Information Quality in the Digital Retail World

Completeness of Product Data as an Indicator of Quality I want to start talking about Content Quality, this is a nebulous term and definitions may vary, but I believe there area number of dimensions of quality and I will describe them individually, starting with completeness, over a coming number articles.  I must thank Charu Talwar, PHD for her contribution to the article below.  High quality product information is the key enabler of customer experience in retail space today, especially when the opportunity to physically examine a product is limited if the customer chooses to browse the product digitally before proceeding to buy in store or online. In a recent article 'The new digital Divide " Deloitte research indicates that 76% of shoppers research products through a digital device.  https://dupress.deloitte.com/dup-us-en/industry/retail-distribution/digital-divide-changing-consumer-behavior.html One of the key indicators of quality content is its ...

What is different in the digitization of retail ?  If you are reading this, you most likely work in an organization that is on a digitization path. This will mean different things to different companies and the path to get there will surely be different, but I would suggest that the end goal is to improve business by leveraging new technologies: improve operations, improve planning and improve customer experience.  For retailers and their suppliers this is fertile ground, and the opportunities seem endless.  One of these opportunities turns our traditional thinking on it head.   I call it the retail digitization paradox.  Traditional brick and mortar stores. have limited physical space, so the goal of merchants is to meet customer expectations by placing the products customers are looking for, in-front of them on a shelf. Making a customer shopping experience delightful by choosing the products on behalf of a customer. Products the consumer ...

We are on the cusp of the 4th Quarter of 2017 and retailers are about to kick it into high gear. Each year the retail landscape has pushed further and further into an omni-channel world. It is no longer a novelty to purchase online it is the norm, just as it remains the norm to purchase in a store, the worlds of brick & click are now one.   The need for Accurate, Complete, Consistent, Relative and Engaging product content, to support use cases in both physical and digital stores has never been more important.  eCommerce websites, mobile applications, in-store kiosks and the multitude of other digital interfaces in a modern retail store, in home devices such as Google Home and even in your car, each and everyone is requires product content to transact.  The quality of this information is all that stands between a product and a consumer, and yet as an industry we continue to struggle to consistently present our customers with information that makes purchasing a prod...