A genuinely satisfied and loyal customer is the do-or-die ingredient that your business needs to keep driving sales, turn in a profit, and remain in business. The reverse is also true; a dissatisfied customer is all that a business needs to kill sales, turn in a loss and ultimately go out of business. One of the most important factors? Product information.
The Wharton Business School proved this in a Customer Satisfaction Study involving 1,186 shoppers in the US. The results of this study demonstrated that a business is likely to lose about 35 existing and would-be customers out of every 100 dissatisfied customers. Of course, there is a lot that goes on in between, and while the data speaks for itself, many businesses still struggle with customer satisfaction/loyalty.
Customers require a lot of product information. It’s important for product information to be readily available and consistent through all channels of your business. Employees need to easily reach this information at the right time and use it to serve customers quickly. PIM helps businesses to achieve this level of organization.
This is where Product Information Management (PIM) comes in. Did you know that a properly implemented PIM can drastically improve your customer’s satisfaction and loyalty? This is particularly true in the eCommerce space because competition can be stiff in a flooded market. Product pages must be complete and accurate in order to gain buyers’ trust and keep it.
But first, a brief touch on customer satisfaction and loyalty before we deep-dive into the role of PIM.
What is customer satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction is the honest feeling of a customer after you have served them, as a business. It is the ultimate measure of how well your products fulfilled the needs and expectations of the customer. A truly satisfied customer is a sign that they may purchase your products again hence transforming from being just another customer into a loyal customer.
What is customer loyalty?
Customer loyalty is when a customer is inclined to return to buy your products again. They’ll return to your site instead of going to your competitors. This is the result of a customer’s positive experience with your business, and so you earn their trust.
How Does PIM Influence Customer Satisfaction in eCommerce?
PIM is crucial because product information is at the heart of eCommerce. Before a customer buys from your store, they will have to be sure that your product serves their need. If they come to your store and the information they find is not useful, then they will leave unsatisfied. You will not only have lost a sale, but a customer who would have given you many sales over time.
If customers buy your product based on your product information but later on discover that the product is not serving their needs, then you lose loyalty because the customer will not return to buy from you again.
You can avoid these frustrations by implementing a Product Information Management solution, tailored for your niche.
What are the benefits of customer satisfaction and loyalty in eCommerce?
More than ever before, eCommerce and B2B businesses stand to gain the most from fulfilled customers. This sector depends heavily on customer satisfaction. So much, that you can never afford to ignore this aspect when running your business.
Several main benefits include:
Increased revenue
When a customer’s needs and expectations are satisfied, chances are they’ll keep coming back to purchase your products. This will help boost your revenue. The constant return of your satisfied customers means you have won the retention war.
According to Bain & Co, the pioneers of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer retention of 5% leads to a profit increment of more than 25%. Dissatisfied clients would happily abandon your business in an instant for your competition, therefore, decreasing your revenue.
Employee motivation
Customer satisfaction and loyalty are directly connected to employee motivation. When your employees are motivated by work culture, they will be more dedicated, helping your business grow. If a business invests the same amount of energy into handling employees as they handle their customers, they will realize tremendous benefits from the investment.
Employee interactions set the vibe for a bad or good customer experience. When employees are unmotivated or unhappy, their communication with clients can, and quite often will, suffer and eventually cause severe consequences for the business.
Customer-inspired brand promotion
Your potential customers are more likely to trust recommendations from friends, loved ones, and authentic reviews than your promotion activities. Moreover, these new clients build a network of loyal customers, giving your business solid touchpoints to build effective connections.
Your customers are your greatest brand promoters that attract new potential customers through recommendations or suggestions. Once you have them, gang onto them, and treat them well.
Reduced service and marketing costs
When a customer is satisfied with your products, the value from that connection exceeds the potential benefits from competing brands. This connection will help increase value, and consequently, expand conversion rates for your brand. Additionally, you can constantly get valuable feedback from your customers, helping you to know what to improve on.
Your business reputation improves drastically as satisfied customers give recommendations and share great reviews. The result? Your business will market itself, drawing more leads that turn into customers you won’t need to spend much marketing on.
6 Ways Product Information Management Improves Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
Whether you’re selling on Grainger, Amazon, or running your own standalone B2B eCommerce store through Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento, we’ll discuss how you can take advantage of PIM to reinvent your approach to customer satisfaction.
We’ll also take a quick look at a couple of Catsy’s top-rated PIM tools. You can use to accomplish key milestones like superior customer service, faster access to rich product information, and data security.
1. PIM helps your employees offer superior customer service.
Who would want to abandon a business if they’re well taken care of? No one, right? Information is vital in any given sector. Your eCommerce or B2B business needs to have a good PIM implemented so that your employees can take good care of customers by providing accurate information in a timely manner.
