Customer Experience: The role of DAM and PIM

Customer Experience - Definition and Delimitation

Customer experience (CX) is the customer's perception of a brand or company. This includes all possible experiences that the customer has with the product or brand. These different points of contact are referred to as touchpoints. This is also where the difference lies with user experience (UX). While the user experience is about a single touchpoint, the costumer experience is aimed at all touchpoints along the entire customer journey.

Why is a positive customer experience important?

The customer experience is an important factor in the success of a company. A positive customer experience contributes to customers buying from a company again and again and recommending it to friends and family. Photos, videos and product data in the form of product descriptions, but also as data on websites and in catalogs, play a particularly decisive role in this. Creating a positive customer experience leads to the customer feeling informed and having a good feeling about their purchase decisions.

Why is a DAM important for the customer experience?

Photos are an important part of the customer experience and more and more of them will be required by the customer in the future. Cropped product photos, mood photos, detail photos and other types of photos are becoming more and more important as they help the customer understand the product better and get a better picture of it. When a customer is planning to buy a product, he usually wants to see it before. Images help the customer get to know the product better and give him or her confidence that the product will meet expectations. More importantly, images are an analog form of communication. This overlays the factual information from product data. Put simply: Even if the data for your product is similar to another, maybe even a little worse: With good visuals you can convince customers. If there are no photos or they are of poor quality, this can lead to uncertainty in the customer and make him not buy the product. So, it is clear that photos are absolutely necessary to create trust and that they contribute to the purchase decision. If a company has many products and the visual material has to be made available to many online stores or marketplaces - each in a customized form - how do you manage that? This is where a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system comes into play. A DAM system makes it possible to maintain the corresponding image and document material for an almost unlimited number of products. When a customer wants this material in a form that is easy to process, the DAM can deliver it quickly and customized. This way, even if your company sells countless products, you manage to keep track of your photos. On the one hand, you can keep track of whether there are enough images for all products, and on the other hand, whether they are linked to the products in your PIM system. This is how TESSA DAM contributes to a positive customer experience.

Why is a PIM important for the customer experience?

Product data is another important component of the customer experience. Customers want to know what they are buying, and product data can help them make informed purchasing decisions. Product data should be clear and comprehensive and contain all the important information about the product. It's important to communicate what functions and features a product has and what benefits it promises. This starts with size - i.e. length, width and height - and continues with weights, colors and materials. In addition to these general attribute classes, there are countless other product information items that are specific to certain product classes. These can be lumen and kelvin values for lights, the size of tires for bicycles, battery capacities in milliamperes or amperes for the storage capacity of rechargeable batteries, etc. The more products you have and the more diverse the product classes or product families - from which they originate - the more important a PIM (Product Information Management) system becomes for you. If the product data is incomplete or unclear, this can lead to customers misjudging the product, not buying it in the first place, or ultimately returning it.

Many of our customers started with an ERP or maintained their product data in an online store solution. Holey data, not optimally prepared for the customer experience, was the result. Customers converted inadequately, even if the path to submitting the order was optimal. This is where PIM helps because it shows how well the data is maintained for which product. PIM systems such as Akeneo also provide information about the quality of the product data. This makes it possible to define the required attributes per product family and thus build the optimal basis for a positive customer experience. This means that excellent product data also forms the basis for purchasing decisions.

The joint importance of PIM & DAM for the customer experience

When images, photos and product data are used together, an even better customer experience can be created. Photos communicate quickly and hit customers on an emotional level. So they are enormously important for creating a positive mood. This visual data forms the superstructure for the facts, so to speak. Only when images and facts come together in the form of attribute values and descriptive texts can customers properly understand products and be convinced to buy them. Whenever you are dealing professionally with many products, and associated image material - which possibly goes even beyond the pure product reference - a DAM is the solution to ensure an optimal customer experience. This applies not only to the customer experience in your own online store, but also to other web stores and marketplaces. If the photos and product data there are accurate and clear, this can help the customer to better appreciate the product and feel confident to buy it.