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In today’s retail market, it is not enough for websites to display a solitary product image with a few bullet points providing washing instructions. Consumers are looking for much more than this.
In some ways, modern customers are returning to retailing of old. They want a more emotional connection with products and brands with descriptions that mean something to them and with all the digital assets that make the product relevant.
Consumers are demanding more and, if they don’t find what they’re looking for on one website, they’ll simply look elsewhere.
“Consumers are demanding more and, if they don’t find what they’re looking for on one website, they’ll simply look elsewhere”
Multiple images, tailored product descriptions and videos are just some of the attributes that shoppers of today have come to expect for a positive customer experience.
But how can companies manage all of these attributes? And what benefit can they bring to consumers and retail head office teams alike?
Join the dots
Omnichannel customers have grown to expect a connected and convenient shopping process, regardless of channel, time or place.
With the right content, retail teams can create personalised cross-channel customer journeys that are tailored to a particular product or selling channel.
At Retail Assist, we’ve been working with retailers for more than 21 years; from speaking to our customers, it has become clear that one of the main pain points is the ability to centralise, manage and share product information across sales channels.
“One of the main pain points is the ability to centralise, manage and share product information across sales channels”
Product experience management (PXM), the evolution of product information management (PIM), is becoming core to retail strategies.
Where PIM is a solution that allows data to be entered via a single port of entry before being published to multiple channels, PXM takes it one step further, allowing retailers and brands to present optimum product experiences.
By using a PXM solution, product data can be tailored so the right description is entered for the right product, personalised for the right channel with the right cultural expectations and context.
Mix these descriptions with an array of images and attribute sets and the customer experience is underpinned, leading to improved conversions, superior customer satisfaction, reduced returns and, ultimately, strengthened brand loyalty.
Step out of line
And it’s not just consumers who will benefit.
Over the last few months, the retail workforce has experienced change like never before; with more people working from home and disparate teams relying on technology to meet the same goals, now is the perfect time to really evaluate how efficiently your work processes are being managed.
For years, the retail industry has been moving away from siloed working and towards a more co-operative way of working. PXM is the next step in ensuring efficiency continues through collaboration.
Retailers are increasingly needing to ‘do more with less’.
Download our Guide to PXM, which explains how our retail-specific solution can not only help you to achieve this, but will also help to set your business up for the future while meeting the many evolving demands of today’s retail environment.
Alex Broxson is chief marketing officer at Retail Assist
Alex is passionate about retail and the technology that drives forward the customer experience. Both areas are continually evolving and the pace of change has never seen a time like the present.
Alex leads Retail Assist’s marketing strategy, giving marketing representation at board level, while overseeing a successful marketing team who were recently listed as a finalist for ‘Marketing Team of the Year’ at the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Marketing Excellence Awards 2020.
