PIM and Customer Experience Design

PIM and Customer Experience Design

PIM as the basis for a positive customer experience.
Many companies have recognized that a positive shopping experience plays an important role in the customer’s decision-making and buying process. How can central product information management (PIM for short) help companies to improve their customer experience significantly?

Digitization and the associated management of data in companies bring with it new requirements and processes. Up until now, the focus was mostly on reducing costs and increasing sales, but this has changed in recent years. In the meantime, for example, the “customer experience” is one of the buzzwords of the hour! The shopping experience has never been more in focus on the customer than it is today.

This does not only apply to the customer himself and his or her expectations of the personal shopping experience – naturally distributed across all sales channels available to him. This also applies increasingly to companies. They have recognized that a positive customer experience strengthens customer loyalty and gives them a competitive advantage. But what conditions are necessary so that a positive customer experience is even possible in companies? How can customers be satisfied and the complex requirements of everywhere commerce met?

Touchpoints – where does the customer meet the company?

If you want to create a positive customer experience with a lasting effect, you have to know where your customers will meet. Because this is exactly where the company can shape the customer experience. It must therefore be analyzed where exactly the customer becomes the customer, why he buys a product, and whether all the necessary product information is available to him.

In the same way, a company must also know what needs its customers have and what expectations must be met in order to satisfy them. These contact points, so-called touchpoints, ultimately also define the various sales channels that are characteristic of the customer experience. This can be done, for example, via social media, via emails, mobile devices, the online shop, or the website, but also on the phone, in brick-and-mortar stores, and via advertising material. It is precisely at these points that the customer experience should be positively influenced by the company. And for this, it must be determined which information is important for the respective sales channel.

Define Information Needs

The initial step is to characterize the information prerequisites. What ought to be advertised? What does the target group look like and through which sales channels can they be reached? This results in the goals that are to be achieved with the respective sales channel. Depending on this, the right information strategy is worked out with the result of defining the necessary depth of information for each channel.

Because depending on the product, channel, target group, and intention, the customer’s need for information is different. For example, if the respective USP is to be communicated in a social media advertising campaign to increase awareness of a product, detailed product descriptions are not necessary at this point.

Determine The Data Model

When the information prerequisites have been characterized, a corresponding data model for product information management can be created. For example, different descriptive texts can be defined depending on the channel or target group. Or which product attributes should be displayed on which channels. As a result, customer expectations can be better met and, in the next step, channel and target group-specific communication can be enabled.

Here is an overview of the customer experience advantages that can be achieved with central product information management:

• More trust is booked through uniform information.
• The needs of customers are addressed in a target group-specific manner.
• Information is made available faster and more flexibly.
• The product search is enormously improved.
• The correct depth of information has been worked out.
• The information can be provided in a way that is tailored to the respective end devices.

Central PIM

The most important prerequisites for properly deploying experience-oriented service elements for the customer are

• the integration
• creation
• maintenance
• and provision of product data by a PIM system.

A balanced cost-benefit ratio can only be achieved if product data is maintained centrally with the help of a PIM project and product-related content is correctly linked. The consequences are, among other things, more efficient processes, improved content quality, and greater flexibility, which generates more sales.

The consolidation of the product master or a uniform terminology of the product information enables an optimized search on websites or on the net. It in turn meets the expectations of the client. As well as a better product description that helps the customer really to select the product that he is actually looking for. Therefore, most likely will not return it, which in turn has a positive effect on reducing the return rate. All of these are factors that contribute to enabling the customer to have a positive customer experience and creating a lasting emotional bond between the customer, product, and provider.