IBM Watson Explorer vs. Yext

The Watson Explorer is great because it potentially replaces a meriad of other low-level analytics products that we would need to use for data analytics and data mining. WEX isn't really suitable much beyond doing text and data analytics and performing machine learning, so if your team doesn't really have a use-case that fits all of these categories, it is worth looking at an alternative.

Incentivized

Yext is great for bigger clients. If your client has a franchise of any kind, or even multiple locations, that's an ideal use case. For smaller clients, with one location that doesn't change a lot, Yext isn't as viable, and the effort to update maybe ten or fifteen listings would be worth it.

Incentivized

• Free to try - It's possible to use most of the useful features of Watson Explore on their trial/demo accounts.
• Super well-designed data analytics tool - Most of the tools and features of the explorer are really useful, and truly help you fully understand the depth of any format of textual data.
• Extensive sources compatibility - WEX can retrieve data from a large range of sources, and the compatibility there is quite good as well.

Incentivized

• Making sure our location data is correctly being understood by Google.
• Taking into account best design principles for our pages layout.
• Staying on top of Google best practices so we don't have to.
• Building a very robust place for us to store all our location information.
• Solid integrations with some of our other key partners, for example Olo, Punchh.
• Being a very good partner for us, our Client Success Manager is exceptional.

Incentivized

• Support is just OK, like most of the other IBM Watson products. The setup/integration is really hands-on, but it's also problematic because support later may take a considerable amount of time.
• UI could still use a little more improvement - part of the administration and sources dashboards are hard to navigate.
• The Application Builder is a great part of the product, but hard to learn/understand - this is where we needed the most support from IBM and tutorials/documentation.

Incentivized

• Cost. This platform offers a lot of powerful features, but it has an expensive barrier to entry.
• Annual contracts limit flexibility for smaller companies
• The biggest drawback is that you need to keep your subscription active or listings/citation data will revert back to what it was pre-Yext implementation

Incentivized

Yext is pretty easy and straightforward to utilize out of the box. While I work for a digital marketing agency, and this is second nature to me at this point, I do believe the average SMB owner with zero digital marketing experience could be a proficient Yext user within 1 hour or so of usage. It's easy

Incentivized

We are a larger company with 26 locations, so we may receive additional attention. But they are always quick to answer our calls or emails. I rarely need support as the software delivers as promised. I will say their staff thus far has been very knowledgable about Yext and some lesser-known features. For us, they really understand our needs and why I'd be asking for certain solutions.

Incentivized

Google Cloud offers a Natural Language product, but it is just an API. This API doesn't offer the useful visualizations of relations, analytics, and graphs that IBM Watson Explorer offers on their interface. For this reason, we chose to go with IBM WEX. For later stages of our production, we decided to use Google's NLP API because we found that it was quick to integrate into production after studying data and developing models using IBM WEX.

Incentivized

Before Yext, I used Moz Local to manage our business listings. Moz Local had fewer listing platforms included with their service. For example, Moz Local did not include Yahoo, and we had issues with inconsistent Yahoo listings. We ultimately switched to Yext and it's been a good fit for us.

Incentivized

• Positive - Trial/demo period. This was really useful for us to figure out what features of WEX we liked most and how difficult it would be to integrate WEX into our workflow.
• Negative - On-boarding was long and almost always requires support from IBM support, unlike most other products this advanced.
• Positive - WEX replaced a large selection of alternative products we would have to use for the same functionality, and having all of that function in one place was definitely helpful.

Incentivized

• Yext has absolutely strengthened our SEO performance and has driven leads that perform extremely well.
• Yext has improved our consultation show rate because all of the clinic information for each of our locations is accurate no matter which website our clients are using to search for the clinic info.
• Yext has allowed our organization to ensure the correct phone numbers are listed across the web, which increased the number of inbound leads that come into our Call Center.

Incentivized