The Impact of PIM on Customer Experience in Retail
If you’re in retail today, the chances are you’re feeling the pressure. It’s a constantly evolving industry and needs a new set of skills to keep up with developments. Long gone are the days of just relying on a couple of physical shops, with a few employees to staff and run them. Retailers need to think digitally – being agile and capable of scaling up quickly to compete with online channels like Amazon, Shopify, or Google Shopping.
What customers want nowadays is relevant, accurate and up to date information – and lots of it. That’s why a PIM system is essential for retailers wanting to provide a top-notch experience for customers. Below, we look at PIM in more detail and outline the key benefits for the customer experiences you want to craft.
PIM – organising product information in one place
One function of a PIM is the process of tracking and indexing product SKUs across diverse sources, such as web listings, social media, and mobile apps. A PIM organises and manages all your product information in one central hub. That means everything from basic product details like description or price to linked digital assets like images, videos, and documentation (specs, usage instructions, et al).
With PIM you can easily see all your products at once instead of having them scattered across many separate places (or worse – not even listed). You’ll also be able to gain more insights into what customers are saying about each item through reviews or comments posted online by purchasers.
Cohesion means better decisions based on more data
What PIM provides is a cohesive view of all product information so that retailers can make better-informed decisions based on more data. Being able to access and manage product data in real time is the key to improving the customer experience. With PIM, retailers have control over their product information and can make changes quickly, helping them respond with agility to new opportunities or issues as they arise.
A PIM solution is also the single source for all metadata – data about your data – including images, descriptions, and pricing.
Richer content to drive searchability, findability and SEO
A PIM enables you to use product information to create rich, compelling content faster by giving you control over a range of product attributes. It is this which drives searchability, findability and SEO. For example, with clothing items, you could add
- A multi-image gallery per item
- Attributed data such as variants for colour and size should be added or altered for each item.
Based on the data you get back, you can make informed decisions about how much content
A PIM also offers greater flexibility when organising items within a category or by grouping them using other criteria (such as brand). That frees up staff time to create high-quality content and also means less time wasted later, managing it down the road. You can easily keep up with ever-changing SEO trends and work out how best to organise products into groupings based on what is most important to customers and help them find what they want faster.
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Better searchability across channels
Customers expect a seamless experience – they want to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, without having to browse through endless shelves or click to numerous pages. PIM enables customers to search across all channels and devices without the need to go back-and-forth between channels. Therefore, when a customer does their initial search on a mobile device, it will automatically appear at the same stage when they re-engage using their laptop later.
Greater speed and accuracy in search results
The control you gain over all product information makes for greater speed and accuracy in search results, because a PIM enable retailers to
- Manage product data across multiple channels
- Quickly integrate new product information
- Ensure that it’s available in a variety of formats
These capabilities drive customer satisfaction by giving them the relevant content they need at any given moment, whether shopping online or searching for a specific item in-store.
Final words
In a nutshell, your PIM solution is a highly versatile tool which gives retailers the power to generate excellent customer experiences. They can help you make better decisions on what kind of content you need to provide, create more engaging content with a range of content and digital assets and drive sales by increasing AOV, cross-selling and up-selling
A PIM is an essential component of any customer experience strategy, with top-quality product data supporting the entire customer journey, from initial search to conversion. At Start with Data, we have a wealth of experience in services connected to all things PIM. Get in touch and we can talk to you in more depth about your product information, your strategic aims and how we can help you to achieve them.