With Yext, La Poste Group Leverages Data to Improve Digital Visibility and Customer Satisfaction

La Poste has at least 35,000 contact points (including post offices, agencies, and more) spread between laposte.fr and Google. With an additional 16,000 parcel collection points and 120,000 street mailboxes, the postal group has an extraordinary amount of touchpoints to manage. To simplify the process — and make sure customers can find all the information they need via digital means — La Poste tapped Yext to support its digital strategy.

Putting the customer at the forefront of their business is La Poste's goal, and they aim to consistently adapt to the needs of their French customer base. Because people today rely on digital channels more than ever, La Poste wanted to streamline the digital journey, giving customers the most comprehensive information wherever and whenever they search. But seamlessly blending the physical and the digital world was a challenge — especially with the number of digital touchpoints La Poste knew they needed to manage.

To help customers access important information about La Poste in real-time, the group needed a secure and robust tech platform capable of automating the process of making updates across all of its contact points and various services. At the same time, La Poste wanted to make a positive SEO impact, improving the search ranking of its contact points and services across Google and other third-party applications. Finally, to better meet customers' expectations, La Poste wanted a solution that would help the group quickly deploy local pages and service pages — in an automated manner, at scale.

La Poste's digital transformation project was carried out in several stages. To better manage their essential information across third-party publishers like Google, La Poste implemented Yext Listingsover the course of four months. This automated the process of updating 495,000 contact points across 10 publishers, including 33,000 Google Business Profile (GBP) listings —while deploying a new locator on laposte.fr.

Additionally, to help highlight lesser-known services and gain market share, the group chose to add more information to their listings(including photos, service details, news, accessibility, and more). Ultimately, this led to the creation of dedicated intent pages for remote assistance or parcel delivery —currently representing nearly 14,000 pages.

Finally, in 2022, approximately 110,000 mailboxes were added to the laposte.fr locator to help the French population find them more easily. Starting from early 2023, La Poste began gradually rolling out an appointment scheduling function in post offices, accessible both via the locator and Google.

The partnership hasn't only impacted La Poste's online discoverability and search ranking. It has saved them over one million hours of manual work.

In the end, with over 272,000 entities spread across 18 different types of entities (including sales points, parcel pick-up or drop-off points, andmailboxes), including 64,000 locations, La Poste has made over 93 million content updates in Yext since the beginning of the partnership in January 2021.

These updates are distributed to three times more digital access points (here, third-party applications). This translates to an average of 2.7 million content updates per month in Yext and 11.7 million updates per month to digital access points such as Google, Apple Maps, and Amazon Alexa. Thus, by using Yext Content as the source of truth (via connectors and APIs) to disseminate data to multiple digital access points, we calculate that La Poste saves an average of over 1 million hours of manual work per month.

Thanks to these real-time schedule management capabilities, La Poste has increased their discoverability, reaching over 550 million views on GBP in 2022. This visibility directly translates to actual customer actions: La Poste saw 53% growth in clicks to driving directions since the initial deployment of Yext***. This is explained by a consistent year-over-year growth for over two years, of at least 10% annually. At the same time Yext-powered Pages experienced strong growth (over 77% of clicks from search terms like "service+city.") This growth also resulted in a 53% higher click-through rate, despite a significant increase in overall impressions during the same period.

Overall, thanks to the availability of more robust, accurate data online, the average rating of the La Poste group has improved. Customer satisfaction indicators are up – as well as visits to the locator on laposte.fr with 2 million visits per month, up 11.5% in one year.

Yext and La Poste aim to further optimize the customer experience by focusing on proximity, convenience, and understanding customer needs — but also by increasing the digital visibility of new services offered by La Poste in its physical contact points. To achieve this, the group's next step will focus on structured indexing to optimize the local SEO for offers and services provided by La Poste in competitive areas.

*Contact points include post offices, communal postal agencies, and merchant relays.

**Assuming 3 minutes per update in Yext or similar platforms and 5 minutes per update in the variety of interfaces specific to each publisher.

***Apr 2023 - Sep 2023 compared to Apr 2021 - Sep 2021.