Improved data quality with Perfion Actions and AI

Data (good data) is a critical component of the customer journey your customers go through.

If valuable information is missing from your catalogs, webshops, and customer portals, your customers won’t have the best possible basis for making decisions, and you risk losing sales.

Some data is easier to onboard/enrich than others. Therefore, it’s also beneficial to map and prioritize your enrichment processes and identify where the low-hanging fruit is. Once you understand which data and processes are candidates for automation (typically tasks performed frequently and following the same logic), Perfion’s AI features and Actions offer a direct path to the goal — efficiency!

By using features like Actions and AI, you can cost-effectively improve the quality of your product data. In this newsletter, we’ll dive deeper into how you can streamline work with, for example, product descriptions and translations, saving valuable time.

Automation not only leads to time savings but also increases your ability to scale and helps reduce manual errors.

In this post, we explore how AI and Actions can contribute to improved data quality in Perfion.

AI - one of today’s hottest topics. Most of us have probably reached a saturation point when it comes to discussions about how artificial intelligence will create “disruptions” in our work lives.

The truly revolutionary AI breakthroughs are yet to come. However, we have by now figured out how AI - or “large language models” - can be used to automate and improve more routine tasks when it comes to creating the best customer journey for our clients.

When it comes to product data, there are plenty of areas where AI tools for text generation, translations, and automatic tagging can be easily implemented, resulting in significant time savings.

Do you operate in multiple markets and either own channels in several languages or provide data to trading partners who need translations? If so, it may be relevant to explore how AI tools can support your translation processes.

Imagine a company preparing to enter a new market; typically, there will be a task involving the translation of a number of product descriptions. With the new AI tools, tasks like translation have become easier to manage independently. For a PIM system like Perfion, language models from OpenAI can be incorporated directly in the grid as well as through a custom integration.

Machine translations themselves are not a new phenomenon. What truly distinguishes the new language models and AI tools is the way they allow users to provide “prompts” for what needs to be translated. With prompts (i.e., a set of commands or rules given to the machine intelligence performing the translation), we can guide and control the AI’s translation work rather than simply getting a literal, word-for-word translation of our text.

Take cultural differences across markets, segments, and nationalities into account

When looking at the cultural and linguistic differences between, for example, Denmark and the USA, it quickly becomes clear that tone, use of superlatives, and similar elements vary from market to market. The same applies to B2C and B2B segments, where many companies want differentiated communication across their various channels.

With the right prompt, you can get your AI translator to adjust tone, technical terms, and other factors critical to how the company’s products are presented and described. You could even have the AI translator create separate B2C and B2B versions of your text for use across different channels.

A good PIM system supports the workflows companies have in relation to, for example, their product data. This could include product creation, onboarding supplier data, translations, categorization, publishing data to the right channels, and much, much more.

Over time, most companies become skilled at identifying processes and process steps that could benefit from automation. By automating one or more steps in a process, the amount of manual work is reduced, while at the same time the risk of errors decreases — making automation a benefit most PIM system owners strive for.

In Perfion, one of the most accessible ways to automate your workflows is through the built-in feature “Actions.”

With Actions, it is possible to have Perfion perform automatic enrichment using small (or large) scripts built directly within the Perfion interface. This means there is no need for complex integrations or advanced software development.

An Action can, for example, help generate a .csv file containing a set of predefined data from Perfion — for instance, when data needs to be shared with trading partners or for internal reporting.

Actions can also help attach specific images to products if the products meet certain enrichment criteria.

For example, if we enrich a refrigerator with an energy label "A++," an Action can ensure that the "A++" label image stored in Perfion is automatically linked to the product. If we have 1,000 products using energy labels, we can save a lot of time by automating this kind of trivial enrichment — our Action takes care of it for us.

Most people recognize the benefit of improving data quality by reducing errors in the data. However, it is important to emphasize that automatic enrichment and enrichment carried out using AI tools usually cannot stand without a good validation flow.