The car maintenance and repair chain has chosen the Yext platform to strengthen its online presence and proximity. Romain Vancappel, Marketing and Innovation Purchasing Director, reviews the network's digital strategy and its results.
You have chosen the Yext platform, an AI specialist, to optimise online searches. What are your challenges and objectives?
With 480 centres in France, Speedy benefits from a strong territorial network, in the heart of cities, which allows the brand to be present at less than a quarter of an hour from the home of 80% of French people. The density of this network illustrates the brand's values: proximity, a culture of customer relations and quality of service. Today, our objective is to duplicate this proximity on the Internet. The digital challenge is a strong axis of development in a very competitive sector. The total overhaul of our website in 2018 was an opportunity to review our approach to natural referencing. When a web user searches for a centre, Speedy must appear in the top 5 - or even the top 3 - of the results on the first page of Google.
What were your criteria for choosing a solution and for what results?
Speedy is a living network, sometimes some centres are forced to close for a few days due to work in their geographical area, others change hands, others are created... we needed to be more responsive to inform Internet users of the status of the centre they were looking for, to adapt the opening hours in almost real-time, etc.
We met with several service providers, Yext has a very good knowledge of retail and as a Google partner has a direct point of contact with its teams. The solution allows us to improve SEO through keyword ranking and provides the responsiveness required to update centre opening times. Other interesting features include traffic analysis data (number of calls from Google Maps, number of routes viewed, etc.)
To date, more than 30% of the traffic on the Speedy website comes from natural referencing, this share was very low before. This traffic comes from Google search engine queries and from local referencing via Google Maps. Updates made in Yext are transferred in real-time to GMB (Google My Business) which synchronises them with its search engine, maps, etc. So as soon as a change is entered, it is propagated throughout our network. It is absolutely key for us to transmit reliable information to our customers.
We have not calculated the ROI, but 30% of online sales come from natural referencing. Knowing that the digital channel represents between 10 and 12% of turnover (€280 million under the brand), a percentage that is growing.
What are your ambitions in terms of customer service for the coming months?
To continue to maintain our positions and to develop the Speedy network because there are still areas that are not covered, to increase its visibility and proximity. In our business, few customers are loyal, so our prospecting objectives are permanent. Speedy was voted Customer Service of the Year in its category for the 8th consecutive year. Our ambition is to maintain this level and to participate again because this competition forces us to progress. Winning the award confirms our positioning, as Speedy draws its strength from people.