HMV Leverages Yext to Save Time and Drive Customer Engagement

Since the 1921 opening of their first shop in Oxford Street, London, HMV has been at the forefront of the entertainment industry. Providing music, visual, technology, and pop culture products to generations of consumers, the brand's commitment to innovation has allowed it to maintain its status as a trusted source for all things entertainment. "When I started in 1998, we sold loads of CDs, some videos, and these new things called DVDs," says Rupert Banning-Lover, Central Operations Manager. "One thing we've always been very good at is bringing trends to fans."

Around December of 2018, HMV came to the conclusion that they needed help reimagining their customers' digital experiences. Before partnering with Yext, HMV relied on their operations team to update online listings for all of their stores across a variety of publishers. With a quickly growing conglomerate of stores across the UK, keeping store information updated for so many locations was becoming unmanageable for their team, whether it was being done weekly or during the madness of holiday hours.

"I would have to manually update store information on seven different platforms," says Charlotte Lawrance, Central Operations Coordinator. "So many mistakes could be made. Information just wasn't consistent and was often incorrect." said Rupert.

HMV partnered with Yext late in 2018 to bolster a large portion of the company's digital experience through listings management–and saw immediate results. The significant burden of making manual website updates was taken off the shoulders of HMV digital marketing and operations teams, leaving them more time and energy to continue tapping into entertainment trends, a mission that has kept the brand so successful for more than a century.

Once HMV realised the amount of time managing their Listings with Yext saved, the company expanded its work with Yext to respond to customer reviews on Google. By providing relevant and timely responses to even the most positive reviews, Yext gives HMV a competitive advantage with consistent customer communications.

Over the past five years, HMV has pushed 80,000 content updates to 2.7M listings, including 60,000 updates to hours of operation, through the Yext platform. The company has also seen a significant increase in engagement, with 2x growth in clicks on listings over the past 2 years.

HMV has also seen an improvement in Google reviews since expanding its partnership with Yext. With 100% of reviews responded to within 48 hours, HMV has seen a quarter-star increase in their average rating, and a 20% boost in the sentiment score of the primary "HMV" brand when mentioned in reviews.

"From an operations perspective, it's brilliant to have all of our business' information housed in one place," Charlotte says. "I can update my company's listings and know with confidence that there's only one single-source of truth managing information across all of these different outlets. And it's really easy and quick to make updates with just a click of a button."

HMV's future plans include harnessing Yext's platform to stay at the forefront of entertainment trends and break into emerging markets with integrated e-commerce functionality. As Rupert puts it. "It's a continuing evolution, all about maintaining relevance with our customers."

The transformation of HMV's digital experience would not have been possible without the hands-on support of the Yext team. "The regular catch-ups and communication has worked really well in helping us understand how to utilise their products to get the best outcomes for our business," Charlotte explains. "They give us a lot of confidence in what we're doing and where we're going."