September ‘23 Monthly Release Notes

Our latest enhancements to our integration with Google Performance API will promote quicker and more dependable data backfills for newly added locations, ensuring a seamless and efficient experience for users.

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts.

When valued customers of our resellers choose to connect their LinkedIn accounts, they will see the Listings logo instead of the familiar Yext logo, allowing focus to remain on their own brand. While the functionality remains unchanged, this adjustment is beneficial for resellers who want to prioritize a fully white-labeled experience and maintain their unique identity.

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts.

We have made the decision to temporarily discontinue support for Twitter, given the current dynamic nature of their support for integration partners. We remain committed to providing Social users with the best experience possible and look forward to offering Twitter support again if it is in a more reliable state.

Starting in the Fall ‘23 Release, First Party Widget Posts will no longer be automatically created when users update the Featured Message or Video fields on entities. This deprecation allows users to have more control of content surfaced through their 1st party channels.

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts.

Enterprises can now assign a linked account to a group of locations before adding the business subscription to all of the locations in the group. This allows users to further prepare for their launches ahead of license assignment.

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts, so you can start taking advantage of it today.

This release, we’ve given users more flexibility to adjust their configurations for existing Custom Field Types. Now, users can add a new option to an existing option-select subfield. This will improve ergonomics around managing custom field types at scale.

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts, so you can start taking advantage of it today.

We’ve added more options for the gender field in Yext Content. These options now include the following:

• Male
• Female
• Non-binary
• Transgender Female
• Transgender Male
• Other
• Prefer Not to Disclose

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts, so you can start taking advantage of it today.

Saved Filters play a significant role in determining which entities should be surfaced in a given experience – whether that be a Search experience or even a saved export. This release, we’ve added more granular reporting into how Saved Filters are used throughout the platform, including Pages, Content Endpoints, and Licenses for Listings and Reviews.

Not only will this improve general visibility, but with improved reporting, users are better equipped to prevent destructive actions that stem from Saved Filter updates — like taking down web pages or removing entities from search results.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Fall ‘23: Improved Reporting of Saved Filters in Use (early access).

We are now introducing Chat metrics in Report Builder to help organizations track performance of their chatbot over time. Organizations can utilize these analytics to identify areas of improvement, understand the most successful chat flows, and determine if there are any gaps in content or instructions.

• Total Impressions
• Total Responses
• Total Conversations
• Total Link Clicks
• Total Thumbs Up
• Total Thumbs Down
• Conversation Rate
• Thumbs Up Rate
• Thumbs Down Rate
• Average Conversation Length (Messages)
• Average Conversation Length (Duration)
• Steps Completed

Additionally, new Dimensions will be available for Bot, Goal, and Step Type, so that performance can be broken down by segment — allowing organizations to precisely pinpoint opportunities for optimization.

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts, so you can start taking advantage of it today.

We understand that organizations have different stakeholders that need to collaborate when building or managing a chatbot. To better support the range of responsibilities held by these stakeholders, we have added two new user permissions for Chat:

• View: Allow users to view chatbots and their goals, instructions, and logs.
• Manage: Allows users to view and also make changes to chatbot configurations.

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts, so you can start taking advantage of it today.

We are introducing a new Instruction type: “Select,” which will give organizations additional flexibility to choose their desired user experience for their chatbot.

Our newest step type “Select” means that the bot can prompt the user to choose a value from a list of options, rather than ask an open-ended question. For example, using the “Select” instruction type, the bot could ask the user to choose between “I’m a first-time customer,” and “I’ve booked other appointments before” or to choose one of the 3 store locations near them for their appointment.

Every Chat experience is configured using Goals & Instructions. Goals & Instructions allow you to customize the behavior of your chatbot for your use case, and allow you to tell your bot how to handle specific scenarios that may come up in conversations with users. The entire system relies on natural language — meaning you can tell to the bot what to do, as if it’s a human being, without coding or complex mapping.

Goals represent a general objective of the user, like “Answer a Question”, “Order Delivery”, or “Schedule an Appointment”.

Instructions offer step-by-step guidance for the bot so that it knows exactly how to achieve each goal. One Instruction step to achieve the “Schedule an Appointment” goal might be, “First, determine if the user is a returning customer or a new customer.”

