In the experience economy, creating a five-star customer experience is the de facto standard for measuring corporate competitiveness and success.
Only a great CX will convert consumers into customers for life. The customer experience derives from all customer touchpoints – from searching your storefronts, to the ordering and buying process, all the way to any service interactions. When asked, most companies would probably agree to the above.
Product experience management is crucial to the customer experience
Key factors influencing the customer experience include customers being able to quickly and easily they find the products they’re looking for, as well as the quality of the product information provided.
Some questions to ask: Is the product information correct and up-to-date? Is it consistently available across all digital and physical customer touch points including online, mobile, point-of-sale, call center, social media, etc.? Where can your customers buy your products? Are they available across multiple sales channels, whether your own or marketplaces?
The product information that you provide is a crucial and integral part of the customer journey. The quality of this data influences the trust in your brand, your products, and ultimately the customer’s buying decision.
If the product experience is a bad one, customers will turn to your competition to get what they need. Rarely will you get a second chance, as customers seek ease of use and convenience on all levels today.
Dire consequences: Organize your product data, or else
Many companies still suffer from product data being scattered in multiple systems across the entire organization. Often, separate solutions are used for different business models and industries, or even customer segments leading to a multitude of product data silos.
This leads to a lot of manual work and inefficiencies, redundancy, and inconsistent and inaccurate product information across the entire value chain. Needless to say, this doesn’t help create a long-lasting, beautiful experience for your customers. Not to mention the frustration of IT staff that has to do the unfulfilling and unchallenging work.
In the past, product information management systems and product content management solutions were the de-facto standard to create and manage all product content and data. While that was enough at the time, today just managing product content and data isn’t sufficient, and you need to optimize it to best match customer expectations and needs.
Show me the money: Product experience management drives the bottom line
The overall product experience should be the centerpiece of an end-to-end customer journey, with a significant impact on revenue and profits.
So, what does it take to deliver high-quality product content that enhances the customer experience?
First, product information must be accurate and complete. When searching for products, customers expect product data to be current and consistent across all digital and physical customer touchpoints – especially mobile – which is the consumer’s preferred device of choice. The same is expected across different sales and marketing channels, whether your own, or global/regional marketplaces like Amazon, Google, etc.
To deliver the best product data, a modern product experience management solution offering more than just master data management is a must. The next-gen platform should cover functional areas, from on-boarding of data from various data sources, content creation, management and enrichment, the syndication of product content, to relevant sales and marketing channels, as well as analytics and reporting – all in one unified platform.
With a single source of truth, you can increase the quality of product data while increasing efficiency by avoiding the need to keep data synched across multiple silos. Not only will it make your product managers life easier and more efficient, but also provide a much better shopping experience for your customers.
Hello from the other side: Don’t make your customers call a thousand times
Time-consuming tasks to keep products in synch across various solutions are error-prone and subject to high-risk. Automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence can help ensure high data quality to deliver accurate and consistent product information across your marketing channels, allowing you to build and maintain credibility with customers while contributing to better productivity.
Customers are more connected and active on an increasing number of channels than ever before – whether it be social channels, retailers, marketplaces, or any other sales and marketing channel. This increases the number of customer touchpoints and the complexity of these channels, requiring new ways to benefit from those opportunities.
In order to optimize business outcomes, you need to leverage these channels and customer touchpoints to become – and stay – connected with your customers wherever they are – whenever they want.
Managing correct, complete, and up-to-date product information builds the base for marketing and sales, but only the fast and flexible publishing of this data to relevant channels allow you to connect with your customers.
You have to make sure that you can expand your market reach and grow your business by syndicating the product data to all relevant sales and marketing channels – whether your own or regional or global marketplaces.
