It may sound crazy on first blush, but hear me out. After all, where would we be without the humble remote control? (Especially during days and weeks like this!) Sure, you could watch television without one. But anyone who’s ever spent hours cramming themselves behind couches and under tables to try and find a missing remote knows just how essential the remote control is to the television viewing experience. Without the remote control, you can’t simply sit back, relax, and let the entertainment come to you. Instead, you need to go through the tedious, manual process of changing channels by hand, flipping through every single one until you find a program worth watching — and repeat that process every time a commercial comes on, every time you want to switch up the show you’re watching, every time you want to raise or lower the volume. What’s more, if you have a smart TV, it’s essentially impossible to navigate through streaming services like Netflix or Amazon Prime without a remote. Obviously, not having a remote control makes the TV experience more tedious and difficult. But it also makes it more time-consuming to find your favorite channel or program. And believe it or not, lacking a remote control can even lead you to make mistakes when it comes to choosing your program — because when you need to go through a long, arduous process, it’s more likely that something will go wrong along the way and you’ll be left watching something unappealing. So, there’s my argument for the remote control as one of the best inventions the world has ever seen, if not the single greatest invention known to man. And just like every good new television needs the remote control, every good product enrichment team needs its own essential piece of equipment — a product information management (PIM) solution. Because in many ways, a good PIM solution is just like a remote control for the product information and product experience.

Pilot your teams

Just like the remote control allows you to control your TV from anywhere in the house, a PIM can help you manage your product experience anywhere, anytime. PIM helps your teams collaborate whether they’re in a centralized office environment, working in offices around the globe, or working from their home offices. With a strong PIM solution, your teams can work together seamlessly to ensure that you’re able to offer enticing, compelling omnichannel experiences to your customers, no matter what environment they’re working in.

Switch channels

Just as a remote control can help you more efficiently and quickly change channels, PIM gives your team a purpose-built tool that can help them enrich or update product information in no time flat. It can also help optimize the process of collecting, enriching, and getting new products to market using one centralized, trusted source for product information by providing a system of record for product information and digital assets, improving the accessibility of product data and liberating it from disconnected silos. This means faster time-to-market for your business. But picking up the pace doesn’t mean you need to make more errors. Remember when we said a remote control can keep you from making mistakes when trying to choose a channel or program? PIM does the same when it comes to product information. Pushing your team to move more quickly without giving them the right tools can sometimes lead to errors and inconsistencies in product information, which kill your product experience. But with PIM, you can accelerate your time-to-market, all while eliminating errors and inconsistencies.

Get a guide

One of the best parts about your television remote is that handy-dandy guide button. It lets you get a view of all the available channels and programs while saving you the time and effort it would take to flip manually through each channel to find out what’s on TV. And, as luck would have it, your PIM solution can do much of the same. By giving your team a system of record for all of your products, product descriptions, digital assets, and any other elements that comprise your omnichannel experience, Akeneo PIM can serve as their guide to product information. It can also help them understand not only what products need to be enriched, but also help them assess the quality and completeness of the product data and assets you’re presenting to your customers. So, if the remote control is the greatest invention of all time, may we humbly suggest that PIM — AKA the greatest invention for managing product information — might just be a close second. Give your team a remote control for your product information management— master product experience management from anywhere, anytime, with Akeneo PIM!  Discover how companies like Novia and Pierce have used Akeneo to make product information management as simple as hitting a button on their remote control. 

 

But when unavoidable circumstances rear their ugly head and keep Akeneo’s PIM experts from visiting our clients in person, all that needs to change. But as the saying goes, the show must go on — and so must the PIM implementation! Check out this recent webinar featuring Akeneo’s Brad Johnson, the Granite Group’s Matt Spangler, and C2’s Jonathan Currie. The group discusses how to conduct high-quality PIM implementations in a remote environment, and the results of the project. Watch now to discover: 

• How Akeneo, C2 Consulting, and the Granite Group retooled for a virtual event
• Technologies used to overcome remote implementation challenges
• Tips for staying engaged in a virtual setting

But how can you evaluate what a PIM can really do for your business? What does a good scenario for adopting a PIM look like? And how do you select the best solution for your needs from all the available tools? Check out this recent webinar from Akeneo’s John Evans and special guest Jordan Jewell, Research Manager, Digital Commerce, at IDC. The pair discuss why high-quality product information is crucial to better results from your commerce initiatives, what PIM can do to help, and tips and best practices for selecting the right technology. Watch now to discover: 

• Key reasons and use cases for adopting a PIM to support your commerce objectives
• Typical business benefits of PIM
• Must-have capabilities of a PIM solution you should consider

DISCOVER THE POTENTIAL OF PIM

These familiar red-and-white buttons were a product of office supply chain Staples’ mid-2000’s advertising campaign, originally debuted as part of the 2005 Super Bowl, and presented an alluring, if simple, premise. Just press your handy-dandy “Easy Button” and poof! Any conceivable problem someone was struggling with, from a bucking bronco that refused to be lassoed, to a new father struggling to keep up with twins, to a business owner or employee searching for an affordable and convenient spot to pick up office supplies, would magically fix itself.

