What makes a good PXM practice?

This is the second of a two-part series of blogs on Akeneo’s new PXM Maturity Model and Assessment. To learn more about the PXM Maturity Assessment, check out part one of the series!

We already know that having a great product experience is crucial to success in the omnichannel age. 

The vast majority of buyers (80% to be exact) say that the quality of a company’s customer experience makes a major difference in whether or not they choose to shop with them. A growing group of consumers are also willing to abandon purchases over a bad experience. What’s more, research also suggests that compelling product experiences can increase customer engagement, enhance brand perception, and improved lead generation and customer acquisition.

Offering a handful of compelling individual experiences, however, is not enough. You need to build an entire practice and group of processes that elevate your product experience across every item you sell and every channel you sell on.

“But Akeneo,” we hear you cry out. “How in the world am I supposed to know how to build a good PXM practice?”

Allow us to explain!

Building a successful PXM practice is all about improving customer experience — but that can’t be done unless you start by truly understanding your customer’s journey. Then, once you have that understanding, it’s time to take control of these three essential elements of PXM: technology, processes, and people.

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 channels and locales.

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, 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 factor onboarding information from suppliers into your PXM practice, so that everyone can spend more time producing high-quality and relevant product experiences. You may also need to engage with external providers such as translation agencies if you are expanding across borders to new markets. 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 Maturity Model

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? With the Akeneo PXM Maturity Model, of course! The Akeneo PXM Maturity Model is separated into three stages designed to help you improve your PXM practice. 

A PXM Adopter invests in a single source of truth as a strong foundation for consistently using product information across channels and markets. A PXM Innovator, meanwhile, 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. Finally, a PXM Champion 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 Maturity 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!