Yext, a popular local business search engine, debuted Yext Calls last year at TechCrunch50, which is sort of like a Google Voice for businesses. Yext allows local businesses to use its software to process incoming phone calls and organize them based on what was said during the conversation. This gives businesses the ability to search or browse through the transcripts and calls at any point. Based on keywords that occurred in the call, the software can detect that e.g. price estimates were requested for a car repair or which part of what type of vehicle the caller was having problems with exactly.
But Yext says that in the realtime web, it’s tough to manage your reputation as a business. So the startup is launching a realtime reputation manager for local businesses. It will claim your local business listing on sites like Citysearch, Yelp, YellowPages, Twitter, Facebook and more. The site will pull reviews for a local business on all these sites, a track each review for positive ore negative feedback.
Businesses can Tweet directly from the management app, manage their Facebook fan page and can access visitor check-ins on Foursquare. Yext’s reputation dashboard is also integrated with its other features. The dashboard will be free for businesses for now. Yext says that local is vertical, and is not a big, broad market. For example for a local gym, the dashboard will source buzz from fitness site as well as social media.
The startup, which was set to generate $20 million in revenues in 2009, just raised $25 million in Series B funding.
Yext will face competition from ReputationDefender, and a number of other social media tracking services for businesses.