A colleague referenced the campaign last Friday afternoon, and I spent most of the weekend (and if we’re being honest, a good chunk of that workday), fantasizing about just how great it would be to really have an Easy Button. Want to spend some time watching TV instead of checking chores of your weekend’s “to-do” list? Easy Button! Stuck in traffic and running late? Easy Button! Don’t feel like cooking dinner after a hard day writing blogs? Easy Button! (At least there’s GrubHub!) Want to take some tasks off your plate at work? Easy Button! Then it hit me. Akeneo’s PIM (product information management) solution is a lot like an Easy Button for your business — especially when it comes to making eCommerce easy. For example, let’s say you need a top-rated solution to compete in the increasingly fierce and fractured digital market. Winning the battle for customers online all comes down to the experience you offer your customers, which means it’s crucial to arm yourself with the best product information arsenal you can assemble. There’s a big difference between a “good enough experience” and a compelling, dynamic, contextual experience. If you want to succeed in eCommerce, you don’t just want a good solution — you want the best — and Akeneo PIM is a leader in helping B2B brands and B2C companies alike create these compelling experiences. Just ask retailers like American farm equipment and supply store Rural King, who have used Akeneo PIM to reinvent their eCommerce experiences and live up to the high expectations set by their in-store experience. Other retailers, like Europe’s leading retailer of outdoor and camping equipment, Obelink, have used PIM to create dynamic product experiences that help them reach customers far outside the walls of their flagship brick-and-mortar stores. Europe’s largest luxury shoe retailer, Kurt Geiger, meanwhile, used PIM to dramatically improve productivity and efficiency. This allowed the company to more quickly add new products to its catalog or expand to a new channel and also helped them better manage seasonal products and events. PIM can also be an integral part of an eCommerce re-platforming or migration, reducing the time spent migrating product data to the new platform and helping your team more efficiently handle the product information related challenges that come with such a transition. Or, if you’re looking to reach new customers by selling products in new locales, Akeneo can help you localize and optimize your eCommerce experience to fit the needs and norms of your new market while making it easier for your employees to track exactly which pieces of product data need to be translated or updated. Maybe you’re struggling to take your eCommerce endeavor to the next level? Make it easy with Akeneo’s dynamic open-source ecosystem of partners and integrations. Integrate with major eCommerce platforms like Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, Big Commerce, Oro Commerce, and many more via the dozens of extensions in our marketplace. Or, get help with your most difficult eCommerce challenges from our community — more than 3,000 PIM enthusiasts and evangelists are ready to help you conquer even the biggest obstacles. Or, brush up on your PIM skills and show off your eCommerce expertise by joining the community yourself. No matter what your business needs to make eCommerce product information management easier than ever, Akeneo PIM has it. So get your hands on the Easy Button of product information, Akeneo PIM, today! Ready to make eCommerce easy to the next level with Akeneo PIM?  Discover how companies like Novia and Pierce have used Akeneo to make product information management as simple as pressing the Easy Button. 

Looking for a dose of community while working away from the office and your normal routines? Akeneo’s got you covered! We’d like to cordially invite you to watch the first live edition of the PXM Pioneers’ Pulpit — a new webshow from Akeneo PIM featuring our vibrant PXM community. Join us as we take a deep dive into the world of Product Experience Management and the exciting ecosystem that surrounds it with Akeneo experts and guests from around the community! Watch the debut episode of this new adventure below! Help us grow the community by sharing this episode with a friend, and join us on our next episode where we’ll invite some Pioneers to join us in discussing some of their PXM tips, tricks, and best practices.

Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic and resultant economic, social, and political turmoil have changed our daily lives. Many European countries such as the UK, Italy, France… have closed all their schools and have asked people to stay home and limit social interactions as much as possible. Working from home whenever possible has now become a civic act that slows the spread of the virus and saves lives, protecting the elderly, the vulnerable, and each one of us. As a global company with offices and employees all over the world, Akeneo is already experienced in managing a virtual workforce and has taken all the necessary decisions to be able to work and serve our community (customers and partners) as usual. As a cloud-based business, we are fortunate to have a suite of tools that keep our business operating smoothly, no matter where our people are. We have also increased the capacity of our infrastructure to ensure the current ramp-up. Therefore, at this time, we do not anticipate any impact on our ability to continue to render services to our customers. Please note that for the safety and health of our teams, business travel at Akeneo is on freeze until further notice, but we all remain operational and ready to run meetings and workshops via video conference. We keep doing everything we can to ensure our products and services will help support your own operations in the best conditions. Our dedicated maintenance and support teams are available for you as usual. You can reach us through our regular communication channels. We wish you, all of your employees, and loved ones to stay healthy and to get through this unusual period as well as possible, together. Fred de Gombert, Akeneo CEO

It’s safe to say that most of us have cabin fever by now. We’ve binge-watched our favorite show on Netflix (or a few shows), listened to some new podcasts, and brushed up on a new book or two. But here at Akeneo, we’ve been yearning for a way to get our creative juices flowing and express our artistic sides, or trying to find a way to simply keep our little hydras away from the screen for a few moments. Fortunately, our pal Ziggy heard our pleas and is here to help. She’s provided us with a brand new Ziggy the Hydra coloring book, filled with 12 pages of adventures to explore and relax with while coloring inside the lines (or outside — we don’t judge!) Keep your kids (or yourself) busy and relax by creating some art with our pal Ziggy! Download the coloring book pages below and share your masterpieces using the hashtag #ZiggyTheHydra!

Download Now

According to Rian Johnson, director of the Academy Award-nominated movie Knives Out, he was not allowed to use Apple products in the movie unless they were used by “good guy” characters and not any “bad guy” characters. I listened in rapt attention — easy enough to do as a hands-free activity, especially considering I was not really moving in traffic anyway. This instance of product and brand control has two implications. One is that, like any good brand, Apple wants its products displayed in the best possible light. That’s by design — not coincidence. It means that any phones or computers used in the movie or television show could be iPhones or Macs only when in the hands of the good guys, the winning side, the innocent. Therefore the bad guys, the losing side, and guilty parties have to use something else — such as Android phones or PCs. Brilliant marketing. How convenient for Apple that its competitors are associated with negative aspects and characters! The second implication is, now that you know the secret, it is a lot easier to identify the possible culprit in the next suspenseful movie or program you are watching by simply looking to see who is using an Apple device. Sorry if this is a spoiler — but maybe you can make some money off your friends by betting on the outcome! This got me thinking about how product information relates to, and supports, your brand strategy and brand values. We don’t all have the brand power of Apple — but there are things we can do to support what we believe is important. We talk a lot on this blog about how high-quality information is important for establishing your credibility with customers, enhancing confidence, and encouraging better conversion rates and reduced returns. There is more and more evidence of these benefits and I think the question of whether consistent, high-quality product information is important is no longer in dispute. What can we learn from the concept of associating your brand with only positive characters? Perhaps the old adage of “any publicity is good publicity” no longer applies. We’ve seen how brands want to have more control over the experience they deliver – specifically, the recent announcement from Nike, who decided to stop selling on Amazon, is one result of trying to control the experience for customers. In an unreleased survey we recently co-sponsored with Accenture, we found that consumers, especially digital natives, see brand values and the product experience as a key factor in a purchasing decision — 32% said they would be willing to pay more for an outstanding experience, and 38% said they would be willing to pay more for a brand that conveys the values they believe in. (Watch our blog for more information from this survey soon). Our survey supports the trend of brands increasingly looking to promote their brand values through product information. Brands and sellers are using sustainable and eco-friendly aspects of their products as a way to differentiate their offering and appeal to customers who actively seek out products with these attributes. We touched on the concept in a January 29, 2020 webcast with Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy (look for it in our events archive on this page). Sellers are even including the ability to filter products on their eCommerce sites based on which ones are sustainably sourced, include or exclude certain ingredients, and so forth. So, while you may not have the brand power or legal resources to demand and actively monitor how your products are depicted by Hollywood, there are steps you can take to better control your brand strategy and values on the platforms you can control. By managing and presenting relevant product information, telling your brand story, and delivering a compelling product experience, you can speak directly to your customers, appeal to your shared values – and maybe even generate more revenue. Interested in what product experience management is all about? Download our free eBook PXM for Dummies to learn more.

