Deutsche Telekom Manage Reviews, Boost High-Intent Clicks With Yext.

Deutsche Telekom is one of the leading integrated telecommunications companies worldwide. Among other things, it operates a landline and mobile network and also offers numerous products such as broadband Internet and services. All retail interfaces are bundled in Deutsche Telekom Privatkunden-Vertrieb GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG. This includes the roughly 700 stationary Telekom Shops, where customers can find the entire portfolio and expert advice.

However, the way in which consumers collect information before making a purchase decision has changed in recent years. Before visiting a shop, customers search online to find out which products and services are offered on site and at what opening times. As the platforms on which these customers search for information — such as map services, voice assistants and social networks — have increased, the company faced a challenge in delivering information to its immense volume of customers about its hundreds of stores.

In June 2018, Telekom partnered with Yext to solve this challenge.

Since uniform data is important for search engines, being able to manage the information for each Telekom Shop to deliver consistency with opening times, address, telephone number and more has helped the brand boost its search presence — and deliver perfect answers to customers.

Deutsche Telekom also leverages Yext Pages in order to provide customers and interested parties with correct, search engine-optimised information about the individual Telekom Shops. Each of the approximately 700 Telekom Shops has its own website, where interested parties can, for example, click to make an appointment directly with an employee of the Telekom Shop. At the same time, they can digitally leaf through the company's latest advertising brochure. In addition, the services offered are listed and the ratings that were submitted by Google and Facebook via the shop are automatically displayed on the page.

The options offered by the Reviews module are particularly helpful: "This enables us to keep track of reviews that customers have made after visiting one of our branches, for example," says Weidenmüller. At the beginning of the collaboration, Yext initially migrated more than 23,000 existing customer reviews to its platform. In this way, the brand reputation could be analysed in detail across the various platforms. Based on this, Yext provided strategic advice to Deutsche Telekom regarding future review management and made specific recommendations for action. Yext integrated 31,000 additional reviews in the first eleven months after launch, giving the brand a better view into its online reputation and how to improve it.

The results are impressive: 11 months after the start of the collaboration, Google Direction clicks and Google Search Views for Deutsch Telekom each increased by ten per cent compared to the same period in the previous year.