Customers require a lot of information about products. It’s important for product information to be readily available and consistent through all channels of your business. Employees certainly need to easily reach the right information at the right time and serve customers in a presentable manner. Whether it is to clarify doubts and problems pre-purchase, discuss product issues after purchase, or inquire about inventory for bulk purchasing, your customer service reps can access the data they need on any product with a PIM.
A good PIM makes it easy for customer care to provide accurate data consistently to even the most dissatisfied clients. With PIM, employees can easily eliminate false or misleading information, and help them navigate through any questions they may have. The efficient process allows more time for customers to provide feedback, meaning they’ll be happy to feel heard.
2. Faster customer access to new products.
In addition to streamlining end data, PIM also smoothes out product-to-market processes and permits you to quickly deal with otherwise tedious tasks. Including reformatting digital assets, data reviews and approvals, keyword attribution, pricing in multiple currencies, inventory, and other related parts. When your company is able to introduce new products more often, your customers will stay increasingly engaged with your brand.
A good PIM makes it possible to unveil new products more rapidly than your competition. A plug-and-play solution in your grasp, you don’t have to scramble on various Excel sheets for product data prior to unveiling another product. PIM offers the ideal opportunity to quickly put out new products in front of your customers, for continuous company growth.
This speed alone will make customers feel more significant as their cherished brand unveils another product ahead of competing brands. Being the first to unveil new, improved products helps your business stand out. You’ll also increase the chances of getting a lot of purchases.
3. Customers get the correct details, the first time.
Solid and reliable product data is becoming increasingly vital to purchase decisions, especially for B2B buyers. It’s easier to post product content on an eCommerce store without verifying data. As a result, companies struggle with weeding out bad data from their stores. But with PIM, product data is safely kept, verified, and posted from one primary location. Meaning, you will be able to verify with 100% accuracy that your product data is correct. Your customers will be able to find accurate, firsthand details about your product. They’ll purchase a product that they actually want and not wonder if they ordered the right item upon delivery.
PIM is purpose-built to cut out misleading, inconsistent, and outdated information. Why? So that customers can buy and receive the product they intended to order. This additionally helps lessen costs for your brand thus eliminating customer frustration.
For this reason, more and more businesses are putting resources into product information. The more product data a customer or potential customer has access to, the more they are able to understand your business, trust you to deliver on every purchase, and remain loyal.
4. Customers have access to rich product information.
As you might already know, eCommerce or B2B customers depend on product information to make purchase decisions. This is why they need detailed information about the products they wish to buy. For example, a potential customer is interested in light bulbs or power tools, and they are looking for helpful information but can’t find it. They’ll instantly move to another site in pursuit of valuable information that can help them make the ultimate purchase decision.
Once the customer has the relevant information, they can then purchase without worrying about ordering the wrong fabric and having to return it. With the right PIM, all valuable information that the customer needs will forever be available, consistently updated, definite, and predictable. This helps boost the shopping experience, minimize the risk of potential customers abandoning shopping carts, and reduce canceled orders, send backs, and wrong orders.
With a good PIM, you can easily provide detailed product information to your partners including affiliates. They’ll be able to provide customers with enough product information and be in a position to answer any questions. PIM is reliable through all channels, regardless of whether customers access your products on e-retailer sites like Grainger, Fastenal, or your eCommerce store.
5. Easy data retrieval
PIM is a primary repository for safely storing product data. Safety and security are the topmost prime focus of PIM. With PIM, you won’t ever lose any crucial information. Securely storing the information away. In addition, Catsy PIM includes a built-in workflow.
Because such rich information can be retrieved and deciphered by customer care teams, PIM offers a valuable resource for ideas that can be used by teams such as marketing, logistics, production, design, advertising, and sales to enhance products. Marketing teams, for example, can easily craft product descriptions that are not only attractive but also factual thanks to accurate data in PIM. Logistics departments on the other hand can save a lot of time by feeding important data directly into PIM, instead of relying on the ever tiresome copy and paste.
As a result, you’ll be able to give your customers precisely what they need and they’ll be more inclined to feel fulfilled.
6. PIM helps your eCommerce business to rapidly apply customer feedback
A study by Oracle indicates that 74% of specialists surveyed agree that great customer experience is essential for accomplishing customer loyalty. The right PIM makes it simple to understand the preferences and inclinations of customers through their buying and request history. This creates an opportunity for more successful product exposure efforts.
