Yahoo Finance Uber’s new partnership will help your driver show up at exactly the right spot
Forget the Uber app. On Thursday, the ride-sharing company announced a partnership with the location-data service Yext that will allow customers to request a car directly through the websites of stores and restaurants. By teaming up with Yext, a cloud-based company that businesses use to manage their location information across their websites and search engines, Uber lets riders to book directly through a site and get dropped off at precisely the right entrance of a destination.
“Yext puts businesses on the map. And together now, Yext and Uber are going to help drive business off the map with Uber buttons placed on our customers’ store pages,” Yext CEO Howard Lerman told Yahoo Finance.
Currently, the pilot program only has a few select customers, including CiCi’s Pizza, Cole Haan and Guitar Center.
Yext, which Lerman co-founded 10 years ago, works with 1 million businesses. Whenever a customer looks up any business — ranging from nail salons to car repair shops — Yext is the service behind the scenes helping power the businesses’ listings.
“With the new Yext and Uber integration, our customers can specify a particular lat-long, that is the coordinates on the map of exactly where the car should take them that isn’t the middle of a mall or the beginning of a parking lot,” Lerman said.
This partnership has wings beyond getting to your dinner reservation on time. For example, if a pregnant woman in labor has requested an Uber to the hospital, Yext will partner with the hospital to ensure she’ll be taken to the emergency room, not the radiology center.
Lerman says the business is not so much focused on a customer’s whereabouts as it is on making sure the details that consumers see about any given business are as accurate and precise as possible.
“We let our customers store information about all the attributes of their stores like the hours of operation, phone number, exact lat-longs of where they want to have you dropped off. We’re all about the cloud, kind of like Salesforce, to help customers store information or structure data about their various places and then make sure that whatever service you’re using you’ll find the right data,” he said.
Despite Yext being around for a decade, Lerman says he’s certain there are only more growth opportunities as consumers demand and expect more precision in every aspect of life.
“If you look at the key themes of technology over the next 10 years, you’re looking at voice search, artificial intelligence, connected cars, autonomous cars. Now the fun part for us is that location is the key dimension in every single one of those services,” he said.
He says Yext is the unsung hero behind these services that we use every single day. But it remains to be seen whether other businesses will pay to have a ‘Ride with Uber’ button on its site.
“When you go ahead and you ask your phone, ‘Hey, I need to find a pet friendly hotel in Los Angeles’ or book a reservation at a gluten free restaurant,” he said, “Yext is going to be there behind all those services, helping you find the right data.”
Melody Hahm is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering entrepreneurship, technology and real estate. Follow her on Twitter @melodyhahm.
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