Case study

How Yell boosted production quality and decreased churn

Yell identified the need to implement a robust quality process to be able to clearly demonstrate the value that customers were getting from a website built and optimised by Yell.

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The challenge

We wanted customers to have something that they could take away with them to show that we had designed, built, and optimised their new site for both prospective consumers as well as highlighting key words for search engines. We wanted our customers to have complete visibility of the quality assurance steps we were undertaking behind the scenes to ensure their website was built to a great standard and set up to perform.”

– Katie Curd, Head of Presence Products at Yell

Yell identified four key problems they wanted to solve:

  • The ability to benchmark a website’s quality that was in place immediately at production and maintained during the lifespan of the customer’s website
  • To automate manual checks to gain time and cost efficiencies
  • A customer-friendly solution demonstrating the value Yell provided in the build process quality and ongoing during the life of the customer’s website
  • To enable high-level decision making, by producing aggregated reporting for Yell’s 36k-strong website client-base

Better web performance

“The Insites platform gives us the ability to define what “good” looks like and explain why each of these factors are important to website performance for our customers and internal users. We no longer need to produce lots of educational material as it is right there in the platform”

-Katie Curd, Head of Presence Products at Yell

The solution

Yell evaluated multiple tools but ultimately chose Insites as a complete end-to-end solution to measure website performance for their sales, quality, and customer service teams.

Two factors were decisive in Yell selecting Insites as their solution provider:

  • User-friendliness – the Insites report interface was suitable to be used by both external and internal users of mixed skill sets and skill levels
  • Flexibility – unlike other local SEO testing tools, the Insites audit and interface was adaptable to Yell’s specific business needs.

As Yell re-engineered their processes, Insites tailored the platform to support their objectives, and the comprehensive digital audit was adapted to complement Yell’s multi-tiered product offering.

The outcome for Yell, particularly for the production and in-life teams, was Insites becoming the primary reference point for customers’ digital health across the organisation.

In sales, the new Insites audit is an essential tool in their pitching process. Agents can quickly and easily identify gaps in a customer’s digital presence and highlight these, showing how Yell’s solutions will resolve these.

In production, agents focus on delivering to the set quality standard. Problem areas can be identified and swiftly resolved before the website is set live. At a managerial level, individual agent performance can be tracked using the reporting dashboards in the platform.

Post-production, the easy-to-understand audit is delivered to the customer at “go-live” to confirm that Yell’s quality standard has been met and the ongoing use of the audit improves retention and up-sell by proving the value delivered.

“Insites gives me the edge when it comes to both timing, and standardisation. If our checks remained the same without the tool to use, I can see agent’s finding it very challenging when having to manually check individual assets’’.  Product Quality Executive at Yell

Outcomes

Implementing the Insites audit as a consistent benchmark throughout the customer’s lifecycle has resulted in significant business value:

1 Based on comparison of 26 sites that went through post-product quality check process with 50% checked manually and 50% check via the Insites builder tool

  • Time and cost saving – in just one of Yell’s workflows, implementing the Insites platform reduced turn-around time by 20%1.

  • Increased sales confidence – agents can use the Insites platform to seamlessly demonstrate the need for a new website, confidently promise a high performing new website (min 8/10 score) with easy to prove results without resorting to multiple tools.

  • Visibility – Yell have newfound visibility on the state of their client’s websites thanks to high-level reporting dashboards in the platform, as well as a feed of data from the Insites API.

About Yell

Yell is No.1 for managed digital marketing services for all types of local businesses in the UK*. Its goal is simple – to connect consumers and businesses online. Yell is one of the largest Google Partners in the UK, a Microsoft Advertising Elite Channel Partner, a Meta Business Partner (formerly Facebook), as well as partnering with Apple and Amazon to syndicate business listings across the Yell network, which delivers over 50 million visits to businesses listed on Yell each month.

*Source: M-Brain 2019, in terms of revenue from sales of managed digital marketing services

† Yell internal and syndicated partner statistics Jan-Dec 2021. Total visits include (a) direct visits to Yell.com and (b) searches for businesses via Yell’s content syndication partners, where Yell’s data was used in the search results provided.