Improving CX with Better Product Data Management
In the age of digital-savvy customers, brands must ensure accurate, trusted, and seamless distribution of product information across all targeted channels, devices, and customer touchpoints.
Customer satisfaction is a factor of Customer Experience (CX) which in turn is a factor of the reliability or credibility of information associated with the products.
It has been reported that companies with connected content collected from product information repositories and knowledge bases are well-positioned to create ‘happy customers’.
Customers have long been relying on product information for online shopping – a trend that has escalated beyond limits post-2020.
They expect detailed product data – which is easily understandable, accurate, and meets their requirements.
They conduct extensive research about a product across multiple platforms such as search engines, websites, social media, and other channels before actually purchasing anything.
Convenience has always been a priority for customers and will continue to be so with “shoppability” increasingly depending upon the relevance and articulation of product information.
As a result, businesses now need to ‘listen’ and ‘remember’ preferences by collating and storing personal data to innovatively craft product information targeted at specific audience groups.
They need to move towards a near-real-time tracking of consumer trends and behaviour shifts, leverage dynamic data at their fingertips to extract immediate insights and incessantly gauge satisfaction and CX.
With the amount of data being generated in order to manage product sales from multiple channels, brands also need to adapt to comprehensive data management solutions.
Product data can enable a truly zero-friction CX
The role of product information management systems is changing — from being a stand-alone discipline to becoming a catalyst for digital strategy or transformation and improving the customer experience.
Brands must create a strategy and operating model that conceives business opportunities from the diverse and rich product content and orchestrates customer experience improvement actions.
No matter the industry, target market, or the kind of product, creating detailed product data and sharing the same in a standardized format across all channels is crucial to create highly targeted product experiences tailored to different channels, locations, and marketplaces.
5 Tips for Improving the CX with Better Product Data Management
Let’s explore how simplified product data delivers enhanced customer experiences:
1. A single source of truth for better visibility
Many enterprises have multiple data sources, applications, or resource management systems such as ERP, CRM, and other third-party systems that hold an interdepartmental data exchange.
But sometimes, it can be disparate, fragmented, and outdated for specific departments.
By enabling a unified and single view of comprehensive product data, businesses can manage product information flow, brand assets, and product content with greater transparency and credibility.
It helps create a 360-degree view of your products by connecting rich product content and digital assets to product master data, in support of customer-centric experiences.
This not only streamlines product data but also improves the real-time delivery across multiple channels devices or touchpoints.
2. Stringent product data quality and governance for trust and credibility
The product information showcased to customers must be full of credibility and transparency whether it is distributed on the web, mobile, POS or in-store.
Having robust data quality and data governance practices enables meeting advanced business needs in data collection, use, and sharing while striking a balance between compliance and productivity.
Such a solution can maintain consistency and end-to-end data governance while complying to set policies in product data across businesses and dealing with long value chains and third-party vendors.
It can seamlessly share reliable data with enterprise systems, channel partners, and the marketplace, thereby ensuring zero chances of inaccuracies or data mishandling.
It also provides guidance on establishing further product data quality and governance objectives, defining and implementing new levels of data stewardship initiatives, meeting data standardization and quality goals, and tracking ongoing improvements.
3. Automated process to eliminate manual errors
When product data is shared and utilized across multiple departments like product teams, marketing and sales team, and customer support teams, it is essential to keep it updated: 24×7 without fail.
But manually creating, structuring, and syndicating the diverse type of product data can be error-prone, time-consuming, and adversely impact your brand— if not done accurately.
By bringing data automation to the management of product data, technology takes care of the tasks that require conformity and repetition, providing business teams more time to focus on creativity and problem-solving.
Automating product data management from a master file boosts inter-departmental collaboration, overall productivity, and increases data visibility while reducing manual labor, corrective reworks, and cost of product delivery.
This all helps improve the customer experience and build brand trust.
4. Capture seamless omnichannel experience
Customers always have higher expectations about how they want to interact with your brand.
But showcasing high-quality product data is just one part of omnichannel success.
Your product data needs to consistent everywhere.
Brands need to ensure seamless omnichannel customer experiences by combining multiple product-related factors.
This requires a comprehensive solution to create, monitor, and manage product information across this multi-channel ecosystem.
By leveraging APIs for data transfer, real-time inventory handling, dynamic workflow engine, connected internal applications, and dynamic customer data management, brands can enhance product information and ultimately increase brand loyalty.
Product data management can help create deeper engagement, drive more traffic, and increase conversion rates across the web, social media, and other platforms.
You can empower your customers with an effortless experience across a range of devices, touchpoints, and modalities to best serve the customer.
5. Faster time-to-market for new and existing products
Customers will continue to recalibrate their expectations and form an opinion on the brand.
On the other hand, slower time-to-market (due to unprepared product information, redundant product data entry, and unorganized multi-channel delivery) weakens business strategy, resulting in poor performance and missed revenue.
Thus, brands need to respond with speed and agility.
Since product data is a critical component for brands in rolling out new products or modifying existing product bundles, it should be syndicated and distributed accurately and timely to get the maximum leverage.
Providing relevant product data at this point becomes a priority and brands require an end-to-end solution that will automate manual processes and deliver consistent product data across all customer-facing channels.
When new product data is distributed in an organized manner across multiple sales channels by meeting the compliance rules and deadlines, it certainly generates excitements amongst not just stakeholders but also potential buyers that is primal for high-end CX.
A well-managed product information management system enabled with API-driven architecture can help brands automate the creation, decluttering, and adoption of new product data and information in a jiffy.
Going the extra mile to ensure customer satisfaction
Smooth interoperability of standardized product data between channels can make it easy for brands to create product content that enriches Customer Experience (CX).
With clean data that is presented intelligently to offer maximum absorption in one go, brands can attract customers of all ages and points of interaction without fail.
Media assets that are checked for quality and published in sync across channels can communicate a brand story and personalize the buying journey at every step.
Now is the time for brands to exploit product information and digital assets for business value creation and customer experience improvement, especially during uncertain climates and business disruption.
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