One truth, many channels: The PIM-driven path to consistent CX

Avoid the trust-killing inconsistencies that happen when product information varies between your channels.

Walk into any boardroom discussion about customer experience (CX), and you’ll hear the same refrain: consistency is king. Yet many brands still stumble on the basics. A product priced at €171 online but €195 in-store. An app showing an outdated colour option. A marketplace listing missing sustainability information that’s front-and-centre on your website.

These mismatches aren’t just irritants, they erode trust, dent loyalty, and silently bleed revenue.

The hidden costs of channel inconsistency

Inconsistent product information isn’t a cosmetic flaw, it’s a structural weakness. When product data is scattered across systems and managed in silos, the consequences multiply:

• Higher return rates: Customers send back products that don’t match descriptions or images. Returns already consume up to 40% of online orders in some categories, with an average cost of €23–29 per item processed.
• Falling Net Promoter Scores (NPS): Confusing, contradictory information leaves customers second-guessing your brand. More than 60% of consumers say they would stop buying after a single bad product experience.
• Brand damage: In an era of reviews, social media, and instant comparisons, even a small inconsistency can snowball into reputational damage.

Centralising product truth in PIM

The antidote is a single source of truth. A modern Product Information Management (PIM) system consolidates, normalises, and governs product data across your organisation. It doesn’t just act as a database, it becomes the operational backbone for CX:

• Real-time updates across channels: Once enriched and validated in PIM, data can be syndicated everywhere — websites, marketplaces, catalogues, in-store systems, and AI assistants.
• Structured and AI-ready: Clean, consistent data is the foundation for search, personalisation, and automation. Without it, even the most advanced AI will misfire.
• Compliance-ready transparency: As regulations like Digital Product Passports loom, centralising product truth ensures brands can supply verified sustainability and supply chain data with confidence.

Why consistency is the foundation for personalisation and AI-driven CX

It’s tempting to view AI as a silver bullet for CX, but AI is only as strong as the data it consumes. A product listed as “navy” in one system, “dark blue” in another, and “#000080” elsewhere looks like three different items to an algorithm — and the result is poor recommendations and irrelevant search results.

Consistency isn’t just about avoiding mistakes, it’s what makes personalisation possible. When every product attribute, material, and customer review is harmonised in PIM, AI can:

• Tailor recommendations with precision
• Detect patterns in customer feedback
• Adapt product descriptions to personas and channels in real time

Consumers are already demanding this level of relevance, with surveys showing that faster support and more accurate recommendations are among their top expectations from AI-powered CX.

The ROI of getting it right

A consistent product truth isn’t just good for the customer, it’s demonstrably good for business. When powered by PIM, organisations see:

• Revenue uplift: Even a modest 3% lift in conversion rates can translate into hundreds of thousands in additional revenue. For example, a retailer with 10 million online sessions annually could generate €575k–€690k in incremental sales from improved data accuracy alone.
• Reduced returns: A 10% reduction in return rates can save a mid-size retailer more than €115k annually, simply by ensuring customers get exactly what they expect.
• Productivity gains: By centralising enrichment, PIM reduces manual workload by up to 50%. Teams that once needed ten full-time staff to manage product content can achieve the same results with half the effort, freeing talent to focus on value-adding activities.
• Faster time-to-market: With enriched product data ready in days instead of weeks, brands can launch seasonal lines or promotional ranges up to 80% faster, directly capturing opportunities that would otherwise be missed.
• Channel expansion at lower cost: With product truth centralised, adding a new marketplace or regional site becomes a matter of syndication, not reinvention, unlocking new revenue streams without exponential overhead.

When you add these elements together, the financial case becomes undeniable: a PIM-driven approach to CX consistently yields both top-line growth and bottom-line savings.

The bottom line

Brands don’t lose customers because of one poor chatbot conversation or a clumsy email. They lose them because of a deeper failure: a lack of product consistency that corrodes trust across touchpoints.

By making PIM the central nervous system of your product experience, you create one truth for many channels. The result? Lower returns, higher loyalty, AI-ready data, and, most importantly, customers who believe what you say, because it matches what they see and receive.

In the era of unified commerce, consistency isn’t just a hygiene factor. It’s the cornerstone of a customer experience that converts browsers into buyers and buyers into advocates.

References

• Akeneo, 6 Ways PIM Delivers Unbeatable ROI
• Akeneo, The Product Experience Revolution
• Akeneo, The Next Chapter of Commerce
• Valtech & Akeneo, The PXM Practitioner’s Checklist
• Akeneo, PX Pulse: AI & the Future of Shopping Survey

Read more about AI in retail in our The Retailer’s Guide to 2025. 🙂

#UnifiedCommerce #Productinformation #PIM #CustomerExperience #AI #DPP #Columbus #SEO #GEO #Search #Trust #Enrichment #Akeneo