Master B2B’s Brian Beck recently sat down in a Fireside Chat with Jeff Reichert, Kimball Midwest’s Director of eCommerce & Digital Marketing, and Eli Cooley, President of Industrial Data Associates, to talk about how manufacturers and distributors can approach fixing their dirty product data.

Jeff talked about the 3 key data issues they struggled with:

Inconsistent Naming Conventions: Duplicate product titles and varied spellings lead to customer confusion. Jeff said, “We had thousands of products that had the same name….we had ‘one inch’ spelled out 11 different ways across our attributes. We lacked normalization and consistency.”

Null Search Terms: Kimball Midwest implemented a new search platform and during that process uncovered a host of product searches that returned no results.

Poor Customer Experience: Customer feedback revealed too many challenges in locating products on their website, enhancing the urgency to address these data problems.

How did they solve this?

1) They built a merchandising team when they hadn’t had one before so that there was a group responsible for owning product data.

2) Brought in a PIM solution. As part of this project, they re-thought their product taxonomy to move away from “being technically focused to being customer friendly…the way we defined things were not how our customers searched for them.”

3) Kimball Midwest added what they call “table views” to their product listing page (PLP). For example, they have 600+ flat head screws where the product image is the same. They’ve recently moved to a table view where someone would not have to scroll through dozens of pages of incredibly similar results to find the exact part they want. “You get enough of the product attributes in the table to make a decision whether to make the purchase.”

To hear more about how they addressed these very (very!) common data problems, watch the Fireside Chat.