Your “employee experience” encapsulates all of the ways your employees interact with their workload — including whether they have the right tools for the job.

Your team can’t provide a top-notch experience if they’re suffering from a sub-par experience themselves. You hired your team to create these compelling customer experiences to wow your customers and help boost conversion rates. But without the right tools, they’re going to be stuck dealing with product information silos, poor processes, and wasting time on manual, repetitive, low-value tasks. That’s where Product Experience Management comes in. Not only does PXM enable you to better serve customers and see increased conversions and revenue for your business, but also arms your team with a solution designed to make it easier to manage product information, so you can give your employees a better experience, too. How does Akeneo help create a better employee experience, you ask? It’s all about increased efficiency, greater productivity, and enhanced collaboration that enables your teams to get their product information management tasks done without the drama associated with manual, Excel-based methods. Allow us to explain.

Make your employees more efficient

Asking your employees to manage product information and create compelling experiences without a purpose-built solution, and instead forcing them to rely on outdated or poorly suited solutions like spreadsheets or ERPs, is like asking a lumberjack to chop down a tree with a spoon. It’s just not going to work. Instead, give your team of product experience practitioners a razor-sharp tool that can help them clear the forest of product enrichment in no time. Akeneo PIM is a purpose-built solution that can help your team manage even the largest and most complicated product catalogs easily and efficiently. It helps you optimize the process of collecting, enriching, and getting new products to market using one centralized, trusted source for product information. It does so by providing a system of record for product information and digital assets, improving the accessibility of product data and liberating it from disconnected silos. Akeneo can also help your team eliminate the hours of time spent on repetitive, low-value tasks with intelligent automation. It takes these menial and tedious tasks off your team’s to-do list using a business rules engine, which automatically populates attribute values across a wide range of products and product models and helps you manage your product data in bulk. That way, you can speed up your enrichment process, slashing time-to-market along the way, while minimizing errors and inconsistencies in product information.

Help your employees collaborate

When it comes to creating compelling and enticing compelling experiences, teamwork makes the dream work. Your teams need to be able to work together seamlessly — but that’s often easier said than done when you’re dealing with internal teams, remote teams, field and regional teams, and even external teams like translators. If you want to keep up with the increasingly fast pace of omnichannel commerce, every member of your team needs to know exactly what they’re responsible for — and what they shouldn’t touch. That’s why Akeneo PIM comes packed with features like Advanced Rights Management to help you govern product enrichment processes by ensuring contributors only access the products and field values they need. It also offers validation workflow controls designed to help your team ensure that only the highest-quality, validated, and approved information makes it to your touchpoints. What’s more, with Akeneo’s Teamwork Assistant, Akeneo PIM help fosters collaboration across your teams by tracking product data completeness to ensure no incomplete products make it to your sales channel. It also helps you pick up the pace by helping you audit your enrichment processes and notifying your marketing team when a product is missing attributes, needs translation, and is ready to be exported to your sales channels.

Give your employees a 360° view

The last weapon your team needs to triumph in the battle over bad product information and product experiences is a complete view over every part of your omnichannel offering. That means providing your employees with a 360° view of all of your products, product descriptions, digital assets, and any other elements that comprise your omnichannel experience. It also means helping them understand not only what products are available and what products need to be enriched, but also helping them understand how well products have been enriched, by assessing the quality and completeness of the product data and assets you’re presenting to your customers. Akeneo PIM, fortunately, offers all of the tools your team needs to understand the quality of your product data. This includes tools like the catalog completeness feature, which tracks product data by sales channels and locales, ensuring no product data is published before it’s complete. Data Quality Insights helps your team quickly measure product data quality and consistency while making suggestions for how to improve data quality.

Give your employees a great experience

Give your employees the tools and resources they need to be happy and successful at managing product information. People are your most valuable resource, so it’s crucial to give them a high-quality employee experience, so they can create the compelling customer experiences your business thrives on. Give them the tools they need to get the job done right with Akeneo PIM! Want to see how other companies have become more productive and delivered a better experience for their teams? Discover how companies like Kurt Geiger have used Akeneo to boost productivity, slash time-to-market, and ease expansion to new channels. 

