4 essentials for the delivery of an excellent product experience
Excellent product experience delivery goes beyond ensuring core product satisfaction. Imagine buying one of the popular smartphones out there only to discover later on that it has poor customer support and an even worse return policy. The product itself may be good, as it’s popular after all, but if its ancillary services are a hit or a miss, what’s stopping you from switching to the better brand and leaving a bad review?
Product experience, then, is the customer’s emotional response to the product at every touchpoint. To excel in product experience, brands must elicit a positive emotional response from consumers each time they interact with a product at every touchpoint.
How to get started:
1. Identify your target’s pain points. To manage experiences, you must first manage expectations. And what consumers expect from ecommerce sites boils down to:
- UI/UX optimized
- Accurate and complete product information
- Unlimited selections or an assortment of products
- Personalized offerings
- Availability of reviews and ratings
- Shopping convenience, including flexible payment schemes
- Discounts and promos with loyalty reward offers
- Free delivery and pick up options
- Painless return policy
2. Build a technology infrastructure that can support your content creation and distribution strategy. Top brands implement the concept of product experience management (PXM) to distribute relevant and targeted content at the best times and to the precise targets in order to: deliver the desired experiences and elicit positive emotions, build a relationship with customers and eventually inspire loyalty and expand market share.
According to Gartner, a PXM adds the following capabilities to a product information management solution (PIM):
- Product content analytics
- Personalization
- Contextualization
- Automation and optimization using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI)
3. Create compelling content. As with customer experience, the great differentiator for brands in e-commerce is content. Top brands not only address shopper pain points but work to exceed their expectations. So, through rich and contextual content, you could communicate, engage and build a relationship with consumers, hoping it eventually leads to not just sales, but even endorsement and loyalty. Note, though, that what’s compelling for one may not be the same for another, hence the rise of personalization. By doing a demographics and psychographics deep dive, you could create content that anticipates and addresses a consumer’s particular need, and then position yourself as the credible solution provider.
For more inspiring content, you can check out Warby Parker’s and Airbnb’s websites.
4. Use analytics for insights. Brands need insights into their product content performance to come up with tweaks and improvements that could drive consumers deeper into the sales funnel. With analytics, you could also see associations and affinities between your products and customers.
Not only that, by leveraging your operational and transactional data, you could make better business decisions, such as how to:
- Best respond to rapid changes in market conditions
- Adjust pricing
- Improve market segmentation
- Address seasonal demands
Now you know the essentials, do you have the tools to start?
By using a combination of features and advanced technologies that facilitate not only the on-boarding, enrichment and management of data, but one that can also help you create targeted, contextual and emotionally engaging product communication.
- PIM - It’s the foundational piece to a PXM. With a PIM, you can collect, maintain and distribute accurate, complete and consistent product information across all channels. This is important because when it comes to e-commerce sites, consumers expect accurate and in-depth product information.
- Master Data Management (MDM) - This solution allows you to accelerate business processes by connecting all data in your product information supply chain. An MDM also helps you ensure data quality and security, create golden records, and control versions.
- Marketing Experience Management (MXM) - The perfect complement to your PIM and MDM, an MXM enables you to exceed consumer expectations through timely delivery of personalized product experiences across channels. With an MXM, you can offer dynamic promotions and adjust them in real-time based on insights gathered from analytics.
