For vendors, ensuring effective digital service interactions throughout the customer journey is critical for retention and loyalty, yet major gaps continue to exist between consumer expectations and reality.
To address these gaps and ensure a seamless customer experience, many companies are turning to AI. In fact, according to a 2023 report from CMSWire, 63 percent of retail organizations have already invested in AI to improve customer experience. Additionally, many retailers are turning to next-generation product information management (PIM) solutions that, when used correctly, can drastically improve customer loyalty.
Although traditionally regarded as tools for efficiently managing products, a PIM can standardize product stories, simplify regulatory compliance, personalize buying experiences, and keep customers returning.
Let’s look at some of the ways PIM solutions are revolutionizing CX and helping retailers bridge the gap between consumer expectations and reality and three key benefits that come as a result.
- Improved Customer Loyalty
Throughout the purchasing journey, customers constantly engage with sellers through a diverse array of digital touchpoints, spanning social media channels, email, search engines, chat platforms, and e-commerce websites.
Regardless of where or how customers interact with a brand, retailers must deliver a consistent and unified product experience. If the online representation of products differs from what’s advertised, consumers are likely to lose trust in the product and the brand.
Fortunately, modern PIM offers a solution to this challenge. By leveraging a single source of truth for product information, brands can ensure coherence across all customer-facing touchpoints, regardless of the stage of the buyer’s journey. This represents a fundamental advantage of newer approaches to PIM. By aggregating data from across the supply chain, creating consistent content, and synchronizing product updates across all endpoints simultaneously, modern PIMs facilitate a seamless omnichannel product experience and boost customer loyalty.
This new generation of PIM also enables retailers to effortlessly implement self-serve tools that provide customers with real-time, accurate product data – wherever they engage with the brand.
For instance, many retailers provide self-service digital retail kiosks and touchscreen displays in stores. These stands provide buyers with comprehensive product details and stock information, play promotional content, and serve as self-service checkout points. When powered by PIM, these tools offer buyers all the product information they need and effectively blend the in-store and digital shopping experience, thereby enhancing sales potential.
- Accurate Inventory and Pricing Management
It’s frustrating for customers when they can’t trust a brand’s product inventory and pricing information. For instance, retailers often advertise their products on social media, only for customers to discover that the item is unavailable or priced differently when they visit the retailer’s website. Another common scenario is when items have different prices in physical stores compared to online storefronts.
A PIM solution can solve this problem and enhance customer trust by ensuring that any changes to stock levels or prices are reflected in a single centralized platform and every touchpoint is automatically updated. This ensures every channel, every product, and every piece of product content always shows the most recent information.
Furthermore, a PIM gives vendors a clear picture of low stock levels or any pricing differences across their various channels. Armed with this information, they can adjust in-store pricing if needed or communicate effectively with customers if their desired product is unavailable.
- Compliance with New Rules and Regulations
Whether a retailer sells in-store or online, new regulations continue to pile on the pressure. Key among them is the European Union’s Digital Product Passport (DPP) legislation. Designed to promote product transparency and move towards a circular economy, the law requires retailers to provide information about a range of product-related data points via a DPP. A DPP is a document that accompanies a product on its journey, from raw material sourcing to point of sale and end-of-life recycling.
Once this initiative is formally implemented in 2026, DPPs will likely be associated with products through QR codes or RFID tags. Fortunately, PIM can simplify compliance for both customers and retailers. These systems offer full transparency into every aspect of a product, including its parts, attributes, and components. Suppose customers have any inquiries regarding compliance or the product life cycle. In that case, they can simply scan the item and receive the most recent product information pushed to the DPP by the retailer’s PIM.
The Answer to Better Customer Experiences and Compliance Readiness
Driving frictionless experiences should be a top priority for any retailer and underscores the need to adopt next-generation PIM. These tools go beyond just organizing product data: they are essential for maximizing the value of product data on every channel, improving the customer journey, fostering loyalty, ensuring regulatory compliance, and turning every touchpoint into a revenue opportunity. With the right strategy and the right technology, retailers can quickly reap these rewards.
The author, Stephen Kaufman, is Chief Product Officer at inriver.