Selling products on a digital platform has become more than displaying a photo of the product along with its interpretation today. The global retail space is getting competitive day by day and formulating a plan to stand out from the crowd has become essential. Technology is at the crux of surviving this wave of change. Artificial Intelligence has been throwing a life jacket to businesses in the period of the industrial revolution for quite some time now. 3D product visualization and configuration is helping businesses to not just stay afloat but make a splash with their existence in the retail market and how!
What is a product configurator?
A product configurator is a tool that helps the customers of a business choose products by customizing different components digitally to make the desired purchase. A product configurator is a digital experience platform(DXP) that contributes to processes like development, management, optimization, and delivery across the entire customer lifetime journey. A DXP offers valuable digital experiences to business employees, consumers and partners.
Let’s go through a use case to know more about how it works. Royal Furniture has a product configurator deployed to not just showcase the product catalogue to its customers but also allow them to customize the products according to their convenience or liking digitally.
This product configurator has a 3D Truview option for customers to view the product from every angle and then customize each product based on their preference. Let’s pick one product and see how this configurator works. A corner sofa is the most common type of furniture found in almost every living room. Selecting this piece of furniture would require the customer to visit the shop, go through the design and size options, imagine the material of the cloth used, and how the desired colour looks on the sofa from a catalogue displayed by the brand. This situation would create confusion with the customer not knowing what the colour and the fabric would actually materialize into when they see the final product in front of their eyes. The product configurator would jump right in, in this scenario to help customers actually see what each aspect of the sofa would look like, including the fabric and the colour immediately with access at their fingertips to get the desired product home delivered.
This product configurator allows the user to add and delete the components of this sofa to create a product based on their needs when it comes to the design and size.
Sofa fabric can be changed from the available options to see what the color and the material would look like in reality before the purchase.
This product configurator provides a complete 360° view of the sofa along with an option to check dimensions, rotate, zoom in, zoom out and flip. This approach not only facilitates an easy hack to the normal procedure of visiting the store but also provides benefits the digital world has to offer like time and location convenience and entertainment. This product configurator is user-friendly and comes equipped with easy navigation for a regular customer as well as a new visitor.
Royal Furniture features on the list of DaveAI’s product visualizer and configurator clients. DaveAI helps end-users of a business take a virtual tour, configure & visualize products to make a real-time purchase.
Did you know?
A 360° spin ranks 1st amongst all the visual demonstrations available on digital retail platforms today.
Benefits of deploying a product configurator for businesses:
Buying items on virtual platforms has become a perpetual habit lately. Having a strong digital presence has become a necessity for a business in every industry nowadays as people like to have options for channels and to buy according to their convenience. With technology going places only to take the experience to the next level, providing the accuracy of in-store shopping digitally has become as easy as pie. A product configurator is one such strategy that serves as a medium between the business and a consumer to provide a seamless digital commerce experience. Product configurators are helpful for a business in the following ways:
1. Designing and building a product after understanding the exact customer requirements during the designing process itself can save resources required to rectify the product if the customer requests a change.
2. Displaying product components in less amount of time as compared to the in-store process of making different items available to showcase and providing quotes can make the item go into production sooner. With a product configurator, a product reaches the customer’s doorstep on time, saving the hassles of delayed delivery.
3. Accurate and timely information on the queries the production team has, helps reduce the chance of manual errors leading to satisfied customers.
4. The availability of options to select from for a particular product and its components helps customers customize the products making the selection process easy, quick, and fun, leading to happy customers who come back for more.
5. A product configurator helps the customer plan the product with components that are available or going to be in stock soon. If a particular item is not available, stock won’t be arriving anytime soon or the sale of a particular product has been shut then the customers are notified about it, saving time and displeasure.
6. Data Analysis and data management helps businesses identify customer behavior and patterns to provide desired outcomes to them, come up with new trends and stay in tune with the needs of the market.
7. A product configurator also helps the sales and marketing department to have direct communication with the customers, target customers with the right content, stock and prices and make the experience entertaining. This helps businesses retain existing clients, gain new customers, and enhance revenue.
8. A product configurator would allow the services of a business to be available 24/7 and on holidays, giving the business a chance to sell more, make use of special occasions like festivals where the shop has to be kept shut but is a time where people buy more, leading to an increase in sales.
Bottom Line
A product configurator proves beneficial to the customer and the business in every process. By bridging the gap between what the client wants and what the business comprehends, the product configurator simplifies the process of reciprocation on both ends, strengthening the business-client relationship. The ultimate goal of a business is to provide a seamless customer experience and gain customer loyalty to boost revenue. An enhanced customer engagement does just that and makes sure everyone involved in the process enjoys every ‘byte’ of that benefit technology has to offer.
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