Define Your Product Configuration Experience
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how Product Configurator enables product customization.
- Discuss the role of configuration rules in validating product selection.
Explore Product Configurator
With Product Catalog Management, you create a product catalog with all of your product information. But there’s more to the story. After selecting a complex product or bundle, customers typically want to configure some product attributes. For example, while shopping for a laptop bundle, they might want to add a mouse or a warranty package, or maybe they’d like to configure laptop attributes such as the number of USB ports.
In this unit, you learn how to enable the configuration of products and bundles using predefined product configuration templates.
Product Configurator in Revenue Cloud offers templates for customizing how products and attributes are shown to customers and sales reps. When designing the products in the catalog, you can assign templates to products or product classifications, thereby saving time and enabling users to configure their selected products during runtime. They can customize attributes of the selected products, view a summary of their choices, and see the impact on price instantly. Users can configure products at various stages of the product-to-cash journey: while browsing the product catalog in a quote, when working with quote line items, or when creating orders.
Further, you can define Configuration Rules to ensure that user selections are valid and don’t create product incompatibilities.
Design a Product Configuration Flow Using Default Templates
Next, explore how to define a product configuration flow that uses the default templates in Product Configurator.
The example screen shows the default product configurator flows provided with the product.
For every aspect of product configuration, a default flow template is available. The example shows the template for product attributes. Define things like the number of columns to show and the display style for product attributes.
After defining the flow, assign it to a product or a product classification. In this case, it’s the Laptop product. The screen shows the Product Configuration Flow window.
Click New to assign the flow to the Laptop product. In this case, here’s what the customer sees while browsing for a product.
Each tab shows the product attributes: Graphics, Memory, Processor, and Storage. The user configures the product attributes in each tab.
Set Up Configuration Rules
While, by default, all products are available for customers to buy, it’s important that they only select compatible products. Similarly, some products require others to work. For example, certain warranty products apply only to specific laptops. It’s critical to get the configuration right because errors in product configuration can result in order fallout.
Configuration rules ensure that all attributes of a selected product are valid and compatible with any other products selected. These rules are based on the following information.
- Rule Scope: This defines the limits within which the rule executes—either for a product, a bundle, or a transaction.
- Condition: This specifies the criteria for the rule to be executed.
- Action: This defines what action to take when the conditions are met. The action could be to validate something, set attributes, attribute values, or quantities, or to hide attributes or attribute values.
To set up configuration rules, launch Product Configuration Rules from the Product Catalog Management home page.
The screen shows an example of a rule that you create to ensure that a wireless mouse is automatically selected along with the laptop pro bundle.
In this example, the condition for the rule checks if the attribute Wireless for the product Mouse is selected. If not, the action is to set the Wireless attribute to True. An informational message indicates this is recommended and unchangeable. In some cases, you can make the message type an Error or Warning. Setting the message type to Error prevents order submission.
The final step before rolling out the configuration rule is to activate it so that it is executed during product selection. Plus, thanks to the extensible design of Revenue Cloud, you can integrate third-party configurators and create a custom configuration flow using the headless configurator APIs.
Once your product catalog is ready and you've set up product configurations and rules, you're ready to deliver an optimal browsing experience.
In the next unit, you discover the role of Salesforce Pricing in helping you design your Revenue Cloud solution.