FedEx Drives 97% Growth in Five-Star Reviews with Yext

Everyone knows the name FedEx — and for good reason. It transformed the shipping industry forever by becoming the world's first overnight delivery service in 1973. Today, FedEx is a delivery giant powered by 600,000 employees, 200,000 road vehicles, and 680 aircraft. Its extensive network safely ushers more than 18 million packages, parcels, and letters to their destinations every day.

"FedEx is a global company. We service more than 220 countries and territories, but there are significant differences between regions in terms of market maturity," says Natasha Alarcon, Manager of Digital Access Marketing and CCA Marketing Operations. "The U.S., for example, is very established. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the market is less mature and we manage over 50 countries — each of which has its own degree of penetration, perception, and brand recognition."

Large enterprises typically engage with FedEx through existing relationships, whereas individuals from small and medium-sized businesses often discover FedEx through search engines by typing queries such as "shipping near me." Search engines like Google determine how results are ranked by weighing factors such as relevance and prominence. To grow its presence in Latin America and the Caribbean, FedEx recognized the need for a comprehensive SEO program that focused on these variables to boost organic discoverability.

FedEx became a customer in 2012 and has gradually expanded its Yext footprint to manage Location Listings in all of its markets. This meant that the relevance piece for the region had been taken care of with complete and detailed business information on all of FedEx's third-party profiles. Prominence, which is influenced by reviews and star rating, was a different challenge — especially with a team of only 10 part-time customer service agents.

"About two years ago, we started engaging with the Customer Experience team to understand how reviews were being managed and responded to," says Alarcon. "We quickly understood that there was room for improvement, but lacked an efficient way to scale the program with such a small team."

Alarcon was aware that Yext offered Reputation Management and initially kicked off a pilot in Mexico to test how the tool would perform. With the flip of a switch, FedEx gained access to a centralized feedback platform to view and manage their customer interactions across a network of 200+ global integration partners. "Our Customer Experience team started to respond to reviews right away," says Alarcon. "Since then, we've added country after country. FedEx now uses Yext to monitor reviews across most of Latin America and responds to reviews in Spanish, English, and Portuguese with plans to support responses in French soon."

The enablement process was simple, and Alarcon only had to facilitate a single training before her team was fully onboarded. They already understood the importance of reviews and were eager to improve the efficiency of their day-to-day work. "As soon as they saw the tool, got trained, and realized how intuitive it was, they started responding right away," says Alarcon. FedEx streamlined the process even further by setting up response templates in different languages, which made it a breeze to manage thousands of reviews with just a handful of people.

An added benefit of the program has been the amount of insight Alarcon and team have been able to gain from reviews. "Through Yext, we've been able to identify operational issues from reviews that we wouldn't have seen before," says Alarcon. "For instance, we can see when certain employees get positive or negative feedback. With this information, we can either give team members recognition for a job well done or training to correct their performance. We treat Yext as a Voice of the Customer tool, and it's proved useful for both our customer experience and retail operations departments."

Since launching the Yext Reputation Management solution in November 2020, reviews for the 725+ FedEx locations in Latin America and the Caribbean have surged. Total review volume has risen by 64% over a two-year period, which would typically be an operational challenge for a small number of employees. However, thanks to the efficiency delivered by Yext's platform, Alarcon's small team has consistently responded to over 90% of the reviews received while cutting average response time in half.

This dedication to customer feedback is well-received, as evidenced by a 97% increase in 5-star reviews within the same timeframe. Growth in perfect reviews has been 3x faster than growth in negative reviews (1, 2, and 3-stars), and nearly 2x faster than growth in 4-star reviews. The overwhelmingly positive response has helped FedEx increase its monthly average rating by a quarter-star across all locations in the region.

Users are now more likely to find FedEx listings when looking for services, and often perform high intent engagements when they do. With heightened prominence in local search and a flood of positive reviews, it's no surprise that website and "Get Directions" clicks have increased by 19% and 32%, respectively.

"I'm surprised at how easy it was to achieve the results we've seen, but I'm not surprised that we've seen them because I've always known that Yext would get us there," says Alarcon. "It's a testament to what can happen when two great teams work together with a powerful, intuitive platform."