Using a product configurator allows your business to meet customers’ needs effectively. It ensures that orders are received with 100% accurate Bill-of-Material and other relevant data while providing an engaging experience for your customers.
It helps cut lead times for manufacturers and buyers, eliminating the need to manually request information from sales representatives. It also gives your customers a better experience and eases the burden on your sales crew.
Table of Contents
Increased Customer Satisfaction
When your customer has designed their product, they are more likely to be satisfied with the purchase. They will take ownership of it and feel pride in its design. It will be their product, and they’ll want to show it off to their friends. Customer loyalty and brand advocacy can boost sales volume and profit margins.
Customers will also be less prone to returning products, costing businesses up to 66% of the original price. By offering 3D and AR visualization tools, customers will see how the final product will look and clearly understand what they’re purchasing.
Moreover, many configurators feature cost estimation, or quoting, tools that allow users to accurately calculate their customized product’s total costs before making the final purchase. Thanks to this, they can plan their budget and make well-informed purchases. In addition, these tools help minimize order processing time as well. As a result, your sales force will have more time to devote to developing trusting connections with clients rather than responding to inquiries, obtaining more technical materials, and updating quotes.
Reduced Risk of Human Error
A product configurator provides rules-based guidance to prevent illogical or incompatible selections. It also ensures valid configurations through several other protocols, including comparison with design requirements and the ability to create CAD documentation of a configured product. These features reduce the strain on sales teams and eliminate errors in quoting and manufacturing.
A parametric product configurator is ideal for manufacturers selling complex, build-to-order products. It allows customers to point-and-click or drag-and-drop in three dimensions to assemble the product of their choice. They can express their creativity via their designs, which will help them feel more invested in the outcome.
Buyers can also see the impact of their selected options on the final product in real time through dynamic visualization, eliminating miscommunication and ensuring that their expectations are met. These capabilities significantly reduce the back-and-forth between buyers, sales teams, and engineering departments, saving resources that could be better spent on other business-critical activities. Frequent reworks are costly because they require equipment, materials, and labor.
Simplified Sales Process
Most product configurators include visualization tools, which help customers create their designs in real-time. This helps build a connection with the brand and fosters a sense of ownership and pride in the result. Customer loyalty and satisfaction follow from this.
The software also verifies configurations by comparing rule-based protocols against design requirements. This reduces manufacturing delays and eliminates the need for sales representatives to verify the accuracy of orders manually.
Furthermore, using a product configurator allows businesses to maintain smaller inventories. This is because products are created as ordered, so there is no need to stock many variations.
Lastly, it’s important to note that product configurators also help reduce lead times by automating the quote-to-production process. This means fewer errors and faster responses are possible, benefiting the business and its customers. This is particularly helpful for manufacturers that deal with complex products, as their teams often need to pass queries on to engineering teams.
Increased Efficiency
Product configurators create a personalized shopping experience for customers. This allows them to connect with the product deeper, creating a feeling of ownership and satisfaction.
Using configurators also helps streamline the sales process and reduces errors. As the configurator is pre-configured with established criteria, it will automatically disallow incorrect entries – eliminating mistakes that lead to order returns.
Many configurators also offer cost estimation (or quoting) tools, helping customers understand how much their custom product will cost before purchasing. This ensures they get the best price possible and a better purchasing experience.
Configurators can also help businesses manage inventory more efficiently. By only producing products once ordered, companies can save resources on storing extensive inventories of variants that may never be sold. This helps them improve efficiency and build long-term customer loyalty.
Reduced Product Development Costs
Using top-tier visualization tools to capture client input helps guarantee accuracy and minimizes reworks. Frequent reworks require costly equipment, materials, and labor that can significantly inflate manufacturing costs. Moreover, it can waste time that could have been used for other projects.
Providing clients the opportunity to design products they will buy creates a sense of ownership and pride. It also fosters a sense of loyalty for customers and boosts customer satisfaction. Product configurators enable businesses to offer personalized options and customize the creation process for each client, reducing production times and costs.
In addition, product configuration systems automate the quote-to-production process. They record all the order details a sales representative enters and then verify them based on established criteria. This eliminates the need for back and forth between sales and engineering. Once a sale is approved, the order is sent directly to the production team. This helps reduce the returns that might otherwise affect the company’s bottom line. This is especially true when it comes to custom products.
