Product Experience and Customer Experience
Consumers are faced with numerous choices as they search for a new product to purchase. This means that they can easily become overwhelmed by the number of choices that are available to select from. A great way to help consumers with their purchasing decisions is by providing a product experience. The product experience can provide additional guidance about a specific product and can help a consumer feel confident about a product they are considering.
Another important aspect is the customer experience. By providing your customers with a positive experience, they will likely return to purchase from your company or brand again. They may also tell their friends and family about the positive experience they had.
What is the best way to create a product experience? A PXM is a great tool that is available to create product experiences. Let’s dive into this more in the next sections.
What is PXM?
According to Salsify, product experience management (PXM) “ is the process of creating and distributing consistent, engaging product content to customers to drive sales and build loyalty.” Simply put, product experience management (PXM) is defined as delivering a compelling and accurate product experience. This means in all product experiences, where product-related content is displayed, it is always accurate and relevant to the applicable use case. For example, a product experience for showcasing all of your product offerings, such as product catalogs, will provide vastly different information than a digital product experience aimed at educating a buyer in-aisle on which product to purchase. So with all of this in mind, what is a product experience?
According to Gainsight, product experience “is the perception of a company’s product based on all touchpoints, interactions, and engagements.” Basically, product experience is the customer’s journey with a particular product. This can be from the customer’s initial awareness, their decision point, and to the long-term usage of the product.
As you begin creating a product experience for one of your products, you should take into account the following items:
Why the information is going to be accessed
Who will be accessing the information
What their goals are at that moment
How they will access it
How can you provide a delightful experience
All of these items are key things to keep in mind as you begin creating your product experience, as they will drive what should be your primary focus.
At the end of the day, manufacturers need to think about product experience management as an extension of customer experience, as a majority of the interactions customers have with a manufacturing brand are product-related. By creating product experiences for your different products, you can provide your customers with a personalized experience no matter what part of the journey they are on.
The goal should ultimately be to provide every customer with a personalized product experience throughout their entire customer journey. Simply put, the more personalization you can provide to your customers, the better experience they will have with your product and brand.
How Do You Describe the Product Experience?
There are various use cases and ways to describe a product experience. Here are some common product experience examples:
Product Catalogs - By creating a product catalog, you can showcase all of the products your company offers.
QR Codes on Products - By adding a QR code on a product, your customers can easily access product information, such as product manuals or troubleshooting guides.
Trade Show Booth - Provide an interactive element at your trade show booth by including a product experience that goes into greater detail about your products.
Product Registration - Assist your customers with easily registering their products and having this information go into your system of record.
Maintenance Tracking - Provide recommendations on when maintenance should be performed and allow your customers to track their usage of a product.
Product Recommendations - Assist your customers with finding the best product for them by providing an interactive quiz to an experience.
This is just a small sampling of the type of product experiences that can be created.
As discussed earlier, a product experience refers to a customer’s journey with a product. While a complete product experience involves the overall customer’s experience with a product, from the beginning to the end. Each part of the customer’s journey can be visualized in a different product experience.
Why Is Product Experience Important?
There are numerous benefits to using a product experience within your organization. Some of the key reasons why product experiences are important are as follows:
Shorten time-to-market - Most software solutions allow you to easily add and manage your product information with no IT or development required.
Brand Consistency - Ensures all of your product experiences include brand-approved digital assets.
Accurate Product Information - Take advantage of a centralized location for all of your product data and related assets. This will ensure you are always using the most up-to-date information throughout all of your product experiences.
Improved Customer Experience - Every customer wants a personalized experience. With a PXM, you can easily tailor the product experience to match the needs of each specific customer and meet them where they are in the customer journey.
Create data-driven Digital Experiences for Your Products - Utilize real-time product information to create data-driven digital experiences to showcase your products.
Increase Sales - Accelerate your revenue growth by driving increased conversion, recommending relevant products, promoting related parts and accessories, and more.
Empower Collaboration and Increase Productivity Across Your Business - Using a software solution to manage your product data and digital assets allows multiple users within your business to update this content at any time. And when you use Lumavate, any updates made to this content are automatically updated in any related digital experiences. This will ultimately save you time and money.
What Is Product Experience in Marketing?
Product experience plays an important role in marketing. Since a product experience involves a customer's journey with a product, marketing teams are tasked with focusing on different parts of the journey. Each part of the journey can have its own set of product experiences and ideally assist your customer along the way.
