NEW YORK, March 31, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Yext, Inc. (NYSE:
YEXT), the Answers Search Company, and Wilkes
University, a private college in Pennsylvania, today announced their
collaboration to deliver accurate, up-to-date information to
students and faculty on Wilkes.edu with Yext Answers, Yext's
revolutionary search product.
While redesigning its website, its main channel for engagement
with potential students, Wilkes
University prioritized incorporating advanced, more modern
search because its legacy experience wasn't powerful enough to
understand nuanced queries beyond a handful of FAQs. With search
activity on the rise due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Wilkes University selected Yext Answers, an
advanced search experience powered by natural language processing
(NLP) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers
(BERT) technology, to deliver official answers to questions about
COVID-19 safety protocols, virtual tours, tuition, admissions,
programs of study, financial aid, and more.
Using search intelligence from Yext Answers, Wilkes University was able to identify the
information that its most frequent site visitors, including
prospective students, enrolled students, and faculty, were asking
for, and used it to inform the site's ongoing redesign. It took the
Wilkes team just 20 days to load 80
academic programs onto its Answers experience, and 25 days to
launch 176 searchable FAQs. Two months after implementing Answers,
the university saw a 54% click-through rate on site search
results.
"Yext Answers has really helped us better understand what
students are searching for — and what their expectations are," said
Mandy Pennington, Director of
Digital Marketing at Wilkes University.
"By providing students with accurate answers and updates about
COVID-19 and beyond, we're creating an infinitely better experience
for them."
"The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that just being digital-first
doesn't cut it — you have to be digital best," said David Rudnitsky, President and Chief Revenue
Officer at Yext. "By implementing a modern search solution with
Yext Answers, Wilkes University is
differentiating itself from other educational institutions by
meeting students where they primarily are this year — online — with
the answers they need to make important decisions."
Learn more about Wilkes University's
success with Answers here.
About Yext
The ultimate source for official answers
about a business online should be the business itself. However,
when consumers ask questions on company websites, too often they
are left in the dark with wrong answers. Yext (NYSE: YEXT), the
Search Experience Cloud, solves this problem by organizing a
business's facts so it can provide official answers to consumer
questions — wherever people search. Starting with the company
website, then extending across search engines and voice assistants,
businesses around the world, like T-Mobile, Jaguar Land Rover, BBVA
USA, and Kiehl's — as well as
organizations like the U.S. State Department and World Health
Organization — trust Yext to radically improve the search
experience on their websites and across the entire search
ecosystem.
Yext's mission is to help businesses and organizations around
the world deliver official answers everywhere people search. Yext
has been named a Best Place to Work by Fortune and Great Place to
Work®, as well as a Best Workplace for Women. Yext is headquartered
in New York City with offices in
Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, Dallas, Geneva, London, Miami, Milan,
Paris, San Francisco, Shanghai, Tokyo, and the Washington, D.C. area.
About Wilkes University
Wilkes University is a private,
independent, non-sectarian institution of higher education
dedicated to academic and intellectual excellence through mentoring
in the liberal arts, sciences and professional programs. Founded in
1933, Wilkes is on a mission to create
one of the nation's finest doctoral universities, offering all of
the programs, activities and opportunities of a large university in
the intimate, caring and mentoring environment of a small college,
open to all who show promise. The Brookings Institution ranked
Wilkes 14th in the nation for
middle-class mobility. In addition to 45 majors, Wilkes offers 24 master's degree programs and five
doctoral/terminal degree programs, including the doctor of
philosophy in nursing, doctor of nursing practice, doctor of
education, doctor of pharmacy, and master of fine arts in creative
writing.
CONTACT: Amanda Kontor,
pr@yext.com
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SOURCE Yext, Inc.