Product Customization: Benefits, Examples, & Tips | #customersupport #supporticket

Imagine opening your Netflix account and seeing four independent Turkish television shows, an advertisement for a German horror movie, and three movies you’ve already seen, but didn’t really like. 

Not very helpful, right? Fortunately, Netflix has customized their product to offer personalized recommendations in a way that will please their users, and keep them coming back for more. The home screen shows the viewers content that is customized to their preferences, and the lists are tailored to pique their interest and show them what they are most likely to be interested in. 

Unfortunately, they haven’t come up with a way to get all the members of your family to agree on which movie to watch. 

Similarly, not all of your customers want the same thing or use your product the same way. Product customization is the key to catering to these different needs and serving your customer base in a meaningful and personalized way.

What is product customization?

Product customization refers to enabling customers to personalize a product according to their needs and preferences. Add ons, exclusive functionalities, templates, and flexibility with product design all count as different forms of personalization. 

Product personalization is an essential element in delivering tailored customer experiences to different segments of users. It is the key to driving customer loyalty and increasing customer satisfaction. Here’s a closer look at why you should be customizing your products for your customers.

4 ways customized products impact customer satisfaction

#1 Cater to different customers’ requirements

Regardless of whether you sell a physical product or online software, your customer base has different wants and needs.

Remembering that all of your customers are different, is critical to creating a product that is attractive to as many people as possible. As the old saying goes – if you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll appeal to no one.

80% of customers have grown to expect and desire personalized experiences. – McKinsey & Company

Millennials are particularly attracted to the idea of customization. In the book Custom Nation, Anthony Flynn and Emily Flynn Vencat explain that, “millennials (13 to 31-year-olds) have grown up with customization, and naturally expect it in every aspect of their lives.”

Instead of being just generally suitable for your clientele, you can customize your product to be specifically perfect to every different segment of users. 

Instead of being just generally suitable for your clientele, you can customize your product to be specifically perfect for every different segment of users.  

Brands such as Netflix and Function of Beauty have been developed around the idea of hyper-personalization, which makes it possible for everyone to get exactly what they want at the press of a button. 

#2 Gain loyal customers

Customization is a great business strategy because it makes customers happier, and happy customers are repeat customers.

According to a McKinsey study, successful personalization programs yield more engaged customers and drive up the top line. It results in positive experiences that have led to 20 percent higher customer-satisfaction rates and a 10 to 15 percent boost in sales conversion rates.

Customers who can customize their experience find value either through exclusivity in the form of a personalized, unique product, or specificity in the form of a feature that works in a way they would like.

#3 Understand your customers better

There’s no denying that customization is an expensive affair. It takes time and money to offer multiple versions of the same product. Your development team needs to dedicate resources to building out new customization options.

There’s also a higher risk factor, since more customization means more complexity. In retail, this might look like you are shipping the wrong customized product. In software, you might see bugs pop up as there are more and more different ways to use your product, that you may not have even thought of testing yet.

But by offering customization, you get answers to the most important questions: “who are my customers?” and “what do they really want?”

Customization can help you understand how your users use your product and what they expect from it. You can identify and add popular features currently offered as customization into the core product itself to boost customer satisfaction and retention. This information can also be helpful when you’re looking to revise your development or pricing strategy.

#4 Boost sales and business success

Allowing your customers to customize their products is a clever way to stand apart from the competition. After all, who knows what they need, better than the customer themselves?

When customers are satisfied with their personalized products, they are more likely to tell their friends and family about them. Your customers might also take to social media to share these positive experiences too. As a result of offering personalization, you get word-of-mouth marketing, a great, organic way to grow your business.

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of selling customized products, let’s get into how you can start offering customizations too.

How to offer product customization?

Deciding whether it’s worth adding more complexity to the product can be quite challenging. Instead of aiming to customize everything, look at who your users are, and what they want to be able to do. This will help identify the most important opportunities for customization.

