I had the pleasure of speaking with Scott Mcintosh of MedCenterDisplay recently. Scott and his team have been Yext Certified Partners since April 2013, making them one of our longest-lasting Partners. Scott was kind enough to chat with me about MedCenterDisplay, being a Partner, and what problems Yext has solved for them.
AARTHI: So, tell me a little bit about your business!
SCOTT: MedCenterDisplay runs patient engagement networks. What that means is, we install large digital displays inside hospitals and in the high-capacity areas: outpatient surgery, emergency waiting room, and cafeterias typically. We also provide healthcare related content to display on those screens. We have a content team here — designers, copywriters, and so forth — who create engaging content that the hospital can use to inform, educate, and entertain patients, family, guests, and hospital staff.
We also license space on the digital network to non-competitive local healthcare businesses. Say a Chiropractor wants to communicate to hospital visitors or staff on one of our screens. If the hospital doesn’t have an on-site Chiropractor, he or she can purchase / sponsor screen time.
We have well over 160 hospitals in 31 states, and hundreds of healthcare businesses use our display networks and/or sponsor our screens.
How did you hear about Yext?
In-hospital messaging is only part of the patient engagement process. In reality, there are three parts: before the visit, during the visit, and after the visit.
The “before” stage can start with a search online, either to find a doctor or to self-diagnose. Prospective patients will search for a local provider in search engines or online directories. They’ll want to locate their name, address, and phone number as well as look at office images, services provided and online reviews. This “provider research” is all part of the “before” process. I spent a lot of time when I first joined to see what was/wasn’t working, working out what were the newest and best tools, because I wanted to put together the best set of tools to help manage online presence for our clients.
To go through and manually claim every client’s’ listing can take hours, which increases the cost to the client. You can go through another service, which promises to register your business in X directories, but it takes too long. Plus, those services wouldn’t put up all the information we wanted published for our clients. Yext was a fantastic solution. It updates instantaneously, it is an easy tool to use — not only show clients where they’re lacking, but also to quickly update info in multiple, prominent directories — and it lets us add more robust information, like staff bios, promotions, upcoming events and so on.
The great thing is, we could send a report to our clients to show tracking — no one else can provide online directory visitor tracking! We can see what happens on the website by watching the traffic, we can see what happens on Google through Google Analytics, but we don’t know the others, like Yahoo! — Yext data shows us the views, impressions, and clicks that are non-Google.
What was it that sold/convinced you Yext Partnership was the right choice?
The price made sense for the product delivered, and Yext gave us the option to do things that we couldn’t even do manually — like the staff bios and product lists. Yext was a unique product capability to offer our clients that made sense in context with our other services. That’s what we really liked about it. Manually, it takes so long to go through and select categories and everything for every publisher.
Have you checked out the YCP community/blog yet?
Yeah, I’ve been led there by the weekly newsletter. I like that the newsletter only goes out when there’s new and important stuff that’s come out, rather than just sending for the sake of sending. I’m always curious about what new products and features Yext is launching, keeping up to date on Yext news, and watching the videos. That says a lot — I unsubscribe from just about every newsletter possible, because every second of my day is scheduled and I just don’t have time to do extra things. But I will take an hour to read through the Yext newsletter, click through the videos and articles, whatever.
I use Yext every day for one client or another. I can’t miss the good stuff! Every newsletter saves me at least an hour of work in the future. I watched the video about adding users to the client dashboard the other day. We have a new hire, and instead of calling my Yext rep, Bobby, I did it myself.
What’s your favorite thing about being a Partner?
I’m not sure, because I don’t know what it’s like to not be a partner. I would have to say the reporting.
Do you have any wishlist feature for Yext?
If you could add Google+ Local claiming and Google+ Local reporting, that would make Yext a complete online directory solution.
Also, total white labeling — URL, dashboard, login, everything would be nice. And if a user fills out all of the information themselves, at the end it should prompt them for an email and password and automatically create a white-labeled user account for them on Yext, one that can only access the information they just entered. So, if they just put in the information for one location, they should only get access to that location. Then, it would email me, the Partner, to approve the new user. That way, all I have to do is start the process, and the client receives and email saying, “Hey! Fill out this information.”
Would they do it? Who knows! But this would streamline the whole adding a user process considerably and save us a few steps in our current onboarding process.
Is there anything you’d like to tell the other Partners, current or future?
Just that we really enjoy Yext, it’s exactly what we needed.