Assessment: Is Your Company Looking to Improve the Entire Product Experience?
How is your company approaching a customer’s product experience, on and off your site? Product Experience Management (PXM) is rapidly becoming the approach digital leaders are adopting to improve their audience’s browsing and buying experience through personalization and contextualization. Like many initiatives, the success of a PXM strategy involves various capabilities, from the cleanliness of your data to the structure of your internal processes to the capabilities of your teams and partners.
To help companies understand how suited they are to adopt PXM, our Product Information Management (PIM) partner Akeneo recently launched their PXM Maturity Assessment. Take a few minutes to complete your assessment (or bookmark for later!), and read on to understand how this tool can help your organization identify and prioritize the steps needed to improve your product experience.
Product Experience Management (PXM) is a concept that covers how audiences experience products as part of a digital experience on cmmerce websites, marketplaces, social media, or other places your product appears digitally. PXM is not a specific tool or platform, but rather the collection of platforms and capabilities that deliver the experience that surrounds products.
Enabling PXM generally requires integrating several platforms that could include PIM, Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs like Adobe Experience Manager, Acquia, etc.), Commerce Platforms, and more to deliver compelling product experiences.
An effective PXM implementation requires presenting product information in a way that’s contextualized and personalized throughout the customers’ journey. PXM is not for the faint of heart as it’s a large undertaking that requires planning and preparation.
What’s the PXM Maturity Assessment?
The PXM Maturity Assessment is a tool that Akeneo released to help organizations determine their level of digital maturity. Enabling PXM requires a higher degree of digital maturity, so it‘s essential to assess your current digital capabilities to understand how to approach PXM.
Akeneo has identified three levels of PXM Maturity: PXM Adopter, PXM Innovator, and PXM Champion—most organizations fall into one of these levels though some might be transitioning to the next level.
Akeneo’s tool provides clear guidance and recommendations on how to progress to the next level. The survey is quick and concise—it should take you around 10 minutes to complete.
The self-assessment questions are organized into three sections:
Process – Every business has different needs and requirements, but a key driver of PXM success (and PIM generally) is having well-defined, understood, and repeatable processes.
People – Processes alone cannot function without people. Whether establishing organizational buy-in, gaining executive sponsorship, or securing stakeholder alignment, you’re not going to get the PXM results you want without getting everyone committed and speaking the same language.
Technology – Technology is the catalyst that enables people and process. Understanding the role of technology and how different platforms play a key role in your PXM journey is critical.
Once you complete the assessment, you will be rated at one of Akeneo’s levels of PXM Maturity. Each level requires a different approach to enable you to attain the next level:
PXM Adopter
A PXM Adopter invests in a single source of truth as a strong foundation for using product information consistently across channels and markets. If you fall into this category, your next steps might include:
Process - Build internal buy-in for PXM within the organization among stakeholders.
People - Evaluate whether or not your team and your current PXM strategy are optimally aligned with the overall business strategy.
Technology - Continue building on your foundation as a stepping stone to the next level. Data governance and modeling can be a starting point here. Getting to PXM starts with getting the most out of your PIM.
PXM Innovator
A PXM Innovator establishes a collaborative model between teams and formalizes processes to make sure attributes and assets are defined to match the product experience that you want to deliver to customers along their entire customer journey. If you’re at the PXM Innovator level, your next steps might include:
Process - Start to identify opportunities to automate processes and scale the application of PXM principles in the organization.
People - Start expanding organizational engagement with departments that have not been active with your core PIM operations but will be needed as you employ PXM more broadly within your company.
Technology - With your foundation in place, audit your current tech stack to identify platforms and extensions needed to support true PXM and build a roadmap to get them in place.
PXM Champion
A PXM Champion unlocks growth thanks to a scalable and well-designed platform that involves internal and external stakeholders and aligns with your business strategy. If you fall into this category, your next steps might include:
Process - Make sure you have effective analytics or business intelligence in place to measure PXM performance. Like many things, PXM is a journey and without actionable insights, it will be difficult to plot your course.
People - Ensure PXM is an active part of your strategic planning at the highest levels of the organization.
Technology - Look ahead to proactively identify technologies that can further assist your organization’s execution of PXM principles. Areas around efficiency, automation, and scalability would be a good place to start looking.
Begin the PXM Conversation
Before tackling any initiative, it’s important to assess your capabilities and collect guidance and recommendations to help you move ahead. The PXM Assessment is quick and easy to use, but it’s just the first step. If you’re starting the process of improving the product experience, the PXM Maturity Assessment from Akeneo is a great way to start the PXM conversation.
