Customer expectations – how to meet and exceed what shoppers demand

In a retail environment where normal is defined by fierce competition, fleeting loyalty and high expectations, the fight to win customer trust is no longer limited to price or speed. It’s about clarity, consistency and credibility across every channel, explains Justin Thomas, VP Sales, EMEA North at Akeneo.

Shoppers expect complete, accurate and transparent product information whether they’re browsing your website, checking a third-party marketplace, asking questions via chatbot or standing in your store aisle. If they encounter conflicting product specs, missing images or incorrect availability, the damage is a missed sale and a hit to your brand’s trustworthiness.

This is why product experience has become the foundation of customer experience. And meeting rising expectations requires a shift from reactive content management to a proactive, AI-enhanced, centralised strategy, one that ensures every product detail, across every channel, is accurate, enriched and optimised for the customer journey.

Retailers have traditionally relied on fragmented systems, manual uploads and one-off spreadsheets to manage product data, but they are now buckling under the weight of modern customer expectations.

Instead, businesses need a unified, cloud-based platform that allows them to centralise, enrich, activate and optimise product content at scale. This platform becomes the single source of truth for all product data - descriptions, images, specs, availability and even customer sentiment.

Data drives collaboration

By centralising product information, teams can collaborate more efficiently across product development, marketing, merchandising and ecommerce, while suppliers can onboard and enrich product data in a consistent, structured way. Businesses thus reduce the risk of errors, duplication and data silos that frustrate both internal teams and external customers.

The real competitive advantage comes when product content is not just managed, but enriched with intelligence and context, specifically Artificial Intelligence which is already transforming how brands, manufacturers, retailers and distributors process, classify and improve product information to drive better experiences.

Instead of spending hours manually updating listings, teams can also benefit from AI to automatically categorise products based on customer intent and attributes, identify missing or low-performing content and get recommendations for improvement, and connect real customer feedback, such as reviews and sentiment data, directly to product pages to guide optimisation.

When enrichment is powered by AI, it is both scalable and self-improving; every click, view or return becomes a data point that helps refine the next product interaction.

Great product content is only valuable if it reaches customers at the right place and time. That means activating enriched product experiences across all touchpoints, from eCommerce sites and social platforms to marketplaces, apps and in-store displays.

This is where a truly composable product experience management (PXM) platform really contributes. It enables businesses to tailor and syndicate content based on the requirements of each channel, while maintaining consistency. That might mean optimising image formats for a marketplace, localising descriptions for international stores or adapting tags and keywords for search relevance. A strong PXM strategy ensures that wherever your product appears, it will be accurate, engaging, contextual and conversion-ready.

And with built-in analytics, businesses can continuously measure how product experiences perform across channels, enabling faster, data-informed decisions.

Closing the loop with customer feedback

Too often, product content is created in isolation, without a direct link to how customers actually respond to it. Advanced platforms now allow teams to connect product information with real-time customer signals like click-through rates, reviews and returns. This creates a powerful feedback loop: high-performing products and pages inform best practices, while underperforming listings highlight where updates are needed.

By embedding customer sentiment into product information, businesses can build better experiences, faster and foster greater customer experience at every step.

Scale is then possible through smart supplier collaboration. For retailers and distributors managing hundreds or thousands of SKUs as well as onboarding supplier data is a critical, and often painful, process. Misaligned formats, missing attributes and inconsistent standards cause delays, errors and margin loss.

Modern PXM solutions include supplier data management capabilities, allowing suppliers to upload and enrich product information in a guided, consistent way. This speeds up onboarding and also ensures that every product meets your brand’s content standards before it ever reaches the digital shelf.

Ready for AI commerce

Looking further ahead, existing product experience insights should now be complemented by tools that can optimise product visibility across AI shopping assistants and Google Shopping, giving brands actionable insights to boost relevance, performance, and ROI.

New AI agents now dramatically accelerate product data modelling (from months to days) by automatically generating and evolving flexible, governable data models, while new features like AI-powered product enrichment, composable products and attribute type migration increase agility and control.

For brands, manufacturers, retailers and distributors looking to assess where they are on the path to product experience excellence, a self-assessment can be a useful first step. These tools offer a clear benchmark of current maturity, along with strategic and operational recommendations to move forward, whether you're just starting to centralise your product data or already deploying AI to optimise listings dynamically.

Today’s customers demand more because they have more choices. Retailers must therefore not simply meet but exceed their expectations , every time. And the only way to do that consistently, across every channel, is with a modern, AI-powered, centralised product experience strategy.

About Akeneo

Akeneo is the product experience (PX) company and global leader in Product Information Management (PIM); creating a world where every product interaction is an experience that guides consumers and professionals to the best purchase, anytime, anywhere. Akeneo empowers business leaders with software, education, and an engaged community all focused on the practice of product experience management.

Leading global brands, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers, including Chico's, CarParts.com, TaylorMade Golf, Rail Europe, Kering, and more trust Akeneo to scale and customise their omnichannel commerce initiatives. Using Akeneo's intelligent Product Cloud, companies can create elevated product experiences with user-friendly and AI-powered product data enrichment, management, syndication, and supplier data onboarding; as well as a comprehensive app marketplace and partner network to meet business and buyer needs. For more information: www.akeneo.com.