Product customization: Benefits, examples, and tips

Imagine opening your Amazon and getting a car cleaning solution recommended (you don’t own a car). Or getting bombarded by fish food recommendations (you have a cat and a dog, but not a fish).

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

If you’ve ever ordered on Doordash or Uber Eats, you’ll know that if “chicken fried rice” is your base item, you can add a large number of customizations: make the bowl extra large, add momos, add a drink to the meal, and so on.

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 meaningfully and personally.

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 product customization. 

Product personalization is essential for delivering tailored customer experiences to different user segments. It is the key to driving customer loyalty and increasing customer satisfaction. Here’s a closer look at why you should customize your products for your customers.

4 ways customized products can drive customer satisfaction

Customization gives you a competitive edge, and ultimately, leads to brand loyalty. Let’s take a look at the benefits of product customization.

#1 Cater to different customers’ requirements

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

Remembering that all your customer needs are different is critical to creating a product that is attractive to as many people as possible.

About 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, “Millennials (Ages 13-31) have grown up with customization, and naturally expect it in every aspect of their lives.”

Instead of being generally suitable for your clientele, you can use a product configurator to customize your product to be perfect for every user segment. A product configurator is a solution that allows buyers to customize different aspects of the product or software they are buying.

Brands such as Netflix and Function of Beauty have been developed around the idea of hyper-personalization, which allows 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 become repeat customers.

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

Customers who can customize their experience using a product configurator 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 having a custom design is expensive. Offering product customization means your development/production team needs to dedicate resources to developing new customization options. It might even affect your profit margins.

Shipping a customized product has a higher risk factor since more customization means more complexity. If you’re customizing software, you might see bugs pop up, making it less user-friendly.

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—it makes customers think it’s their own product. After all, who knows what they need better than the customers themselves?

Customers who are satisfied with their personalized products are more likely to tell their friends and family about them. Your customers might also take to social media to share these positive experiences. Offering personalization results in 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 discuss 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 to understand 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.” 

A user persona contains a lot of helpful information. Understanding needs, goals, and user journeys will help showcase where your customers could be getting more value from your product if it were 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 catering to various stakeholders. Suppose a company sells data analytics software, and 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, the dashboard and data visualizations can be customized according to user personas, showing 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 other 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 for.

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 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 customers' wants.

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

#3 Consider the customer journey

Personalizing your product alone is not enough. You need to ensure that the customer has a unified experience before and after 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 that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.

When you understand the different stages of the buyer’s journey, you know the customer's goals at each touchpoint. You can personalize each touchpoint 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 they purchased, including the customizations they picked. The key is to pick customer service software that offers information about recent and past orders, transactions, and interactions.

You’ll better understand 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, home decor, or anything that suits their preferences.

#2 Customizable gifts on Etsy

Etsy, a global online store, offers mass customization—everything from t-shirts and mugs to keychains, crochet dolls, and more. Many gifts are print-on-demand offerings for different occasions, such as birthdays, anniversaries, graduation, etc.

Example of product customization in B2B

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. This allows you to bring your brand colors and fonts 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 an overly confusing and complicated product.