In recent years, the interest in product configurators has increased rapidly. No wonder, because the success of the entire project stands or falls with the customer preferences and satisfaction. Anyone who thinks in a customer-oriented and sales-oriented way will certainly already have dealt with the advantages of configurators. But what do you have to consider when you want to create a configurator? We have analyzed frequently recurring challenges and requirements. From our point of view, there are 5 decisive, cross-industry success factors when creating a product configurator. Tip 1: Define your target audience Before you start thinking about the process and usage of the configurator, you need to collect as much information as possible about your customers. Information and user data is key when defining the configurator process, because your customers are going to use the configurator the most. Sure, you may attract new customers, and that is a good thing. But you are designing the configurator for your target audience in the first place. A useful approach is to create user personas. User personas are complete descriptions of your customers. Think about age, gender, profession, position and even buying habits. The more information, the better your configurator process is going to be. Because you want to user experience to be as optimal as possible, so therefore you have to be as specific as possible. Creating personas and mapping out customer journeys has become the core of all web and branding projects. If you haven’t implemented it already, you should definitely start trying it out!
Tip 2: Start small. Stay flexible Product configurator can become very complex at times, so we advise to start small and stay lean. A lot of time is often spent in the concept phase, incorporating all possible configuration options. But you can also use that valuable time monitoring your customers’ behaviour when using the newly implemented product configurator(s). Using this approach you can immediately start optimizing the configurator to the users needs based on their behaviour, and add new features along the way. Always bear in mind the danger of information overload. Do not overwhelm your customers with tons of options, because often they will get overwhelmed and choose nothing at all. Another interesting statistic is that a lot of pre-defined features are not being removed, even though the users don’t necessarily use it. So you can better implement new options along the way than keeping unwanted options in the configurator. That only leads to confusion, overwhelming amount of options and a significant decrease is sales and revenue. Tip 3: Try rapid prototyping when you are not sure During the concept phase it may not be clear which process navigation, pricing strategy or design strategy is best. But this should not be a reason to not launch the configurator! Instead, try rapid prototyping and A/B testing to see what suits your customers best. And what strategy leads to the most conversions and sales. In A/B testing, you analyse the behavior of subjects using a prototype. It provides good insights in which variant is preferred rather quickly. The results are objective and offer a high degree of statistical certainty.
Tip 4: Do not overestimate your brand or product Never overestimate your brand or product! Sure, your company might be well-known and well-established. But when a small competitor performs much better, it might outperform you before you even know it! So always make the customers aware of the benefits of product customization and stay ahead of the competition! Don’t expect anyone to use our configurator to buy a single product, just because you offer it. They can purchase the product on a bunch of other platforms too. When you start out on your configurator project, it is very important to develop a sustainable marketing strategy specifically tailored to the target audience. Don’t try to target everyone, because often products are not used by everyone. That is why defining the target audience is so important! Configurator projects often fail only because the new, expanded target audience would simply not convert (i.e. purchase the product). Also, make sure the configurator does not end up at the lowest level of your website! Make it visible to the user. Because the customer won’t use what they don’t see. And they scan websites very quickly nowadays. So make sure they don’t miss out on it. Tip 5: Keep monitoring and improving When you have successfully launched your product configurator, you can easily start thinking you ‘have done it’. But don’t forget that you are in a rapidly changing market. What works today might not be working tomorrow. So always stay curious and analyse your user data and website and/or webshop traffic. That helps you interpret anomalies and anticipate quickly on new customer demands. Not only your own company’s statistics are relevant. Your competitors and even the market as a whole provides insight in the market trends and differentiation opportunities.