There are often many things behind this. It is very common for product information to be fragmentary. The technical descriptions are located in one folder, the pictures in another, and various certificates and documents, such as installation, use, and maintenance instructions, somewhere else. The commercial descriptions produced by marketing are on the website.
In addition, companies are usually organized in such a way that different people – or different departments – are responsible for customer experience in different channels. This happens even within sales and marketing: an advertising agency creates content for presenting products on social media, the marketing department writes product descriptions for websites, product managers compile product cards. Sales make their own PowerPoint presentations to present the products to customers, and customer service works based on different internal data sources. It is quite unlikely that content created with this model will generate a consistent message across different channels.
The unity of communication is not always remembered in companies to appreciate. To many, consistency sounds simply boring: it's much nicer to bring your own personal fingerprint to the contents or even stretch the visual dimension of the brand. It is natural for a salesperson, for example, to express things in a way that they feel is natural for them. At the same time, not only does he perhaps break the unified product experience, but he also does extra work.
Centralized product information management or PIM (Product Information Management) combines fragmented product information, improves efficiency and helps create a better product experience
The PIM solution ie product information managementis a system where different people and departments centrally maintain product-related information and content. Master data related to products can come the product information management system, for example, from ERP, where product information is mainly managed for internal processes. Product information management is used as a centralized platform for all product information, from which product information is enriched for customer channels. Information from the product information management system is published to all sales channels where information is needed.
When the product information management system is used optimally, everyone has the same information at their disposal. For example, advertising agencies can import texts used for product promotion into the system, and marketing can enter content needed for sales. The product managers, on the other hand, maintain the technical information of the products, and sales updates the product-related market and competitor information from the field. It is easy for customer service to maintain an internal database of questions and answers asked by customers. From there, for example, product managers can monitor them and, if necessary, enrich product information with information requested by customers. It's starting to sound like a collaboration!
Companies using Adeona PIM report that the solution has brought many advantages:
- The time spent managing product information drops by half.
- As manual work decreases, the number of human errors decreases significantly.
- Enriching and maintaining product information is easy and fast. In this way, the information offered to customers is broadened and deepened. Customers have better information when making a purchase decision and the shopping experience improves.
In terms of a unified product experience, the PIM solution is downright revolutionary. The product information distributed from the centrally managed solution is the same in all publication channels. Different language versions are easy to manage and thus ensure consistency in all desired languages. In particular, product cards, attachments to sales offers or other publications implemented with publication automation bring a significant change. They are always up-to-date and exactly in line with the company's visual brand. And this way of working results in consistent product experiences for customers!
