Eliminate Information Silos to Power Dynamic Digital Experiences

What happens when your brand's information is siloed and disconnected? Confusion, mistrust, and ultimately, a poor digital experience with your brand.

When the most valuable information about your business (like your hours of operation, location, and contact information) is hosted among so many different owned and non-owned channels, it becomes more difficult to manage. What's worse: if information is difficult for your team to manage, it's also difficult for your customers to find and rely on because they only have access to a fraction of the information they're looking for.

Your customers' digital experiences are less impactful when they can't find what they need. But when they find information that is incorrect, outdated, or even contradictory, the customer begins to distrust your brand.

In short, information silos make it difficult for your customers to have confidence in online interactions with your brand. So how do you eliminate them?

Unless they are purposely created to protect sensitive information, silos are usually created unintentionally. There are various causes: systems that don't integrate well together, multiple teams working in isolation and relying on different tools, and a lack of a single source of truth, to name a few.

There are many causes of information silos, but typically these data breaks point back to the massive digital sprawl that's accumulated throughout the SaaS boom. As time goes on, your tech stack becomes larger, more all-encompassing… and more difficult to manage.

Whether you're already struggling with information silos or looking to prevent them, information silos are best fought with a flexible data management and aggregation tool. This typically looks like an underlying tech stack with a composable architecture, leveraging MACH-certified solutions, and a framework that allows data of all types to pass throughout your entire digital experience platform with ease and accuracy.

But different digital experiences are managed in different applications, which often work in isolation and have various data formats. This makes it difficult for multiple applications within your digital experience platform (DXP) to "talk" to each other, and pass information back and forth. In the real world, this manifests as a disjointed experience for your customers.

To effectively break down silos, you need to leverage a data framework that makes it easy to turn messy, unstructured data into clean, manageable information. This is easier said than done: you'll need a content management platform with multiple data sources that communicate via integrations.

At Yext, we're familiar with the problems information silos create – and we've made it our business to solve them. We start with the Yext CMS, which leverages our Connectors framework to collect and organize business information and content. Once information passes through the Connectors framework, it is uploaded into the CMS. There, organizations are able to manage this content, make edits or generate new content, and deliver it to external experiences.

The Yext Connectors framework is designed to eliminate siloed information – and more importantly, it gives you full control over the content that reaches your customers.

To break the silos, we start with streamlined navigation and a user-friendly interface via our content management system, or CMS. The Yext CMS interface allows you to set user permissions across roles, teams, and departments. The purpose here is to keep information unified and central, but still manageable and accessible to the necessary personnel.

Working from the Yext CMS, it is easy to create and manage new content. With our flexible ingestion methods, you can map data to specific fields to ensure it's optimally structured for your organization.

Once you've stored your content, ongoing data management is key. The Yext CMS will offer visibility into recently created new entities, recently updated entities, entities with suggested edits, and even entities that have not been updated. This makes it easy for your team to verify that the updated information is reflected correctly in relevant content across your customers' digital experiences.

Because content management is an ongoing process, your team can also leverage an automatic schedule to run consistent and regular audits of your information. Simply schedule recurring Connector runs from the sources of your choice to ensure your content is always up to date. The Connector will then notify the team member(s) of choice once the Connector is done running. This approach towards data governance makes creating content and sharing information so much easier for your team.

The Yext Connectors framework pulls from multiple data sources and integrations. This includes generic sources, as well as native and third party sources.

Generic sources typically include site crawler(s), API pulls, functions, and file uploads – each of which will allow your organization to ingest content directly into your CMS. Even if information is coming in from siloed teams, you can view and share it company wide.

Additionally, the Yext platform has native integrations with over 200 third-party publishers. Information silos occur when your platforms and tools can't communicate, but native integrations all but eliminate these issues. This is because these integrations can be set up and troubleshooted quickly and easily, even by users without a technical background.

Your team will tell you that their ability to customize digital experiences is dependent on their ability to customize your data and integrations. The Yext Connectors Framework makes it simple to update source settings. You'll start with default source settings, and your team can use Connectors and Functions to update and create custom sources as you see fit.

A common issue within digital experience platforms, or DXPs, is that data changes forms. With pre-built Transforms available, your team is empowered to manipulate information as it is ingested into the Yext platform.

For more custom needs, your team can fully customize a Function in TypeScript. Again, the pre-built Transforms can get you far, but your unique needs can also be accommodated.

If you are short on resources, the Yext platform also gives you the option to leverage AI-powered data cleaning. Simply provide a few examples of the change you want made to your ingested data, and our AI Transform will automate these changes across all rows. This empowers your team to execute complex functions, without taking technical resources away to write the functions manually.

By managing and aggregating information, you can effectively fight silos. In fact, eliminating information silos for improved digital experiences is something Yext has been devoted to since the launch of our CMS.

That's why the Yext CMS is MACH-certified, supports a composable approach to architecting your customers' digital experiences, and offers both built-in and customizable information management tools.

The Yext CMS is a robust tool for manipulating data, with your customers' digital experiences at the heart. To make sure your information is manageable and accessible across your team, the user-friendly interface of the CMS enables your team to find, store, and update information and content. Any source, structured or unstructured, can be brought into the CMS with simple built-in integrations, while custom APIs allow you to solve for unique business needs.

Customers' online interactions with your brand are only as good as the quality – and accuracy – of your information. With Yext's Connector framework, you can power cohesive, consistent, and dynamic digital experiences within your business.