TC50: Yext transcribes, searches phone calls for local businesses

yextYext is trying to make online local advertising more effective by focusing on phone calls instead of clicks. The company debuted its system today at the TechCrunch50 trade show in San Francisco.

When a customer calls a local business, Yext transcribes the calls and generates an automatic e-mail for the owner. It tags the call with different actions or categories. For example, if you’re an auto repair shop, Yext can sort out whether it’s an order or a complaint. You can also search all of your old calls.

Yext’s business model is what’s known in the ad business as pay-per-action. Local businesses list the kind of phone calls that they want — they could be ones about car repair orders or candidates interested in jobs. When a customer completes an action the company says it wants, Yext charges for that.

Yext can filter out the spam phone calls, like ones from telemarketers. The company says it’s making $20 million a year in revenue and that’s up 60 percent from four months ago.

Some selected experts at the conference provided some feedback about the company:

Roelof Botha, partner at Sequoia Capital: Pay-per-call has been around for awhile, but all previous startups have had problems with signing up companies. There’s a sales and marketing problem with explaining the value proposition.

Paul Graham, founder of YCombinator: Seems like large, national businesses would be interested in this as well.

Marissa Mayer of Google: Why sell it as pay-per-action? Company could consider selling it as an IT product to local businesses.

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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler

Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Heather
    I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But our company is highly unsatisfied with YEXT. We have been working with them for a few months now. The first month we received 6 phone calls. All of which were placed in our "qualified" inbox, but were either sales calls or junk calls. I was not told upon signing up for Yext that I needed to personally monitor each call received through Yext each month. $150 was debited from our credit card on the first. We paid $150 for solicitation and wrong numbers calling our office.

    Upon calling to correct and receive a refund for the $150, I was told that they do NOT give refunds but can credit the amount towards future calls. We had decided to cancel the service because it did NOT generate any new leads. They will not issue refunds so we are forced to continue with Yext until our $150 credit runs out. Was told "You'll just have $150 sitting here whenever you decide to come back to us". They informed me that in order to avoid the same thing happening again, I needed to call or email each month before the first of the month to tell them which calls were junk. On top of that, they still debited $10 the first of the next month for the service instead of using our credit. We did not realize upon signing up that we'd have to monitor closely this service.

    Please note this before making the same mistake we did. I just checked our calls for this month. We paid for 2 existing patients that looked up our name and wanted to reschedule their appointments. Something that shouldn't cost us $25 per phone call!

    Highly dissatisfied that the customer service could offer no way to fix the problem.
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