Give Customers a Better Online Experience with 1 Tool: The Interactive Product Catalog with 3D CAD Model Downloads

To Survive in Today’s Increasingly Competitive Landscape, Manufacturers Must Embrace the Digital Revolution and Create an Exceptional Customer Experience Around It.

Forget everything you thought you knew about your customers. They are not the same customers you sold to years ago.

Today’s industrial customers are armed with more information, more purchasing power and higher expectations for customer service — and it’s all thanks to the digital revolution.

Customer experience is “the new competitive battlefield,” according to Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory company. While customer satisfaction has always been important for manufacturers, delivering a great customer experience has evolved into a new sphere: digital.

Right now, most engineers say they complete 60% of their buying journey online, according to IEEE GlobalSpec. Business experts Gartner and Forrester predict that percentage to increase to 80% by 2020.

Industrial manufacturers must embrace the digital revolution in order to survive in today’s competitive landscape. And, you must create an exceptional digital customer experience around it. There’s no better tool out there that can deliver on both needs than a digital product catalog with 3D CAD model downloads.

What’s an interactive product catalog have to do with customer satisfaction and sales? Get the answer and more in our new ebook: The B2B Guide to Digital Customer Experience.

Customer Experience for Manufacturers

To improve customers’ digital experience, you must first optimize your website for the customer.

As a native tool that lives on the manufacturer’s website, the digital product catalog enhances the digital customer experience by:

• Speeding up the design process
• Improving accuracy across digital 3d products designs
• Empowering the buyer with more information and more control
• Creating an easy-to-use interface which guides the buyer through the purchasing process.

Transparency and Sharing Information

By implementing a product configurator onto a manufacturer’s website, you are giving the customer more product information, more transparency and more usability. you should ask yourself:

• Who is my customer?
• What does my website offer that customer?
• What entices them to come back?

The interactive product catalog enables customers to configure products for themselves and to see the information and prices attached to those parts. Site visitors feel more empowered and informed throughout the buying process. In turn, they trust your company more because they have the opportunity to research the product on their own.

The Ultimate Guide to DCX: Everything you need to know about digital customer experience in the manufacturing industry.

Eliminating Road Blocks

Over half of engineers said a company’s website has considerable impact on their perception of that vendor as credible and technically competent, according to IEEE GlobalSpec.

Therefore, you want to eliminate road blocks that users encounter when researching products on your website and interactive product catalog. Roadblocks can include an invasive user identification system, poor website design and outdated content.

The interactive product catalog typically requires some user registration to identify and track the behaviors of that customer, and it does so without the customer inputting more information than their name, work email and company name. This is great for you to learn more about that customer to build her buyer persona. Simultaneously, it’s great for the customer who doesn’t want her user identification process to feel invasive.

Conversely, asking an at an inconvenient point in the process can turn visitors away.

Manufacturers have noted success when asking for visitor information later in the transaction, usually after seeing a visual preview but before completing the CAD model download. Asking for user registration before the user really knows what they are registering for (or before they are invested in the transaction) leads to increased abandonment and bounce rate.

In Conclusion

Engineers are on-demand digital customers who want more information and purchasing power. Already, most go through 60% of the buyer’s journey online and on their own. For you to meet the needs of today’s customers, such as 3d digital products, you must create an exceptional digital customer experience to keep them coming back.

The digital product catalog gives customers what they want, when they want it, making it the ultimate online tool for manufacturers.

Real World Example: Encoder Products Company transformed their website to provide users with an exceptional experience whether they are visiting Encoder Products on a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. Watch the video above to see how easy it is!

What do you think of this unique solution to solving the digital experience divide between manufacturers and engineers? Share with us your thoughts, or click below to learn more about how east it is to create your own digital product catalog with 3D CAD model downloads.

Follow the blog series: Digital Customer Experience for Industrial Manufacturers

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