Salesforce Experience Cloud vs. Yext

[Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Salesforce Community Cloud)] seems to be very well suited for what we want to use it for, which is to allow customers to have access to their ongoing and already-resolved cases, which will save our customer success team time and allow for transparency. It also seems well-suited for fine-tuning knowledge libraries, as it allows you to track the knowledge articles that are most impactful (and conversely, those that are less impactful) as you are able to track the path that customers use to self-serve ahead of submitting a ticket. I haven't run into any scenarios yet where we wanted to use Experience Cloud as a solution but discovered that it wasn't a fit.

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

• Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization
• Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required

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

• None that come to mind - integrations, experience, and use is great! However, if you're trying to learn it yourself, you may benefit from consulting an expert. Or, if you're wondering if it's good for you, a business analysis will suit you well before you implement to save yourselves, time, money, efforts, and even people.

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

Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend Salesforce Trailhead along with it

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

Through ease of use and expandability, I think that Community Cloud is a best in class at exposing Salesforce integrations, as well as expandability in working through building custom add-ons for Salesforce for collaborations and self-service. Additionally, the speed to market on these changes are lightning-quick and allow for experimentation.

Incentivized

We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.

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

Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on attributes within the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud was a natural fit for this customer-facing purpose.

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

• Its given us much better issue and customer satisfaction tracking, since before Community Cloud much of our communications were extremely siloed within Outlook. We had no visibility because communications happened on an individual basis rather than a holistic level (the company).
• We've increased user interaction and given our customers a reason to come to the website repeatedly.
• Our costs have gone up, naturally, as the system proves to be a strong solution. We have pulled in other resources and teams which requires more licenses. I guess that's a sign of success but also a cost.

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