PIM and Customer Experience Design

A shopping experience is mostly the product information a customer meets at each step. Companies already treat that experience as a reason someone stays or leaves. Central product information management is how you make the information at those steps agree.

For a long time the internal goal was cost down and sales up. Customer experience became the name for the other half: loyalty and a reason to prefer you, across every channel the buyer can use. The practical question is which information has to exist before that experience is even possible.

Touchpoints

You can only shape the experience where the customer actually shows up. Map where someone becomes a buyer, why they pick the product, and whether the product information they need is present at that moment. The same map should say what they expect, because a missed expectation is what they remember.

Those contact points are the channels: social, email, mobile, the online shop, the website, the phone, the store, and print or other advertising. Each one needs its own information, not a dump of the full record.

Information needs

Start with what you are selling, who the audience is, and which channels reach them. The goal of the channel decides the depth. A social campaign that has to land a single product claim does not need the long description. A buyer comparing specifications does. Depth follows the product, the channel, the audience, and the intent.

The data model

Once those needs are written down, the PIM data model can hold them. That might be a different descriptive text per channel or audience, and a decision about which attributes appear where. The customer then sees the depth they came for, and the next campaign can speak to a segment without rewriting the master record from scratch.

What that central model changes for the experience:

• The same facts in every channel, which is what trust is built on.
• Messages that match the audience in front of them.
• Information that can be updated without a per-channel rewrite.
• Search that can use one terminology.
• A chosen depth per channel, already worked out.
• Presentation that fits the device, because the record was built for that output.

Central PIM

Experience content still has to be integrated, created, maintained, and published. A PIM is the system that does those four jobs on product data. The cost only balances when the data is maintained in one project and product-related content is linked to the right record. The side effects are tighter processes, better content, and more room to change a channel without a new data project.

One master record and one terminology also improve search on the site and elsewhere. A description that matches the product the customer meant to buy is the same mechanism that cuts returns. Those are the pieces a buyer actually feels.