Product Catalog Management
Summarize
Summary of Product Catalog Management
Product Catalog Management helps your organization efficiently manage product offerings by organizing them into catalogs and categories. This structure simplifies the ordering process and supports managing leads, opportunities, quotes, and orders within Sales Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It provides a streamlined user interface for agents and customers to find and select products quickly, enhancing sales workflows and customer service.
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Key Features
- Product Catalog User Interface: Accessible within lead, opportunity, quote, and order workflows, featuring full catalog search functionality including AI Search with logical operators and type-ahead suggestions for quick product discovery.
- Catalog Category Hierarchy: Organizes products and services into hierarchical catalogs and categories, making navigation intuitive and logical.
- Version Control: Tracks changes to product information over time for transparency and auditing purposes.
- Product Offer Eligibility: Uses business rules and eligibility matrices to dynamically filter catalogs, categories, and offerings so agents sell only the products customers are eligible for, based on criteria like customer account, location, or contracts.
- Product Offer Bundling: Enables creation of bundled product offers with hierarchical relationships, linked to product specifications for complex offerings.
- Product Recommendations: Provides agents with automated product suggestions during lead generation, opportunity management, and quote updates, supporting upselling and cross-selling through needs analysis and recommendation guides.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Improves sales efficiency by enabling quick and accurate product selection throughout CRM processes.
- Ensures compliance and relevance of product offerings with eligibility filtering tailored to customer contexts.
- Supports audit and governance with version control of product data.
- Enhances customer experience through AI-powered search and personalized product recommendations.
- Facilitates complex product offerings via bundling and configurable options, accommodating diverse business needs.
Additional Considerations
Access to these features depends on your entitlements. Starting with the Yokohama release, the Business Portal integrates with Order Management to allow order creation using the product catalog and configurator, supporting self-service ordering. For setup details, consult configuration guides on product eligibility, offering catalogs, AI Search, needs analysis, and product recommendations.
Product Catalog Management enables your organization to manage your product offerings by grouping them into catalogs and categories, which streamlines the ordering process and helps manage leads, opportunities, quotes, and orders in Sales Customer Relationship Management.
- Product catalog user interface: Launch from anywhere in lead, opportunity, quote, and order capture workflows, enabling agents to browse and find products quickly with a full catalog search function.
- Catalog category hierarchy: Use hierarchical structures of catalogs and categories to organize products and services logically.
- Version control: Track changes made to product information over time, helping with transparency and auditability.
- Product offer eligibility: Filter your product catalogs, product offering categories, and product offerings so that agents sell customers only the products for which they’re eligible. To learn more about setting up product eligibility, see Configuring product offer eligibility.
To learn more about setting up product offering catalogs, see Configuring product offerings and catalogs.
Product catalog UI
The product offering catalog enables users to review product offers that are organized by catalog category hierarchy, which streamlines catalog navigation. Users can browse and search offerings by using keywords, descriptions, and industry codes.
Starting with Product Catalog Management v. 17.0.0, agents and customers can use AI Search queries in the product catalog interface to find relevant product offerings quickly, using more then keyword searches. AI Search supports logical operators and wild-card characters in queries and provides type-ahead search suggestions. For more information on setting up this feature, see Configuring AI Search for the product catalog.
Product offering catalogs and categories
- Product offering catalog: Hierarchical product offering structures of categories and product offerings.
- Product offering categories: Categories are a logical grouping of product offerings.
- Product offerings: Physical goods or non-tangible services that are configurable.
- Characteristic and Characteristic options: Product options that are created based on customer preferences.
Product offer bundling
You can create product offer bundles with an offer hierarchy using product offer relationships and relationship groups. These bundle offers can have references to a product specification or specification hierarchy at any level in the bundle. For more information, see Product offer bundling with product specifications.
Product offer eligibility
As a product catalog admin or manager, you can use business rules to filter the product catalog, product offering categories, and product offerings dynamically, displaying only the appropriate catalog, categories, and offerings for which a customer is eligible. These rules enable your sales agents to sell the correct products to customers based on context, such as specific customer accounts, customer location, sales contracts, and more. You define these rules using product eligibility matrices. To learn more about using the product eligibility matrices, see Configuring product offer eligibility.
Product recommendations
- Product recommendations using needs analysis - When your sales agents are generating leads and opportunities, they can use product selection guides to help determine relevant products for their customers. For information on setting up needs analysis, including the product selection guides, see Configuring needs analysis. For details on how your agents can get product recommendations for leads and opportunities, see Get product recommendations for leads using needs analysis and Get product recommendations for opportunities using needs analysis.
- Product offering recommendations for quotes - When your sales agents are updating quotes, they can get product recommendations for upselling or cross-selling additional products for existing quote line items. For information on setting up these recommendations, see Configuring product offering recommendations. For details on how product offering recommendations work in quotes, see Using product offering recommendations in quotes.