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Commerce is changing, and fast. B2B and B2C organizations alike will struggle to thrive, or even survive, by offering just one or two sales channels to customers.
Instead, companies must embrace a range of digital channels, including eCommerce, mobile commerce, marketplaces, and even voice-assistant-based commerce, among other still-emerging channels. In fact, according to recently published research, more than 50% of customers prefer to shop via digital channels, including 67% of millennials and 56% of Gen X, while only 23% of those surveyed prefer visiting brick-and-mortar stores to shopping online.
This omnichannel evolution has opened up legions of new opportunities for manufacturers, distributors, and merchants alike — and created new challenges. Now, the customer experience offered by a brand or retailer is the defining and differentiating characteristic between competing companies. These challenges require a new kind of solution, one that allows brands and retailers to offer buyers these superior product experiences, leading to increased conversions, reduced returns, improved customer satisfaction, and stronger brand loyalty.
Enter Product Experience Management (PXM).
What is Product Experience Management?
Product Experience Management is a new profession. It’s the subtle science of delivering product information in context, adapted and scoped by channel and locale to match the buying experience at every touchpoint. Having the right data and insight into the type of product experience buyers expect is the foundation for any great customer experience.
Product experience serves as the backbone of any compelling customer experience, and there is no great customer experience without a near-perfect product experience. PXM optimizes your product experience by centralizing product data, information, and assets, creating a single source of truth for all of your products, and ensuring that customers who interact with you in any channel find exactly the experience they were expecting.
It uses Product Information Management (PIM) solutions to give you control over your product information and serves as a cornerstone of eCommerce and omnichannel operations. PIM remains a critical component and enabler of the practice of PXM, focusing on the content portion of the product experience.
This allows your team to harness the power of product experience and create a compelling experience for all of your eCommerce customers.
Why does PXM matter to me?
PXM is how you make an emotional connection with your buyers. It’s the next stage beyond goods and services in the progression of economic value.
Creating this emotional connection is a crucial ingredient to omnichannel success. According to recently published research, customers who feel an emotional connection with brands have far higher lifetime values than those who say they are satisfied with a brand, but don’t feel any deeper bond — 306% higher, to be exact!
PIM and PXM provide the perfect pairing of solutions to help you forge these emotional bonds with customers. PIM is the “what” you use to describe your commodities, goods, and services, PXM is “how” you stage that experience — put them together, and you have a veritable omnichannel dream team.
By using PIM as an engine for automating the boring, tedious, repetitive tasks involved in collecting, standardizing, and enriching product content, your marketing and eCommerce teams can turn their attention to contextualizing product information, before distributing it to each channel.
Putting product data in context can mean several things: the right images, the right descriptions, the right attribute sets, and more. Each must be precisely tailored for the locale, cultural norms and standards, context for the channel, and the ways your buyer interacts with your brand. With the right tools, you can even leverage product data intelligence to further streamline your PXM practice.
Put it all together, and Product Experience Management is the solution to creating the customized experiences that modern customers demand. By implementing a PXM solution, brands and retailers can stay competitive in the growing omnichannel market and increase conversions with relevant and complete product information.