Discover how listening to customer feedback, leveraging AI, and optimizing product information can drive sales and engagement. Learn practical strategies from top brands on using PIM, AI, and search data to refine product content, improve discoverability, and create seamless shopping experiences.
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If you had the chance to hear exactly what your customers think about your products, wouldn’t you take it?
At NRF 2025, Akeneo’s Chief Strategy Officer, Kristin Naragon, joined industry leaders Carl Ogden from Leatherman Tool Group and Piet Walvoord from a leading gifting company to tackle this very question in our Big Ideas session: Your Customers Are Talking, Are You Listening?
The big takeaway? Brands that truly listen by tapping into customer reviews, search terms, and real-world product usage can create richer and more accurate product experiences that boost sales and reduce returns.
And the best part? It doesn’t take a massive overhaul to get started.
Before you can leverage customer insights, you need a rock-solid foundation: a centralized source of truth for product data.
Why? Because when your product descriptions, categories, and attributes are inconsistent across channels, it creates confusion - and confused customers don’t buy.
A Product Information Management (PIM) system ensures your product data is accurate, complete, and consistent across all channels, which not only reduces manual errors and eliminates duplicate efforts but also provides a single source of truth for your entire organization. With a PIM in place, teams can easily access, update, and enrich product data, making it more actionable for sales, marketing, and customer support teams. (And PS: If you choose to go with Akeneo PIM, you can also easily integrate customer feedback with actual product attributes, helping you identify patterns in reviews and address common concerns - but more on this later.)
Customers don’t always describe products the same way brands do - maybe they come to your site searching for ‘blue dress’, but all your products are tagged as ‘Navy’, ‘#BL’, or even #0000FF, so nothing they’re looking for shows up. Standardizing attributes, descriptions, and specifications across all channels helps ensure clarity and consistency.
Product data isn’t just for eCommerce teams - it affects marketing, sales, customer service, and even logistics. When different departments work with outdated or inconsistent product information, it leads to confusion and miscommunication. By managing product data in a centralized PIM, businesses ensure that every team has access to up-to-date information.
If you don’t know your own products well, there’s no way you can sell them well.
Here’s the cool thing with user-generated reviews and product search behavior - if you pay attention, customers aren’t just buying your products but are telling you exactly how they see them, how they use them, and what they wish they could do with them. The real question is: Are you listening? Too many brands ignore these golden insights, missing out on opportunities to refine their messaging.
Customer reviews reveal not only what buyers think about your products but also how they actually use them. For a tools company like Leatherman, this means understanding whether customers are searching for tools based on where they plan to use them (home, work, or outdoors), or for specific activities like camping or everyday carry. By capturing this data and feeding it into Akeneo PIM, Leatherman builds SEO keywords and metadata that can be syndicated across eCommerce platforms, ensuring that products align with customer needs.
Customers use real-world language, which may be different from technical specifications or marketing copy. If you can analyze search data across paid search, organic search, and AI-driven search engines to capture customer intent, whether they are searching based on occasion, recipient, or a specific theme, you can capture these insights and feed them back into product data, making products more relevant and easier to find.
Are customers interacting with the products you expect? Observing how customers browse, search, and interact with products provides key insights into their goals. For example, a leading gifting company collects data from checkout questions, entry points, and on-site interactions to enhance product visibility and ensure the right product is surfaced for the right occasion. By managing this content in one central location, 1-800 Flowers can ensure proper workflows, data quality, and market-specific adjustments, making product information more aligned with customer behavior.
You’ve gathered all these insights, but manually analyzing thousands of reviews and search terms? That’s a full-time job. Now here’s where things get exciting. Enter Akeneo’s PX Insights, a game-changer that turns raw customer feedback into actionable data without the extra workload.
Manually analyzing thousands of customer reviews and feedback points isn’t practical, but Artificial Intelligence (AI) can instantly detect patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. PX Insights identifies common themes in real customer reviews, whether it’s recurring complaints, praise for specific features, or emerging use cases, allowing brands to improve messaging and enhance product descriptions based on real data. Through this, you’ll gain a clear picture of what your customers truly think and how to improve your products or services.
PX Insights surfaces the most impactful keywords and phrases customers are actually using in their searches and reviews, helping brands improve SEO rankings and fine-tune product descriptions. Whether it’s matching product terminology to real customer search queries or refining titles for AI-driven search engines, AI-powered insights ensure product content is designed to be found. It's like giving your products a megaphone in the noisy marketplace of the internet!
Where should a product be featured? What collections should it be part of? Which keywords should be emphasized in marketing campaigns? Instead of relying on assumptions, PX Insights helps merchandising teams place products where they’ll get the most engagement and conversions. By analyzing search trends and customer behavior, brands can position their products more strategically across multiple channels.
When it comes to AI, product information is one of the best places to invest—it’s your data, you own it, and you can see real, measurable returns.
Gone are the days of static, set-and-forget product descriptions. The best brands treat product information as dynamic, always evolving based on customer insights. As Kristin Naragon puts it, “Make it a living, breathing, dynamic, voice-of-the-customer-infused product record.”
The way customers talk about and search for products evolves over time—so your product information should evolve, too. By continuously refining descriptions based on customer insights, brands can ensure their content stays relevant, engaging, and optimized for search.
Not all product messaging resonates equally with every audience. By tracking search and sales data, brands can experiment with different product descriptions, benefits, and positioning to see what drives the highest engagement. Refining descriptions based on real data and not assumptions ensures your product speaks directly to customer needs and expectations.
With the implementation of AI tools and the right foundation of product data, brands can automate the process of refining product descriptions by analyzing large volumes of customer reviews and search trends and surfacing opportunities to enhance product content in real time. Whether it’s identifying product use cases for unexpected markets or uncovering overlooked customer concerns, AI ensures that product descriptions are always evolving to meet customer needs.
By listening to customers, leveraging AI, and continuously refining product content, brands can create a more engaging, customer-centric experience that turns browsers into buyers and buyers into loyal customers. Whether through optimized product descriptions, smarter search strategies, or AI-driven interactions, the key is to stay adaptable. When product information evolves with customer insights, brands don’t just keep up - they lead.
Your customers are already talking. Want to know what they’re saying? Learn more about how Akeneo can help.
Our Akeneo Experts are here to answer all the questions you might have about our products and help you to move forward on your PX journey.
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