That’s why making a decision surrounding a business solution can be so difficult. It often isn’t enough that these purchases provide only a new way to solve an old challenge or a new perspective to view the same challenges you face every day. Your solution needs to provide tangible benefits if it’s going to be seen as a good investment. This is certainly true when you’re considering a Product Information Management (PIM) system. A good PIM isn’t just a container for product information, nor does it simply provide a new place for you to perform old processes. Instead, your PIM should add value to your organization by transforming product enrichment and management process, and, ultimately, help you raise your revenue to new heights. Akeneo PIM is built to do just that by providing B2B and B2C businesses alike with value-added tools and features designed to take their product information to the next level. So, if you’re having a little trouble understanding or articulating the benefits Akeneo PIM could provide for your business, don’t fret — just read on to see what Akeneo PIM can do for you.

1.  Reduced Returns

The value of your PIM starts with making things right. With Akeneo PIM, you can make sure that every piece of product information that reaches your customers is correct, consistent, and complete thanks to features like automated enrichment rules, product completeness tracking, and data validation. And that’s important because if B2B buyers and consumers don’t feel like they can trust the information you’re providing them with is accurate and paints a full picture, they’ll quickly abandon the purchase in favor of a merchant that helps them better understand what they’re buying. Even if you do somehow convince a customer to make a purchase despite incorrect, inconsistent, or incomplete product information, the victory will likely only be temporary. Because when your customer eventually receives their purchase, only to find the product isn’t what they pictured or won’t fit their needs, they’ll likely return it, costing you that hard-won sale in the process. What’s worse, that return is probably the end of the relationship between you and this customer — after all, most consumers do not make repeat purchases from companies that they don’t feel they can trust. With Akeneo PIM, customers have seen reductions in product returns of up to 40 percent, which leads to higher revenue, increased customer loyalty, and increased value over the lifetime of your relationship with that customer.

2. Excellent Experiences 

Accurate product information is just the beginning, however. In the omnichannel age, consumers must be able to see your product in action or get an inside look at how your product functions via digital assets like photos or videos. This is especially true as competition becomes all the more fierce on digital channels. The advent and mass popularity of marketplaces in both B2B and B2C industries has made digital assets even more crucial. Akeneo PIM includes Asset Management capabilities that are designed to help your team more efficiently and effectively manage your digital assets right alongside product information. Its asset management capabilities for both B2B and B2C businesses are designed to offer flexibility, better asset organization, enable asset transformation and linking capabilities to support different needs in different channels, and a dedicated asset library to help you easily visualize all your digital assets. So what do you get when you combine the correct, complete, and consistent product information you get from Akeneo PIM with its Asset Manager capabilities? You get the high-quality experiences that turn shoppers into buyers and transform first-time customers into lifelong fans. Research indicates that providing your customers, whether they’re consumers looking for a new outfit or a Fortune 500 company looking for a new tech solution, with excellent experiences is the biggest thing you can do to guarantee success in the omnichannel age. In fact, according to one study, 66 percent of buyers care more about experience than they do about price when it comes to making purchase decisions, while another report found that 86 percent of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

3. Tight Time-To-Market

Success in an omnichannel world requires speed. If you want to be able to keep pace with modern customers, your time-to-market needs to be as speedy as possible. Speeding up time-to-market without letting your product information quality suffer, however, is often easier said than done. Pushing your team to move more quickly can lead to errors and inconsistencies in product information, which kill your product experience. But with Akeneo PIM, you can accelerate your time-to-market, all while eliminating errors and inconsistencies. Thanks to better governance over processes and a more streamlined flow, Akeneo customers report significantly faster time-to-market — like the case of Australian retail giant Myer, which saw time-to-market accelerate by 400% after adopting Akeneo PIM. What’s more, with Akeneo’s Teamwork Assistant, Akeneo PIM help fosters collaboration across your teams by tracking product data completeness to ensure no incomplete makes it to your sales channel. It also helps you pick up the pace by helping you audit your enrichment processes and notifying your marketing team when a product is missing attributes, needs translation, is ready to be exported in your eCommerce or is added to the PIM.

4. Climbing Conversion Rates

With your PIM implemented, your team moving more quickly, your product information enriched consistently and correctly, your digital assets driving interest in your products, and your compelling customer experiences delighting and exciting buyers, you should begin to realize the final benefit of Akeneo PIM: increased revenue! As we’ve addressed above, today’s consumers and B2B buyers have high standards when it comes to making purchasing decisions. Fortunately, Akeneo PIM is built to meet, and exceed, those expectations by enabling you to provide dynamic, compelling customer experiences on every channel, offer localized and geographically-appropriate information, and turn shoppers into customers. Akeneo customers have reported increases in conversion rates of up to 400% — and when paired with reduced returns mentioned above, this can have a real impact on your bottom line. So if you’re ready for a PIM solution that provides you with real results, look to Akeneo PIM.