DEVK Improves Discoverability, Boosts Conversions with Yext

With around four million customers, DEVK is one of the largest insurance companies in Germany, offering products for all insurance segments. But increasingly, sales for the company take place digitally. As a result, it's crucial that DEVK's 1,200 branches (and 2,400 additional sales partners) be found quickly and easily online. It's also vital that their sales partners show up in search results when their skills match a customers' needs.

Various studies* have shown that 53% of all respondents first look for a suitable insurance company or insurance agent using a search engine. So, DEVK decided to focus on location data management as a key part of their digital strategy — starting by improving search visibility for advisors.

One of the goals was for the DEVK partner located nearest to each customer to be displayed in response to a search query. But listings on platforms including Google, Google Maps, Amazon Alexa, Apple Maps, and Facebook were frequently out of date or contradicted each other. As a result, potential new customers sometimes ended up visiting offices out of hours – a less than ideal first impression.

That changed when DEVK started working with Yext.

"Working with Yext, we have succeeded in making our 1,200 branches more visible online and our 2,400 sales partners' details are now accurately displayed on more than 150 online platforms," says Sebastian Greiner, Head of Corporate Communications and Online Marketing at DEVK.

"Our sales partners' details constantly need updating. Through the Yext platform, we've customized and implemented over a million data points in the last two years, including updating opening hours, phone numbers, addresses, and more. Doing this manually would have been almost impossible," says Andreas Schneider, Senior Specialist AdTechnology at DEVK.

In the past, DEVK also had issues with branch offices or sales partners being displayed twice. We have now managed to delete around 6,000 duplicate entries," says Andreas Schneider, Senior Specialist AdTechnology at DEVK. "Moreover, it's important for us to leverage Yext technology to focus on addressing customers' emotions; after all, the stress level can be quite high when making a claim. It's therefore important to ensure that the customer journey is as simple and smooth as possible. Using the right data, we hope we'll find our customers right where they are looking for us," adds Hans-Joachim Nagel, Head of Corporate Communications for Banking and Direct Sales at DEVK.

And that's not all: "In addition to location data, it also serves to optimize business processes in our branches," says Andreas Schneider enthusiastically. Several departments within the Group leverage the data as it offers them unique added value.

Clicks on Google Maps have also increased by 55% in the 22 months following the partnerships beginning in early 2018. Working with Yext is not just about making sure our locations are online and that all related information appears correctly on digital maps; it's also about preparing our business and setting our data up in the best way possible to adapt to the evolving online landscape of searches, says Sebastian Greiner. Yext identifies trends and actively influences them through its evolution. Even impressions increased by 78% between January 2018 and November 2019.

DEVK also relies on so-called intent pages – websites that have been optimized for searches using artificial intelligence. This means that voice assistants and apps can find precisely the right website delivering the details that DEVK wants to provide, meeting their customer's needs.

With Yext, DEVK has succeeded in improving the visibility of its 1,200 branches online and making sure that the information about its 2,400 sales partners on over 150 online platforms is accurate.

Between January 2018 and February 2020, the platform was used to update 1.3 million data points, including opening hours, telephone numbers and addresses.

Yext deleted around 6,000 duplicate listings.

In addition, clicks on Google Maps have increased by 55% since the start of the partnership at the beginning of 2018 (the period from January 2018 to November 2019).

Impressions increased by 78% in the period from January 2018 to November 2019.