Adopter, Innovator, Champion: Assess your PXM maturity

Customers have more options in their buying experience than ever before. In addition to physical stores, shoppers can now access global marketplaces with the touch of a finger, no matter where they are, look for and buy products on social media networks like Facebook or Twitter, or even interact with potential purchases via augmented or virtual reality.

But it isn’t just the number of new sales channels that continue to grow — customer expectations have also constantly and continually risen in recent years. What’s more, customers of all stripes are making purchasing decisions based on which company offers a better shopping experience. Roughly 80 percent of buyers said that the quality of a company’s customer experience makes a significant difference in whether they choose to shop with them. Add it all up, and it’s clear that great customer experiences are no longer a nice-to-have – they’re an urgent need. But no great customer experience can exist without a solid foundation of compelling product experience — consistent product information delivered in context wherever and whomever, your buyers are. So what’s a modern business to do?

Why PXM matters

Offering all of this, and meeting those changing expectations, of course, is often easier said than done. That’s why to make sure you’re offering the best product experience possible, you need Product Experience Management — better known as PXM. Product Experience Management is more than just a data management solution — it’s a new methodology. It’s the art and science of delivering rich, high-quality product information in context, adapted and scoped by channel and locale to match every touchpoint’s buying experience. Having the right information and insight into the product experience buyers expect is the foundation for any great customer experience, of course, but PXM is about more than just data and technology. It’s also about the people and processes involved in the management of that data. Product Experience Management touches almost every part of your relationship with your customers. It’s how you make sure potential customers can find your products and how you ensure product data is accurate, complete, and consistent across all channels and markets. It helps create an emotional connection with your buyers, accelerate time-to-market, and give your team more selling days. Most of all, it’s how you make sure you’re meeting those ever-increasing expectations of both B2B buyers and B2C shoppers.

Introducing The Akeneo PXM Maturity Assessment

It’s no secret that product experience, and effective management of that product experience, is crucial to success. But to get to where you want to go, you need to know where you are. So, to help you figure out exactly where you are in your PXM journey, Akeneo has created the PXM Maturity Assessment! It’s designed to provide you with recommendations and guidance on how to think about the different ways that product information is leveraged, who should be contributing, and help you find ways to improve business processes that involve PIM. It also includes a clear path of recommendations to continue your progress toward becoming a PXM Champion. The assessment consists of 14 questions designed to evaluate how you’re managing information. The questions ask you to identify and describe how your organization is currently using your people, data, and technology to manage product information, including enrichment processes, workflows, time-to-market, employee satisfaction, and more.

Become a PXM Champion

So, once you’ve taken the assessment, what’s next? How can you use this to elevate your PXM practices and become a PXM champion? Once you’ve completed the assessment, you’ll receive a personalized report that explains the next steps you can take at your current level of PXM maturity that will help you and your business progress along the maturity journey. You’ll get a clear picture of where you are in your journey, plus a better idea of just how far your company can go with increased or modified applications of PXM best practices Ready to get started? Take the PXM Maturity Assessment for yourself, or contact us to get help from our team of product experience experts.