PXM: When the PIM Tool Gives Way to Product Experience

Summarize this article

Product experience management, or PXM, is becoming more and more essential! Its benefits? Better sales performance, more productive teams, happier and more loyal customers, and much more!

In e-commerce, the challenges keep growing, and some of them can be hard to grasp. Launching a retail venture or growing your sales strategy now takes more effort and involves more complexity than ever before. Sales channels are multiplying, competition is intensifying, and potential customers are more mature and demanding than ever.

While caring for the customer experience is essential, nurturing the product experience matters just as much, and increasingly so. But what exactly does it involve? Overall, it means giving prospects and customers consistent, reliable and contextual product information. One single goal: to give them a tailored, personalized and memorable experience. A real asset for closing a sale, satisfying customers and building loyalty. Welcome to the world of Product eXperience Management!

Creating experiences with PXM

Managing products: an opportunity

It all starts with managing your products. Every day, this involves a large number of data flows. Many e-commerce administration and sales platforms list, publish and sell a multitude of products around the world every day, across every touchpoint of customer journeys that keep getting broader, richer and more fluid.

The internet, e-commerce and the growing number of digital communication channels have made product distribution largely commonplace. Today, finding the right product at the best price is fairly easy.

The inevitable bet on PXM

The conclusion is clear: this search keeps getting easier. The challenge now is to create a memorable product experience that captures the potential customer’s attention. Only then will they buy a product rather than a competitor’s, and only then will an online retailer keep the relationship going.

Services helped showcase products for a while, but a limit soon appeared: all online retailers probably made the same efforts at the same time. They offer ever faster delivery, ever longer return windows, ever more attentive customer support…

In short… While these efforts are not entirely in vain, they do not provide a distinctive enough competitive advantage. Products and services are no longer enough. And so the age of experience has arrived! An era that makes it possible to involve the customer directly, to the point of becoming an economic offering in its own right. And this offering is built to last! Saving customers time is not enough. You also need to give them a pleasant moment so they stay, and a memorable one so they come back.

Staying in tune with your customers

This context drives companies to innovate, to take care of their content and to build a high-quality brand message, all while staying humble enough to keep the promises made to customers. Because there is nothing worse than breaking a promise made online. The same goes for information about the products or services being sold. That is how Product eXperience Management was born! With it, online retailers can stand out from their competitors and stay ever more in tune with their customers and prospects.

Naturally, if a brand message is consistent with its commitments and the product information is reliable, clear and true to reality, an online retailer will have brought together all the ingredients of the recipe for success.

PXM working for your business

It is now clear: PXM benefits customers and prospects alike! But it also directly benefits an online retailer’s business and overall performance.

A dedicated tool for greater efficiency

First of all, PXM benefits the organization itself, improving the efficiency and relevance of its teams. Prioritizing product experience management often requires a dedicated tool such as a PIM. The right PXM solution provides tools that boost team productivity by automating the recurring, tedious tasks involved in managing catalogs and distributing product data.

It also structures work by eliminating manual tasks and setting up business rules and workflows. This lets employees focus on high-value work, the foundation of a quality product experience. The same approach also speeds up time to market for products. That matters when launching an exceptional sales event and rolling out capsule collections. It also helps keep up with changing consumer trends, across every sales channel.

Higher conversion rates and fewer returns

Among the direct benefits for an e-commerce business, a compelling product experience naturally drives additional sales and a higher conversion rate. And thanks to the rich, high-quality information provided to customers, merchants see the number of returns drop. When customers have reliable, accurate product information and visuals that are true to the product, they are obviously more likely to buy. Above all, they are also less likely to send it back.

Why? Because they received the right product information at the right time, before buying. This allowed them to picture themselves using it and to buy with full knowledge. PXM is therefore an additional lever for optimizing shipping-related costs, which are often high in an e-commerce business, and an extra acquisition lever that helps improve the conversion rate.

Finally, it is above all about building customer loyalty by forging a strong emotional bond with buyers who are engaged with the brand, its message and its values. Online retailers will enjoy winning customers. They will love turning them into regular customers who promote their brand.