be able to have Yext on our search technology partner listing, because we are strongly convinced that they are not a typical search-feature oriented company. Instead, they have created an innovative and unprecedented solution that is now fully compatible with Storyblok.

Yext: One platform, limitless solutions

Yext’s purpose is to empower businesses to deliver relevant, actionable answers wherever customers, employees, and partners look for information.

Yext Content enables businesses to manage and structure any data about their brand and build complex entity relationships. This data can then be used to power search experiences across a vast array of digital touchpoints such as publishers, websites, apps, maps, search engines, voice assistants, and other digital touchpoints — which is how Yext helps businesses answer questions, anywhere.

For over 15 years, thousands of companies worldwide have trusted Yext to seamlessly deliver and centralize content-driven experiences at scale. Yext has expertise in every industry and works with organizations of all sizes around the globe. Their products address business needs across the marketing, support, commerce, and workplace functions.

Why do we consider Yext as an innovative and powerful platform?

Firstly, it’s about who and what they are. The company’s brand identity is bold, confident, authentic, and engaging. Yext believes that building a brand around a composable platform means that it is important that flexibility is important, and nothing is one-size-fits-all.

Let's take a look at why exactly they are loved by their customers:

• Enterprise-wide Solutions: Yext is the only platform that can improve both findability and discoverability across search engines, websites, apps, chatbots, intranets, and voice assistants.
• Direct Integrations: A growing library of connectors, publishers, and app partners gives businesses the flexibility and confidence to manage data with the tools they trust.
• Fast Time-to-Value: No-code implementation and pre-tuned machine learning models quickly drive results, while consumer-grade APIs can be flexibly deployed to solve a growing number of use cases.
• Low Total Cost of Ownership: Yext customers pay for our software to independently deliver best-in-class digital experiences without relying on dedicated development or data science resources.

Yext & Storyblok on the way to answer Business Questions together

Yext’s platform can power both first- and third-party search experiences using a flexible and scalable platform. Combined with an expansive technology solutions network, it enables customers to extend and leverage its functions in a wide range of ways to complement businesses’ existing tech stack. One of such partnerships is our exciting Yext & Storyblok integration, which is built on Storyblok’s API.

How does that work?

Yext’s workflow starts with content collection from across an enterprise, using pre-built or custom integration. Then, the content is organized into a structured platform — or“Knowledge Graph”, called Yext Content. Finally, Yext leverages the platform to deliver actionable and relevant information - in the form of answers - across a wide variety of digital touchpoints.

While creating their solution, Yext had in mind that when brands onboard a new platform, they often have to deal with burdensome data transfers and heavy manual processes to get up and running. Yext has built a library of data sources - “Connectors” - that make it easy for new clients to sync data into Yext Content. With the Storyblok connector, mutual clients can quickly pull in any of their Story types into Yext and remove those manual steps. When using the Yext & Storyblok integration, any Storyblok customer can take advantage of the solution and seamlessly pull their Stories - and associated content - directly into Yext.

The integration was created using the Storyblok Content Delivery API and makes requests to the Retrieve Multiple Stories endpoint for a list of Stories, and their associated content, within a Space. Yext & Storyblok integration is built on top of Yext’s powerful Connectors framework. With an easy-to-use UI, Connectors allow users with or without technical know-how to map and transform data from an API and create structured entities in Yext Content.

There are a lot of reasons why is the integration so unique:

• Flexibility and ease of use: With this integration customers can customize Yext Content to match their Story structures. It is quick and easy to duplicate a Connector and update it to pull in a new Story type. Similarly, it is easy to change field selectors and mappings if a user adds new fields to existing Stories in Storyblok.
• Data is always up to date: Yext’s Connectors can run on a configurable frequency (hourly, daily, etc.) and have run modes that keeps Yext Content always in sync with Storyblok.
• Quick time to value: The pre-built React components make it easy for developers to integrate our Search bar onto any existing pages with a few simple lines of code to reference the React components and an easy ability to make customizations.

Two technologies, one joint Answer

After our numerous interactions with Yext, it’s clear for us that we have a lot in common! Yext is thrilled to expand its focus on partnerships and, exactly like us, believes that customers should be able to build the scalable and flexible platform that works best for them. Another similarity between us is that Yext is also a member of MACH Alliance, which only confirms the company’s best practices and innovative approach. We’re confident that together we can maximize the power of our technology ecosystems and our cooperation results in creating a unique, innovative, and effective digital search and content creation experience.

Feel free to visit Yext's technology partner listing, or the company’s partners website and their extensive content library to discover more. Also, we encourage you to contact our partner team or sales team directly, to find out more about our endless integration possibilities.