In 80s, manufacturing industry started with the concept of customized products offering to its customers. For many years the concept was limited to business-to-business models, only after the internet boom in late 90s, it picked up in other industries, and started to be famous as product customization or mass customization.
Product customization is a concept whereby customers are able to design what-they-want-to-buy, rather than choosing one of the available product’s offering. Technology plays a crucial role in enabling customers as product designers, similar to many other cases, where customers have taken up organizational roles in form of being marketer, customer service agents to peers.
In my view point, product customization is different from personalization. Personalization is an experience of personalized information & service, either in an interactive mode or customer being passive. While product customization is producing a tangible product with uniquely defined features by a customer. Leading brands like Dell, HP, Levis, Sears, adidas, Nike have been harvesting on the product customization concept for almost a decade now.
What are the underlying challenges and how organizations are handling them?
From customer’s view point typical challenges are “Do I understand the product?”, “How can I easily make what I want?”, “How will it look like?”, “Will I get what I exactly want?”
In brick & mortar scenario, sales representatives are able to provide required information about the product features and help customers design products, while in online scenarios, it becomes extremely difficult for customers to be able to understand complex features of simple-looking-product, and configure what-they-want. Online help works, but not to an extent, which will make customer feel confidents spending money on something, they may not have fully understood.
After designing the product, customers want to visualize the product in order to know how it will look like. There are many challenges in terms of making customer visualize & feel the product. For example in apparel industry, customers would like to visualize something similar to what it looks in a mirror, and not a stand alone customized product. There are various technical innovations in last couple of years in form of creating virtual mirrors, online virtual models, 3D models based on rich internet technologies.
Providing easy-to-understand product descriptions, easy to plug-and-play product features, and see in real time on what-it-looks-n-feels-like are most important success measures for a good customer experience in product customization scenario.
From organizations’ perspective, there are two fold challenges. ONE – Adapting “made-for-mass-production” supply chain & production systems to be able to manufacture customized products on near mass production efficiency. TWO – for meeting customers’ expectations on accurate fit & comfort, lead time expectations on “I-want-it-now” and return handling.
Organization are needing to adapt the supply chain to be able to fast track customized product information to factories, and change the production processes to support customized production. The key is to achieve a mass-production like efficiency & quality at a near mass-production-cost. It becomes extremely important to model products with the right choices and rules, not to overburden the supply chain and production systems but still able to meet customers’ expectations on configuration choices.
Technologies like Virtual Fitting Room from Intellifit System, being used in Levis stores for measuring exact fit for a customized Jeans, are steps in right direction. There are many other technologies for foot scan & pressure measurement for footwear industry.
On lead time expectations front: it used to take weeks-to-month time to get customized product delivered to customers. But in last few years, technology has been fast evolving to provide instant production capabilities to organizations. Direct to garment printing, 3 D printing, Cut & sew construction technologies are few examples, which organizations like Zazzle, Spreadshirt, Spoonflower are using to provide within-hours customized product delivery to customers.
What’s next?
Organizations need to integrate web2.0 concepts like online chat, online community, with product configurator to be able to provide instant information about product features, and guide customers similar to brick & stores sales agents. Rich internet technical innovations, especially in 3D technologies, will take customers’ experience to the next level.
Companies like Zazzle, Spreadshirt, Cafepress are taking the product customization concept to a new level, where the customers are not only designing the products, but marketing the best design, and creating new markets. Organizations have started taking advantage of the product configurator to find on the best selling designs directly from customers, and feeding it back to product innovation groups.
Technical innovation will continue driving customers closer to production systems, and empower customers to exactly buy what they want to buy, instead of choosing one from the available ranges.
It will be quite interesting to watch product customization evolve to the new level with fast changing technology landscape.