What makes a good PXM practice?

Having a great product experience is the crucial first step in providing an omnichannel customer experience. Every interaction with your product that a consumer has during their ever-widening buying journey is going to impact their experience and perception of your brand.

Feeling skeptical? Here are the numbers to back it up: two-thirds of shoppers saying that they have abandoned buying a product because of bad product information experience obtained from any source. What’s more, research also suggests that compelling product experiences can increase customer engagement, enhance brand perception, and improve lead generation and customer acquisition.

Offering a handful of compelling individual experiences, however, is not enough. You need to build an entire strategy that elevates your product experience across every channel, marketplace, and touchpoint.

Building an impactful product experience (PX) strategy is all about improving the customer experience — but that can’t be done unless you start at the foundation: Product Experience Management (PXM).

PXM is the set of best practices and key metrics for successfully making the most out of the people, processes, and technology needed to deliver world-class product experiences.

Technology

As any artisan will tell you, a high-quality product is much easier to achieve when you use the right tools for the job. Too often, organizations take the perceived simple route and invariably use the wrong tools (e.g. spreadsheets) to manage product data. The cornerstone of any effective PXM practice is a good Product Information Management (PIM) solution. 

This solution should allow you to easily and efficiently collect, standardize, and enrich your product data and make it easy to create great product experiences that you can distribute across a wide range of locales, as well as owned and unowned channels.

The right technology will also enable you to streamline the onboarding process for suppliers and data providers, helping you establish a system of record for product information. A good PIM solution will also offer insights to help you improve the quality and consistency of product data across all channels, and enable your team to deliver compelling product experiences to drive increased sales, higher conversions, reduced time-to-market, and more.

Processes

Building an excellent PXM practice requires more than just a good PIM solution, of course. It also requires you to have the right processes in place. This includes product enrichment processes, localization and contextualization, data governance rules, approval workflows, and team collaboration processes that go into creating a great product experience.

But while internal processes and collaboration are important, make sure you don’t neglect your business partners! Your suppliers can also provide accurate and high-quality product information. Make sure you account for onboarding information from suppliers into your PXM practice, so that everyone can spend more time producing high-quality and relevant product experiences instead of replicating redundant information. 

You may also need to engage with external providers such as translation agencies if you are expanding across borders to new markets. Regardless, a great PXM practice will foster collaboration across all internal and external stakeholders.

People

The last, but certainly not least important, part of building a PXM practice comes down to people: the team of hard-working, dedicated employees you have managing your product experience. Building beautiful, dynamic product experiences is all well and good, but your PXM practice should also make it easier for your employees and any external teams to create and manage these product experiences. It should also consider all the valuable contributors to high-quality product information: creative, marketing, sales, finance, procurement, and more.

So, to build a top-notch PXM practice, remove manual processes and bottlenecks around enriching, managing, and sharing product information. You can then begin to unlock business growth by leveraging a user-friendly and adaptable PIM that supports seamless workflows, collaboration, and productivity.

The Akeneo PXM Self Assessment

So, as you work to build up your PXM practice into a well-oiled machine, how can you know where you stand in your PXM journey? 

The PXM Self Assessment is a short questionnaire that will help you to determine where you are on the path to product experience data excellence and learn how the Akeneo customer platform can help you succeed in your omnichannel PX strategy. Based on your answers, you’ll be categorized into one of the following groups and receive resources tailor-made for your situation:

PXM Adopter: Someone who invests in a single source of truth as a strong foundation for consistently using product information across channels and markets. 

PXM Innovator: Someone who establishes a collaborative model between teams and formalizes a process to make sure product attributes are defined to match customer expectations all along the buying journey. 

PXM Champion: Someone who unlocks growth opportunities thanks to a scalable and well-designed platform involving both internal and external stakeholders.

Of course, building a successful product experience practice, and becoming a PXM champion, doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey, one that you must carefully navigate to avoid the many potential pitfalls that dot the road to product experience excellence.

To get started on the path to becoming a PXM Champion, begin by taking our PXM Self Assessment to get a better understanding of where your organization currently is and what your goals should be. 

Then follow the advice offered in your detailed and personalized report to improve your PIM processes and better your PXM practice. Before long, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a PXM Champion!

Learn from organizations who have cracked the code and become PXM Champions by checking out some customer stories!