As customer expectations sky-rocket, delivering the right product content, and offering exceptional buying experiences is no longer a matter of choice, but a prerequisite for success. To achieve this, organizations need to revamp prevailing models and provide exceptional digital experiences to customers across every single touchpoint.
But that presents a formidable challenge for manufacturing companies. We have written in the past about how product data has become central to the digital strategy of manufacturing companies. That suggests the need for a concerted, ongoing, strategic, and highly-skilled effort to enrich product data. How is a manufacturing company to overcome that challenge?
That’s where a blended product content delivery model through captive centers comes into play. By offering an array of services across product information management, master data management, mobility, integration, and analytics, captive centers are enabling manufacturers to deliver product data-driven innovation across the enterprise.
Why Captive Centers Make Total Business Sense?
Over the years, the manufacturing landscape has evolved owing to digitization. Add to that, the increasing number of customers, suppliers, and distributors moving online. B2B organizations have to go that extra mile to make the buyer journey seamless and frictionless. Customers seek credible and appropriate product information to help them make up their minds. They consider ease of buying as an important criterion in their decision. Clearly, offering relevant, up-to-date, and rich information is now business-critical.
In fact, manufacturers have to effectively deliver product content and associated experiences and raise the bar to match Amazon-like expectations.
Captive centres offer the expertise, domain knowledge, and IP to accelerate the product content management cycle. They promise efficiency and control at a reduced cost. Through their numerous IP-led innovations and capabilities, captive centres drive faster speed to market, decrease the cost of innovation, and enable better product data enrichment across the manufacturing organization.
How Manufacturers Can Benefit?
Although content can take manufacturers to digital success, it can also be the Achilles heel of B2B digital experiences. Crossing the content chasm requires manufacturers to embrace the latest tools and technology for efficient product information management.
Marrying the product knowledge of the manufacturing company with the product information management skills, technology background, and domain expertise of an expert partner can form an impactful partnership.
Here’s how that could work:
Continuous management of product information: Given that product information plays a huge role in driving sales in the B2B industry, efficient and timely management of product information is a critical aspect of success. Captive centers enable manufacturers to evolve, improve, and optimize product information for better customer experiences. By categorizing product selection and content in a customer-friendly manner, they help manufacturers in creating a strong foundation for their digital experience.
The advantage of location-specific content: When operating in a global environment, catering to customers spread across the world, manufacturers must account for all the minute details that go into meeting country-specific standards. Offshore captive centers can aid manufacturers in aligning product content not just with customer’s needs but also with their culture and norms. By leveraging well-designed data models and firm data-governance, captive centers can help in establishing a well-structured product taxonomy: from contextually relevant images to the use of localized words, safety standard codes and more – leveraging captive centers which are located in the same region as customers can ensure that product content precisely meets the standards of the target audience.
Improved searchability: Customer insights are evolving. Captive centers, through their understanding of product information management tools, help manufacturers to efficiently handle multiple data sources and formats across multiple products. Manufacturers can accelerate and optimize the distribution of product information across their digital and sales for buyers as they look to progress in their journey.
Easy management of complex distributor and supplier network: As the supplier and distributor network scales, management becomes increasingly tough. Manufacturers must constantly drive efforts to ensure their product data fits into distributor and supplier systems. Captive centers can ensure that the product information is thorough and consistent and that there are no information gaps. These partners can leverage their IP to help make this content syndication easier and faster. Manufacturers can publish personalized product content across supplier and distributor marketplaces and transform information across catalogs to align with their requirements – in real-time.
Increased speed of innovation: Companies are under pressure to innovate more and innovate faster. As customer expectations change, captive centers – through robust reporting and analytics capabilities – are enabling manufacturers to drive product improvements like never before. By constantly innovating and optimizing product information, and continuously deploying up-to-date content, they are allowing manufacturers to keep pace with the speed of change to better serve the customers in their buying journey.
Reduced operational cost: As the costs of operating a manufacturing business surge, organizations are struggling to maintain profitability. By offshoring a significant portion of their product content management to captive centers, manufacturers can reduce operational costs. All that, while simultaneously driving business value and performance improvement. Through enhanced process effectiveness and efficiency, captive centres are delivering real revenue impact to enterprises. They are pushing the boundaries on cost, product information quality, and customer experiences.
Drive Better Digital Experiences
With the world embracing a global model to conducting business, captive centers have become immensely popular. Through an array of resources, tools, and modern analytics-based capabilities, these captive centers are enabling manufacturers to manage their product content and product information better. This is allowing manufacturers to focus on improving business productivity and lowering cost. Modern offshore captive centres can drive continuous management of product information, offer the advantage of location-specific content, improve digital experiences, increase the pace of innovation and reduce cost.
If you are looking to meet the rising needs of your customers, while efficiently managing the complex network of suppliers and distributors, it’s time to rethink your operating model and think of a partner who can help you build a captive centre of your own. And that’s how you will be able to overcome the product data challenge.