The food & beverage industry is evolving just like any other industry, and the tech stack you use must keep up with the changes of ever growing e-commerce trends, consumer shopping behaviors and supply chain complexities.
Whether you are a producer, supplier, distributor or retailer, it becomes imperative for businesses to provide accurate, consistent and correct product information, which will ultimately influence your user experience. A PIM tool with DXP capabilities can assist f&b businesses in driving a comprehensive and effective e-commerce strategy that fulfills the current market demands.
If you are new in the food & beverage industry, and willing to transform your digital business that truly optimizes customer experiences, then leveraging product information management (PIM) system and digital experience platform (DXP) is a must. Let’s learn about what these systems are and how food & beverage industry can benefit from them.
Role of PIM in Food & Beverage Industry
What is PIM?
Product information management is a tool that allows you to store, manage and enrich your product information from a single place. It acts as a central hub for all your product information, rather than fragmenting data and storing them in different systems.
Having a single place to store all the data means everyone in the team can access the same information. This eliminates issues, such as data silos, data redundancies, data errors and miscommunication as there is only a single source of truth for all your data. In other words, a PIM tool improves data quality and helps streamline business processes.
How PIM Can Benefit Your Food & Beverage Business?
Get full control over all information
A centralized product information enables food & beverage businesses across the globe eliminate data silos by allowing them to create a single source of truth for all product information. This ensures completeness and reliability of all technical information, such as ingredients, usage information, such as cooking instructions, and emotional information, such as recipes to be stored in a single database.
Businesses get full control over this information through a PIM system, which also enables them to deliver a consistent brand experience across all sales and marketing channels.
Offer bespoke customer service
Today’s customer demands personalized service. From smooth ordering process to receiving real-time tracking and personalized recommendations based on their past ordering history, PIM plays a significant role in offer customized customer service.
Hotels and restaurants can leverage PIM to suggest cuisines based on the customers’ past preferences, which could be a driving force in offering personalization and generating more revenue.
Reduce returns and cost overhead
More suppliers generally come with more product data structures and their own data formats. With PIM, you can collect product information from multiple data sources and suppliers, and standardize, contextualize and enrich product information.
That means you don’t need to have a separate system for each supplier, which reduces the chances of incomplete and incorrect information being distributed to all channels. Users always get to see accurate product information across each sales channel, and thus, reducing returns.
Integrate new channel with ease
Ability to expand and scaling up your business is essential if you are looking to boost sales. With a robust PIM system, you can streamline the channel integration process, so you can effortlessly add your desired sales or marketing channels in food ordering and delivery systems.
Whether you want to sell in a new region or add a new social channel, PIM will prepare your data to be distributed to the particular channel. Thus, PIM supports your digital transformation journey as you expand your business to new horizons.
Role of DXP in Food & Beverage Industry
What is DXP?
A digital experience platform (DXP) is a consolidated suite of cutting-edge tools that enable businesses to create, manage and improve digital experiences across multiple channels. All the digital technologies involved work together to offer optimization and delivery of exceptional digital experiences, focusing on cross-channel consistency throughout the customer journey.
Businesses taking their digital presence seriously must understand that in order to deliver a personalized and compelling shopping experience, they must embrace digital experience platform that binds the data across the organization and keep their customers engaged, no matter what platform they choose to shop from. A DXP helps them keep up with the latest trends and improve their interaction with various touchpoints.
How DXP Can Benefit Your Food & Beverage Business?
Enhanced personalization
Customers, today, are bombarded with a number of food choices, but there are some customers who only wish to order certain dishes. A business that knows and understands what a customer needs will eventually win the customer.
Integrating DXP with other systems, such as social media and CRMs can help you connect with customers on every touchpoint, establish a relationship with them, and thereby understand their pain points and keep enhancing their experience with your business.
Better customer insights
If you wish to deliver personalized experiences in the truest form, having a well-rounded view of every customer is essential. It lets you make critical decisions in terms of how you define your personalization strategy.
DXP allows you to connect all the digital channels, and no matter where your customers are and what platform they use to order their favorite dish, DXP’s analysis and reporting tools gather customer data to help you offer better personalization, which will eventually boost sales and promote brand loyalty.
Touchpoint optimization
The number of customer touchpoints is growing beyond mobile, web app, chatbots, voice assistants and customer portals. Customers demand personalized experience at every point in their food ordering journey. With DXP, customization across every channel is easily achievable.
DXP accumulates data from all avenues and give you a 360 degree view of customer behavior at every touchpoint, allowing you to analyze customer expectations closely.
Final Thoughts
Customers demand personalization and ease of shopping everywhere, regardless of the industry. At every point in their journey, they desire to receive personalized attention to their needs, and they may not hesitate to move to your competitors if you fail to deliver what they expect.
Time to market is another crucial factor to consider that can give you a competitive advantage in the F&B sector. Fragmented product data can lead to poor turnaround times, which may disrupt your workflow and hamper your customer shopping experience.
If you are a food and beverage business owner, no matter big or small, you must integrate some technologies, such as PIM platfrom and DXP that enable you to overcome customer experience challenges. With the help of these systems, you can quickly introduce products and updates in the market and deliver excellent user experiences.
