Pep Boys Wins Retail TouchPoints’ Customer Engagement Award for Yext-Powered Instagram Monitoring Program

Retail TouchPoints announced that Pep Boys has received a Gold 2015 Customer Engagement Award for its innovative Instagram Monitoring program, which the Yext platform powers. Retail TouchPoints' Customer Engagement Awards program recognizes retailers that are employing the most creative and unique strategies to deliver on the promise of customer-centricity. This year's winners include several other top retail brands, such as AT&T, Kate Spade, Kohl's, and Payless ShoeSource.

In early 2015, Pep Boys turned to Yext to help integrate Instagram as a key component of its Search and Response customer engagement program, which is focused on improving the brand's social media following by actively tracking and responding in real-time to all relevant social media posts. Instagram's limited search function only let brands track and search by hashtags and @mentions, but not by location. Pep Boys solved the problem by leveraging Yext's unique technology, which pulls in user-generated content that is geo-tagged at their store locations even if the user doesn't include a hashtag. This allows Pep Boys to gain access to an important audience segment they would not have been able to reach otherwise: the local customers who are actually visiting their shop locations.

"Thanks to Yext, Pep Boys can now see all user-generated content tagged at any of our 800 locations in a single, searchable feed and reply to them directly— without ever leaving the Yext dashboard," says Emily Smith, Pep Boys' Online Marketing Manager. "We also leverage Yext's real-time tracking and response capabilities to respond immediately to customers who have urgent questions and concerns, which has really elevated our quality of customer service and helped us build better customer relationships."

With Yext powering their Instagram monitoring, Pep Boys is always just a click away from engaging with local customers who are posting about their business in the moment it actually matters – when they are shopping in-store. Since launching in early 2015, Pep Boys has tracked in real-time over 6,400 Instagram posts in the Yext platform.

"By leveraging Yext to improve our social media presence in general, we are able to attract the attention of new users who have not interacted with our brand before and thereby grow our customer audience," adds Rachel Silva, AVP of Marketing.

"We love partnering with forward-thinking brands like Pep Boys who understand the importance of leveraging technology to engage today's mobile-empowered customers," says Jeff Rohrs, Yext's CMO. "Through Yext's platform, Pep Boys is effectively harnessing the power of location to expand their social media audience and create more meaningful engagement that has a positive impact on their customer experience."

To learn more about Pep Boys' Instagram Monitoring program, you can visit our Customer Showcase. You can also read the press release here.