Specsavers Boosts Search Discovery and Drives Appointment Bookings with Yext

Specsavers aims to provide the best value in eye care and audiology across the markets it serves. The retail chain, which has more than 2,000 locations worldwide, offers vision and hearing tests in addition to selling glasses, contact lenses and hearing aids.

"The customer is first and centric to our approach," says Darin Butler, Head of Digital Customer Engagement at Specsavers. "We pride ourselves in best-in-class customer experience and that starts from the moment our customer is searching for an eye test, 'opticians near me,' or 'hearing check.'"

Butler's team is responsible for guaranteeing a consistent customer experience across digital channels, and a seamless online-to-offline journey is paramount to him. "Our customer's online journey, regardless of channel or device, needs to complement their in-store experience," he says.

Specsavers drives customers into its stores by offering eye and ear tests. The company's primary KPI is the number of appointments booked through online channels.

"Our goal in digital marketing is to provide an effortless digital and search experience for a user such that when they land on a Specsavers page, they are empowered to make a decision to book an appointment easily without having to click around," explains Vicky Allen, E-commerce Manager at Specsavers.

"While we can control the user experience on our owned properties like our website, we were lacking in control across search and social sites that lead traffic to our owned properties. That's why we started working with Yext."

Before partnering with Yext, Specsavers relied on manual agency resources to update its store information across the many maps, apps and search engines its customers use. The company also had no way of measuring the amount of traffic coming from these third-party sites. "This left a big margin of error and a blindspot in our reporting," explains Allen.

"It became such a manual task. We were really keen to have one source of truth and process to update our brand information," she adds. "We did a review of various providers and Yext came back ahead of the pack."

Specsavers uses Yext to power the facts about its business across search experiences, which helps drive appointment bookings and face-to-face interactions.

Yext's initial impact was driving internal efficiency and saving time. "Yext unlocks a lot of what would typically be staff resource," says Butler. "We work with a digital agency to manage integrated marketing campaigns. With Yext, they are able to focus on their core competencies rather than the manual entry of data. Not to mention, we can now leverage Yext to amplify our national campaign across digital platforms."

Prior to partnering with Yext, Specsavers saw about a 9% year-over-year increase in average monthly clicks. In the two years since launching with Yext, the brand has seen an average of 34% year-over-year growth, an incremental lift of 25%. At launch, Yext also pulled in 6,700 historical reviews from Specsavers listings — providing visibility into brand reputation across publishers over time.

In the first 12 months after launch, Specsavers averaged a 20% increase in monthly visits to its store pages from organic search, year-over-year. The brand also pulled in an additional 17,000 reviews, to allow for ongoing monitoring of brand reputation.

A key area of focus for Specsavers is its online reputation. "Peer-to-peer recommendation is key to customers and thus has to be key to our business," says Butler. "When a customer is looking for a provider, the odds are they will Google 'optician near me'. And if that store doesn't have a good rating, it doesn't matter how much money we've invested in local marketing — they aren't going to choose it. Yext gives us the ability to easily monitor and respond to reviews at scale."

Yext is now integrated across the Specsavers organisation. Butler's team provides each local marketing team with a monthly report on their average store ratings. And centralised customer service teams use the platform to respond to local reviews.

"This is just the beginning," says Butler. "As a healthcare provider, brick-and-mortar locations will always be important to us. Our digital visibility is crucial to our success as a company moving forward. Yext is a true business partner to us, helping us navigate the future of our industry."