Regularly, it is your dedicated customers who respond to reviews and reply to surveys dispersed by your marketing crew. Loyal customers would be happy to set aside some time to share significant feedback that you would then be able to transform into useful strategies for promotion or find ways to improve your customers’ experience.
PIM allows marketers to readily apply customer feedback and suggestions in the form of product updates. For example, if a customer tells customer service they would have liked to know the weight of a product before purchasing, customer service will relay the feedback to marketing, and marketing can quickly add the weight to the product description on all channels where the product is sold.
How Catsy Product Management Solutions Are Boosting Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty for eCommerce Businesses
Catsy’s PIM solutions take your product information to all your sales channels, faster than your competition. This level of efficiency puts you in a superior place to reach your customers fast with the correct content plus support, giving your business an edge in customer satisfaction/loyalty. From managing product description updates to formatting them for different partners, businesses have trusted Catsy since 2006 to optimize costs and drive revenues.
If you are an eCommerce or B2B company searching for solutions to improve customer satisfaction and increase sales, then Catsy is for you.
Here is a quick look at a couple of Catsy’s top PIM tools and what they can achieve for your business.
1. Centralize
Centralize makes it possible to work on your information from one central repository, ensuring that your customers always get the correct details the first time. This solution gives you the power to organize data and assets in the manner that works best for your business. Crucial product data including attributes, pictures, PDS, 360s, videos, cad drawings, spec sheets, pdfs, and more will flow seamlessly from a single repository.
With Centralize, you can connect new and current data with your ERP system, ensuring that you’re always dealing with the most up-to-date information.
2. Optimize
Just as the name suggests, Catsy’s Optimize is designed to help eCommerce businesses optimize content pages. This might sound simple until you discover that it could be the missing link in your pursuit of conversions. Marketing experts will tell you that optimized product information is like that ever-joyful, pleasant party MC that keeps everyone fully engaged, and excited. You might have the best products on offer but without that sweet and concise edge, no customer will be engaged. Well, you now have a chance to engage better; because once your merchandise enters Catsy’s Optimize, you will immediately discover a world of optimization opportunities and uncover methods to improve your content.
Optimize makes it possible to grade content automatically based on specifications, enhance product specifications and descriptions. This is significant because you are then able to present a clear perspective of products to customers, hence increasing customer confidence and minimizing returns. If you ever dreamt of achieving superior customer service without breaking your back, then make that dream come true with Optimize!
3. DAM
Data is everything in business. You want to pay special attention to how your data is managed and shared. Catsy’s DAM makes it super easy to organize all data assets within a single source of truth, connected to all product information. Pictures, PDS, 360s, videos, cad drawings, spec sheets, pdf, name it. All assets will flow into one central repository using the DAM tool, ensuring that customers have access to rich product information.
Duplicate content will no longer be a headache as DAM stores all assets in one place, automatically throwing out duplicates.
You’ll never have to worry about copies as a master copy of all assets is automatically kept as you work with the most recent versions. Try DAM and forget about the agonizing days of renaming files over and over again.
4. Publish
The Publish PIM tool by Catsy helps businesses to publish easily and quickly across all their sales channels. Whether you want to send out your content to your distributors, retailer account at Amazon, BIGCommerce platforms like Shopify, or even your self-service brand portal, Publish is built for this. You will publish images instantly upon adding attributes, validate product specs, create catalogs fast, publish thousands of products in one go, share safely, and so much more.
Catsy’s high-limit API makes it possible to build catalogs rapidly by selecting only the products you want to showcase, import, or export without errors.
5. Workflow
Workflow is a PIM solution that helps eCommerce businesses automate their workflows and accelerate time to market. Examples of tasks you can automate and expedite include product updates, image reviews, and sending emails. Take advantage of customizable workflow templates, automated checklist recommendations, and the ability to assign tasks and monitor progress.
You can approve product specifications at every level using Catsy’s workflow review tools, assuring quality before your products hit the market. Existing low-performing products can be easily updated or phased out. Additionally, you can receive workflow notifications from Catsy straight in your Asana projects to keep track of any updates and new releases.
Final Thoughts
A well-implemented PIM is what you need to build long-lasting connections with your customers. All information that your customers need should always be presented fast, be well organized, rich, and satisfactory. As we have discovered, it is so difficult to achieve all these essential items without exceptional PIM solutions.
In the absence of PIM, your customer support, sales, marketing, and product management teams will struggle. The end result is customer dissatisfaction and disloyalty. This is certainly not what you want for your business, and the most practical way out is a visionary PIM strategy.
Product Information Management is the secret oil that is powering successful eCommerce businesses.
It’s now your turn to act.
Reach us here and book a strategy call to gain insight on how to convert those customers into loyalists and lock them out of your competition
