Your product pages have a new reader
Your content person spent Tuesday afternoon picking a photograph. She compared two shots of the same product, chose the warmer one, wrote forty words of copy underneath it, and moved on. That afternoon, a customer asked an assistant on her phone which supplier could deliver this part before Friday. The assistant never loaded the page. It read the data behind it, found no delivery time, and recommended someone else.
Nobody in the company noticed. There was no bounce to look at, no complaint, no lost cart. The customer was answered somewhere else, by something that had already decided your warm photograph was beside the point.
From author to source
The interface stopped being a place you build and became something that assembles itself per question. For your content person, that is the whole change in one line. She used to write the page a customer would see. Now she writes the material an agent uses to compose an answer she will never look at.
That makes her job narrower and more important at the same time. Less layout, more substance. Fewer adjectives, more facts that hold up when a machine checks them against three competitors in the same second.
The human interface rewarded the look of quality; the agent rewards whether the thing is actually true.
A brand a machine can read
Most companies have a brand team of thirty and a team for structured data of nobody. In a smaller company the numbers are different and the gap is the same: someone owns the tone of voice, and nobody owns the delivery times, the dimensions, the warranty terms, the stock position in a form a machine can use.
Give that second job to her. She already knows what the product is. What she needs is the discipline of writing it down in fields instead of sentences:
- what it is, in terms a buyer uses
- what it costs, including the conditions
- when it arrives, by postcode if you can
- what happens when it breaks
- who you are, and what you refuse to do
Three standards and three disciplines
The plumbing is being standardised for you, and there are three pieces of it. One connects agents to tools and data. One connects agents to each other. One connects agents to the people using them. Your content person does not have to build any of that. She has to make sure there is something worth connecting to.
The book names three new disciplines on top of that plumbing: a machine readable brand, the agentic journey, and the generative interface. The first one is hers from Monday. The other two arrive once the first one exists.
How much control you hand over
Control runs along a spectrum with three settings, and you choose per question. Controlled means you wrote the answer and the agent repeats it. Declarative means you wrote the rules and the agent composes within them. Open means the agent decides and you watch what it does.
Price, warranty and safety stay controlled. Product explanation and comparison can go declarative. Keep open for the questions where being wrong costs you nothing.
Her new skill is placing each topic on that line and writing down why.
What you do on Monday
- Ask your content person to take your ten best selling products and write the facts as fields, not as copy.
- Put delivery time and return conditions in that list, by postcode if your system knows it.
- Pick three questions customers ask most and decide for each one: controlled, declarative, or open.
- Give one person the title for structured data, even at four hours a week.
- Test it yourself: ask an assistant on your phone what you sell, and read the answer out loud in the team meeting.
The step after this is mapping where in the customer journey an agent answers on your behalf, and what it needs from you at each of those points. The Agentic Journey Map takes you through that in an afternoon with the people you already have. Bekijk de materialen