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, [email protected]
SOURCE Yext, Inc.