What Is the Role of Product Experience?
Product experiences play an important role in the customer's journey. Some of the most important aspects of a product experience are the following:
Its relevance to the customer based on where they are in the customer journey
How they are accessing the product experience
What the customer's current goals are
A good example is if a customer is trying to sort through your huge product catalog. As they are searching, they can easily become overwhelmed and frustrated trying to find a product that works for them. As a result, they need an easy way to answer a few questions and get a list of recommended products that your company is confident will meet their needs. In this scenario, the customer likely wants detailed product information. Whereas if the customer is standing in the aisle at the store while comparing two similar products, then the customer likely only needs high-level differences between the two products before they make a choice.
With all of this in mind, how do you create a product experience?
Nowadays, consumers are on their mobile devices more than ever before. They also often use these devices to find relevant product information. With this in mind, it is highly important that the majority of the product experiences you create should be digital. This means that your company will need a software solution that helps you quickly and easily create product-related digital experiences. Ideally, these experiences will also automatically pull data from yourproduct information management (PIM), digital asset management ( DAM), and content management system (CMS) solutions.
Using a PXM platform that can automatically pull in data from these different sources, will allow you to spend less time managing the product data and creating product experiences.
This means that your business will need a software solution that allows you to easily create product-related digital experiences that automatically pull data from your PIM, DAM, and CMS. Using a PXM platform that automatically pulls data in from these applicable sources will allow you to spend less time managing your product data and creating product experiences. This means faster speed to market!
There are numerous platforms out there that allow you to create product experiences. A few of the most common PXM platform options are:
Lumavate
Akeneo
Salsify
Each one of these platforms offers its own set of features and benefits. Determining the best one for your company will involve researching the features, to determine which ones are most important to you.
What Is the Difference Between PXM and PIM?
As we discussed above, PXM stands for product experience management and is defined as creating compelling product experiences. On the other hand, PIM stands for product information management and is a tool that helps provide a centralized location to manage all of your product data and digital assets.
Lumavate is a PXM platform that will give you access to analytics on how customers are using your product experiences. This information can be extremely useful and can help you continue to iterate on the experiences to improve results.
What Does a Product Experience Manager Do?
A product experience manager would be in charge of determining what product experiences should be created for the company and their products. They would also be part of the team who creates the product strategy. Any company that sells products should create a product experience strategy. When creating the product strategy, it is recommended that it includes PIM software as a component.
What Is Customer Experience?
According to HubSpot, customer experience “is the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the buyer's journey. It results in their view of your brand and impacts factors related to your bottom line including revenue.”
Customer experience is made up of two components, people and products. This means part of the customer experience that you have with a brand is related to the product you purchased and the interaction with their team members.
The importance of customer experience is key to the continued success of your company. When a customer has a positive customer experience with your brand, they are more likely to continue purchasing from you, whether this is the same product or new products your brand offers. These days there are numerous options of products that consumers can select from and by providing a positive customer experience, your brand can stand out from the crowd.
Customer Experience Examples
You have likely had numerous customer experiences throughout your lifetime. These may have been both positive and negative experiences.
One example of a company that provides a good customer experience is Lems Shoes. Say you order a pair of their shoes online and realize that the size you ordered was too small. Once you proceed to their website to see if you could exchange them for a larger size, it becomes apparent that they provide a seamless exchange process. All you need to do is enter your order number and zip code, which will pull up your order. The next step is to enter your reason for the return and the system will recognize your request and have the correct size on the next step.
Once you have finished submitting the exchange, they will provide a QR code to provide to FedEx. This means that if your FedEx is considered a Return Bar location, you simply show the employee this QR code. They will not require you to package the exchange, instead, they scan the QR code and package it up for you in reusable packaging. Within minutes of leaving the store, you will receive an email that the company has received your exchange and would be shipping the new shoes shortly.
While you may not directly interact with any customer service representative from Lems Shoes, this process provides such a positive experience, where you may recommend them to others. This shows that by providing a positive product and customer experience, it can lead to repeated business by the same customer or others.
Product Experience and Customer Experience
Customer experience is the overall experience a customer has with a company while product experience is the customer’s perception of the company’s product.
Ensuring your customers have a positive experience with a product, will help ensure they have an overall positive customer experience with your company or brand.
Get Started with Lumavate
Ready to start creating product experiences for your company? See what Lumavate can do for your business by booking a demo today.