Within Instructions, there are different Instruction step types available, which helps the bot understand what kind of action needs to be taken in each step. For example, there is a “Collect” type, which indicates that the bot needs to request information from the user (such as a phone number or order number).

Adding this new “Select” step type will expand the range of user experiences that Yext Chat can provide. In some cases, allowing the end-user to choose from preselected options will streamline the experience and help them accomplish their goal faster.

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts, so you can start taking advantage of it today.

The Chat SDK and Widget now support passing context, which can be used to capture information about the user (customer logged into their account) or general facts about their digital journey (example: the page they came from) and referenced as part of its instructions. This can help an organization tailor the chat experience to make it more relevant to the end-user.

For example, if a healthcare organization includes the chatbot on the bottom corner of every provider’s page, they may want to pass the entity ID of each doctor to Chat, so that the chatbot can answer questions specific to that doctor when a user is on their page.

Or, if a logged-in customer says they have a question about an order, the bot can fetch their recent order history to answer that question, using the context provided in its instructions.

Context is an arbitrary JSON property, which means an organization can pass in any type of information they want to provide the bot as a part of its instructions — from user-specific information, to location data, to details about the landing page, and more.

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts, so you can start taking advantage of it today.

We’ve made several incremental, but meaningful improvements to various parts of the Search platform that will enable users to more easily build impactful search experiences, including:

• Improved s_snippet for Document Search: s_snippet is the field generated in the Search response from fields enabled with Document Search, which represents the most relevant segment from that field. We improved the algorithm for generating s_snippet to better handle newlines.
• Returning File Contents: You can now return the extracted file contents in the Search API, by including the s_content field of the file field in displayFields. For example, you could denote: c_file.s_snippet.
• New Values for additionalSearchablePlaces: We released additional values that Administrators can use to enable more specific autocomplete results when using location search. This property is used for Mapbox when there are filters on builtin.location. Options are:
  • neighborhoods
  • address (new)
  • poi (points of interest) (new)
• Allow entity ID as searchable field: Administrators can now use entity ID as a searchable field. This will be particularly helpful when Administrators store important information, such as the product SKU number, as the entity ID and want users to be able to search for that value.

These updates were automatically enabled in all accounts, so you can start taking advantage of them today.

Yext has updated the slug field to accommodate a broader set of characters. This flexibility will allow for more descriptive URL structures across all languages. Please refer to this reference article for more information.

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts, so you can start taking advantage of it today.

We are always working to expand the range of sources that are compatible with our Connectors framework, including both Generic Sources and our set of available Native Sources. This release, we’ve added support for OAuth providers that utilize the Client Credentials grant type. Now, users are easily able to build Connectors that pull from even more sources, like Kyruus and Sitecore, to comprehensively manage their content in Yext.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Fall ‘23: Client Credentials OAuth Flow (early access).

GreenPlaces

GreenPlaces has joined the Yext App Directory! Using the new GreenPlaces app, businesses will be able to inform consumers about their company’s sustainability practices and share green options more seamlessly.

With the GreenPlaces app, users can:

• Automatically sync location data to GreenPlaces, for an accelerated launch of their sustainability program.
• Automatically pull green business operations data from GreenPlaces into Yext Content, to be pushed to Listings and Pages endpoints enhancing search results and consumer perception.

To install this app, users will need a GreenPlaces account and a Yext account.

WebMD Additional Gender Values

Additional gender options are now supported by WebMD. These options now include the following:

• Male
• Female
• Non-binary
  

Deprecation: Holiday Check

As of September 2023, Holiday Check was removed from the Yext Publisher Network.

This release we’ve updated our Streams architecture to include categories. Now, users are able to leverage category data in downstream systems like Listings, Search, and Content Endpoints.

Categories on an entity can be accessed from the Content Source by including the field ref_categories and relevant subfields. Specifically, you can specify ref_categories.id, ref_categories.name, and/or ref_categories.uid to be included in the returned object. In doing so, you must specify individual sub-fields of the ref_categories object — supplying just the ref_categories field is invalid.

This validation is now also applied to all fields containing child nodes, except those of entity references. Concretely, this means that including the parent nodes ref_listings, ref_reviewsAgg, and any RichTextV2 fields, without a subfield specified, is invalid.

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts, so you can start taking advantage of it today.