The e-commerce sector continues to surge. Projections are for revenue of $4.13 trillion in 2020. But to make the most of this massive opportunity, organizations will need a lot more than a good product portfolio. They will have to focus on enhancing the customer experience. They will need to overcome the challenges that suppliers, distributors, and customers face and offer complete and differentiated product content that really makes a difference to the buyer journey. They will have to embrace modern strategies to effectively manage, transform, and publish personalized product content for channel partners and marketplaces.
Challenges of creating an enhanced experience online for customers
Every digital business knows that top-notch customer experience depends on their ability to effectively deliver product content. Customers must be able to find the information they need easily. They must be able to zero in on the specific information that will address their buying concerns. The product information must be tailored to assist the progress of the buyer’s journey. But accomplishing this is easier said than done. There just isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to deliver quality digital experiences. In fact, there is a bevy of common challenges businesses face when looking to bolster their product content:
- The challenge of growth and scale: As companies grow, so do their product portfolio and their customers. Many struggles to manage product content through the various stages of growth, and many others hit a roadblock when it comes to scaling their content. Not only does poor product content negatively impact customer experience, but it also impacts the digital performance and scalability of the company.
- The challenge of performance: In addition to the challenge of coping with growth and scale, organizations also struggle to provide a high-quality experience to end-users even when web traffic is high. From consistent, comprehensive, and accurate product descriptions to fast video playbacks, real reviews, responsive interactions, high image quality, and more – the challenge of performance is significant.
- The challenge of any time, anywhere delivery: With customers, suppliers, and distributors expecting a seamless online experience irrespective of where they are or what device they use, making content available on different formats and screen sizes is another challenge that often plagues organizations. The wider the market reach, the more challenging it becomes to meet customer expectations.
Taking a complete and differentiated product content approach
A solid online experience requires organizations to deliver meaningful and personalized product content to customers – quickly and reliably – while ensuring top-notch scale, reach, and performance. Good quality product content is essential not just to ensure customer satisfaction but also to build customer loyalty and increase revenue. That’s why enriching product content with relevant, accurate, consistent, and detailed information is essential to drive customer journeys and sales. Since customers can only buy your products if they find them and trust them, organizations need to take a comprehensive and differentiated product content approach to ensure success.
Such a differentiated approach can not only help organizations survive and thrive in the market but also help them achieve a competitive edge and fuel digital commerce success. It ensures products rank high on search engines, distributors understand the product offerings, and customers trust the offering enough to make a purchase. At Codifyd, we have formulated a cloud-based solution Bridge that is focused on enabling manufacturers and differentiators to use differentiated product content to drive customer journeys and seamless onboarding of partners. Using Bridge, organizations can accelerate and optimize the acceptance and distribution of product information across the supply chain. They can ensure timely and accurate availability of product data, so it positively impacts the findability and sales of products.
Bridge incorporates a machine learning-empowered state-of-the-art recommendation engine that reduces guesswork, enhances efficiency, and makes it easy to achieve scale and sustainability. It helps organizations convert search traffic into e-commerce success. Bridge helps provide information that is unique, detailed, and accurate across product descriptions, photos, videos, how-to manuals, delivery options, maintenance guides, reviews, and more. It helps in
- Effectively onboarding and managing suppliers, distributors, and customers
- New product introduction, SKU build, and normalization
- Rich content development and data model optimization
- Tracking quality metrics and maintaining product content consistency
- Driving channel communication and management
- Analyzing customer experience with respect to site performance, product UX, site search, SEO and more.
How organizations can increase revenue and sales
Every would-be digital business understands how tough it is to cope with problems created by inconsistent content workflows. However, by using a modern content syndication platform to solve product content problems and by leveraging the capabilities of scalable onshore/offshore teams, organizations can ensure continuous deployment of product content – that speeds time-to-market.
Such a strategy can connect manufacturers to channel partners, publish content in the format needed and update the catalog automatically. It can help organizations devise efficient and clear KPIs and achieve as much as 2x to 4x savings in cost while driving end-to-end results across the full content lifecycle. The right content syndication platform can enable distributors and manufacturers to:
- Eliminate the use of spreadsheets and connect categories and attributes with a user-friendly point-and-click workflow.
- Automate the supplier catalog updating process and bring channels up-to-date with new item introductions or changes – in minutes.
- Leverage the power of smart recommendations and meet channel requirements – 100%, every time.
- Empower customers to choose products that best fit their needs while ensuring satisfaction, driving loyalty, and achieving higher conversion for online sales.
- Get a holistic view of channel management and make necessary improvements to further enhance the customer experience.
- Improve time to digital shelf, update product data in real-time, reduce manual operating costs and increase digital revenues.
This may be exactly what it takes to meet the expectations of your online customers in 2020.