About Trust
Trust is the leading value-for-money brand for digital lifestyle and gaming accessories. Operating in over 50 countries, Trust focuses on providing consumers with cleverly designed products to get the most out of their device – and their day, with a current range of 800+ products for computers, mobile devices, gaming and more. Founded in 1983, Trust International B.V. operates under four globally active brands: Trust, Trust Gaming, Trust Urban and Trust Smart Home.
The challenge
Like many other companies, Trust was working with a patchwork of systems that were independent from one another. As a result, many individuals and teams were storing and managing product information and digital assets as they saw fit, creating data silos across the organization. Because of this, the company lacked visibility of and insight into the quality and completeness of their data, which caused costly errors and publishing delays.
Trust realized that in order to gain a single source of product truth across the organization and to efficiently distribute the product data to their trading partners, they needed a solution to globally manage the product information and digital assets of their total historical range of 9000+ products, in one central location. After careful consideration, Trust chose the Contentserv Product Experience Platform (PXP) to enable high-quality product information and short time-to-market.
Requirements
An important requirement for Trust was to go live with this solution as quickly as possible. In order to address their main challenges in a timely manner, they took an agile operational approach which consisted of two phases. Phase one defined a limited scope of priorities to produce a minimum viable system, including rigorous testing. Phase two addressed the rollout of a download portal, making all product data and assets globally available to Sales, Marketing, Backoffice and other departments. Trust also needed to address their legacy IT landscape, update various systems and optimize associated work processes and data flows to help achieve these goals and future-proof the organization.
Implementation
Contentserv partnered with XSARUS, Trust’s digital commerce partner, for the implementation. At first, long briefings and detailed planning took a lot of the team’s time, but as the project progressed and workflows were set, they could switch to Scrum and operate in a more agile manner. During phase one, the Contentserv solution was implemented to assemble all commercial product data and digital assets in one location and enable Trust to quickly publish updates to their own website. In phase two, Trust focused on providing the product data and digital assets to the entire company, by way of a global download portal. This allowed Trust to ensure that their product information is consistently shared across all communication: from marketing campaigns to customer support and eCommerce content.
The implementation included a dashboard, showing an overview of the content development workflow, from physical product development to final online publication. The dashboard quickly captured each workflow state, so Trust’s Online Content team was able to keep perfect track of content development, and work to enrich each new product launch with commercial content and other useful assets, within a set time frame.
Prior to Contentserv, Trust had no central system to manage all their 9000+ products and assets, throughout their development lifecycle. With Contentserv, all commercial product assets are now centralized; associated data is gathered and made available in one place. This enables the company to consistently advertise, sell and provide support for their products, whilst keeping track of the product lifecycles and keeping their website content up to date at the same time.
By registering products at their conceptual stage in Contentserv, Trust no longer needed to manually transfer data from one system to another, at every stage of development, marketing or sales. Once product specifications have been captured and finalized, the marketing team produces enriching content such as story texts and associated images, product videos and lifestyle images, after which the information is shared with the translation agency for localization. Thus, automatization dramatically improved efficiency, time-to-market and content uniqueness and quality, whilst eliminating a large number of manual operations.
Results
Within just two months, Trust was able to complete their data setup and migration, link their products and digital assets, and publish to their website — in time for the end-of-year peak season. After the phase one success, phase two was completed in merely a few months and with no show-stopping issues.
Trust was able to enforce one product truth by establishing a unique system of records. Today, 150 users from multiple departments — from Product Development to Marketing, Sales, Research, Backoffice and Support — utilize Contentserv to access the same source of product information and digital assets.
By accelerating their product introduction, Trust has sped up their time-to-market. Furthermore, they can now publish accurate, complete, and up-to-date product data, generate language-specific information and provide digital assets everywhere.
Trust is now working to further advance their time-to-market, by testing and incorporating a new implementation to automatically generate channel-specific outputs. The new implementation will also include further upgrades to the download portal, making the product assets more accessible and easier to download.
“Gathering product information for online retailers went from days of collecting inconsistent data from several resources, to just downloading one single version of the truth and sharing it.”
Trust
