Case Study

Industrial Supplier Enhances Category Shopability by Optimizing Product Data

 

 

Challenge

A small financial services investment advisor firm grew rapidly driven by a “we can do anything” entrepreneurial culture.  As a result, the company evolved with a significant lack of disciplined data and content management processes or technology infrastructure.  Individualized Excel spreadsheets had run amuck.  Siloed and loosely defined information processes and organizational roles and responsibilities created confusion, redundant and inefficient execution, with uncertain information accuracy, consistency, and quality.  This left the company exposed for substantive risk from a lack of accountability and traceability of information assets.  Valuable information of an unstructured nature from 3rd party financial content sources was not being extracted and made available for greater leverage across the organization.   There was no master data management practices or centralized repository for shared information and data access.  A lack of proper technology solutions to support the business and a misuse of existing technology was limiting the way that the organization could store, process and make data sources available. 

The company knew that it was in trouble but did not know where to begin.

Solution

Earley Information Science (EIS) collaborated with the client to plan and prepare for production design, review and revision of over 1000 categories of dynamic digital catalog table views. Our team performed competitive analysis, customer behavior metrics, and evaluation of available product attributes for optimization. This approach allowed the company to select the attributes that would allow its customers to identify the products they wanted based on the features that were most important to them.

 

Results

Attributes that clearly differentiated products were chosen for complex categories, and a dynamic table was developed to display them. These new gallery page layouts give shoppers an “at-a-glance” view across the most important characteristics for making purchase decisions. Category-specific dynamic table view schemas were applied to 80% of the online catalog. This new way of presenting information improved the customer experience by providing a way for shoppers to be more confident about their decisions and reducing “research fatigue.”

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