Here are a few questions that can guide you:
– Is there sufficient demand for the kind of customization you’re considering?
– How much time and effort will it take to build and support this feature?
– What else will be impacted by this customization?
– Will the additional customization support or devalue your existing brand?

How to get started with product customization

#1 Create user personas

The first step to identifying potential customization opportunities is by understanding the different people who use your product. Creating user personas can help illustrate the different segments of your user base. According to the Interaction Design Foundation, user personas are: 

“Fictional characters that designers use, to reflect user types by pinpointing who they are and what they do with products in relevant contexts. Designers create personas from user data, to understand user characteristics, needs, and goals, and gain valuable insights into user journeys, and later, test prototypes.” 

There’s a lot of helpful information contained within a user persona. In particular, understanding needs, goals and user journeys will help showcase where your customers could be getting more value from your product, if it was slightly customized to their needs.

This could be as simple as the language they use for work, the jobs that need to get done, or their style preferences. For example, Netflix creates user personas to identify what each type of viewer wants out of their Netflix experience. This helps them pare down their enormous catalog of content to create a custom experience for every type of user.

In a B2B scenario, user personas can be especially handy for products that cater to a variety of stakeholders. Suppose the people purchasing the product, the people who use it every day, and the ones generating monthly reports, are all different people. In that case, user personas can show you what each type of stakeholder needs.

If you don’t allocate individual value to all types of users, it could lead to churn because the person paying the bills or making the decisions may not realize how helpful the product is to the frontline teams.

#2 Look into feature requests

The second way to find opportunities to enhance customer satisfaction through customization is to look at what customers are already asking to do.

Customization doesn’t add an entirely new workflow, it usually only modifies an existing feature. For example, if customers want to add a date range to an existing report, or would like to update a dashboard in a particular way, those are customization requests.

To understand what customers are asking for, look closely at your customer support tickets and feedback forum. Tagging incoming customer conversations with “feature-request” or “customization” can make it easier for product teams to pull reports based on what customers want.

The same applies to e-commerce businesses too – monitor feedback that your customers are sharing and offer personalization on top of that.

#3 Consider the customer journey

It’s not enough to personalize your product alone. You need to ensure that the customer has a unified experience pre and post purchasing the customized product.

Look for ways to offer customers a unique and personalized experience at each stage of their journey.

Research by Epsilon indicates 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.

When you understand the different stages of the buyer’s journey, you know the goals of the customer at each touchpoint. You can personalize each of these touchpoints to help customers achieve these goals.

Post-purchase, you need to focus on offering personalized customer service. You need to assist customers with context about the product the customer purchased, including the customizations they picked. The key is in picking a customer service software that offers information about the recent and past orders, transactions, and interactions.

You’ll get a better understanding of how to apply these different steps by going through the examples below.

Examples of product customization in B2C

#1 Customizable TV bezel by Samsung

Compared to the rest of a house, a TV always feels like it stands apart from its surroundings. But with Samsung’s new customizable bezel, TVs can fit right into the decor.

With this personalization, customers can now match their TVs to photo frames, curtains/wall color, or anything that suits their preferences.

#2 Customizable moon lamps by Art Galore

Art Galore, an online store selling customized products, offers customizations on top of a moon lamp (a lamp that looks like the moon and changes color). Art Galore allows customers to add text and photos of their choosing on a moon lamp, making it a perfect birthday/wedding gift.

This is a great example of standing out and offering a niche in a market that might seem like it’s unilateral.

Example of product customization in B2C

Multi-level customization by Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a customer service software for businesses of all sizes worldwide. Freshdesk enables you to customize processes, roles, number of licenses, and reports according to your unique business requirements. 

The cherry on top is that you can customize the look and feel of your agent portal. You get to bring your brand colors to your help desk and make your customer service team feel more at home. 

Product customization is the ultimate customer-focused experience

Take your online business and customer satisfaction to the next level by offering customizable products. However, instead of trying to make everything customizable, it’s important to be methodical about offering options to your users. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a product that’s overly confusing and complicated.

How do you go about customizing your products? Let us know in the comments below.