It’s 2024, and automation is taking the business world by storm! Businesses are happy to use automation in different areas because it makes their life simpler. It saves time, cost, and effort so that entrepreneurs and their teams can focus on the aspects they are most skilled at.
An area that businesses have to focus a lot on is creating product catalogs. It’s an essential tool for capturing a customer’s attention and informing them about your products and services. The more attractive and value-adding it is, the better the sales. A lot of time is invested in designing product catalogs. With catalog automation, you can automate and simplify the preparation of catalogs using specialized software tools.
What Is Catalog Automation?
In simple words, catalog automation means automating the process of creating product catalogs. Software tools for cataloging automation are designed to help you create attractive catalogs using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation. These tools help source product data, enhance product images, and generate customized content for your catalogs.
Catalog automation has several benefits for your business. These tools help you create engaging catalogs faster without affecting the quality. Your employees can delegate the repetitive work to these tools and focus on more productive work. You can create catalogs at a lower cost, as these tools save time and are quite affordable.
But it’s definitely not all sunshine and roses! You must be prepared to face some challenges during the implementation phase, as it’s a big change for your business. Let’s take a look at the 5 biggest automation challenges you might face in this journey.
5 Challenges You May Face While Implementing Product Catalog Automation
Resistance from Your Team
If not tackled skillfully, this will become one of the biggest automation challenges. According to a survey of 31,000 workers, 49% of workers fear that AI is going to steal their jobs. News articles and social media posts have created a lot of fear in people’s minds about Artificial Intelligence and automation. Due to this, your employees may resist this change of moving towards product catalog automation. They may not take interest in the training, may not show enough enthusiasm, or may stick to their older ways of working.
As their leader, you must explain to them that the automation has been implemented for their benefit and not to replace them. Keep these five tips in mind to overcome this challenge.
- Explain the benefits of catalog automation on their work. For example, explain how they will be able to get more work done in less time.
- Encourage them to try the new software before forming a negative opinion.
- Ask for their suggestions and take note of the valuable ones.
- Implement the software slowly to give them time to cope with the change.
Finding the Right Software
Every business has unique goals and needs for its catalogs. Developing your own tool is quite expensive, so looking for the perfect packaged AI tool is the best bet for most businesses. Finding the right software tool can be quite challenging, especially for offbeat or unconventional businesses. Due to the hundreds of options available in the market, it has become difficult to choose the best one. And if you make the wrong choice, the quality of the catalog may not match your expectations.
If you wish to pick the right software for your business:
- Read all features carefully and make sure that they align with your goals.
- Talk to the software company’s customer support team to understand the product better.
- Enquire if you can enroll for a demo of the software before purchasing it.
- Check if you can have a free trial for a short period.
Ensuring Accuracy
A prospective customer uses your product catalog as a reference before making a decision about your products. Businesses have to be very careful about the information and claims in their catalogs. The information has to be factually correct, and the claims have to be valid.
When you automate the process of designing your catalogs, you must make sure that the accuracy of the information is maintained. The challenge is to choose software that can be trusted to use accurate information. A good idea would be to design a system where the accuracy of the information is checked by an employee.
Maintaining Brand Consistency
The design, look, feel, and content of your catalog have to be consistent with your brand. When a person designs the catalog, they are familiar with what your brand represents. When you use automation, you have to take extra care to ensure that brand consistency is maintained throughout the catalog. Here are some tips to tackle this automation challenge:
- Find software that has features to create customized designs
- Tweak the designs created by AI to give them a personalized touch.
- Review the designs created by the AI tool to ensure brand consistency.
Updating the Catalogs Periodically
You will need to update your product catalogs whenever your business adds products, discontinues products or modifies them. You will need to make sure that the information in the catalog is updated as you change your products.
When you use automation, it can be difficult to keep track of whether appropriate changes have been made to the catalogs. You need to train your employees about providing updated data sources to the AI tool and get the changes done periodically.
Wrapping Up
Despite the automation challenges mentioned above, you can implement them in your business. Discuss these possible challenges with your team in advance and come up with creative solutions for them. The starting point is to study the available software solutions in the market and pick the best one for your business.
The Cataloging Automation tool by Rubick.ai is a great way to start your journey. The tool is designed to help you with data sourcing, image recognition, content generation, template mapping, and so on. Once you enter the data, the AI algorithms will do the rest of the work to generate the required information.
Save your time, money, and effort by choosing catalog automation for your business!
