Portals: First Step Towards Having Successful Business

By Author: Maulik Shah
Total Articles: 138
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Being an entrepreneur and running a successful business is the desire of many people. Everyone wants to be their own boss. And as an entrepreneur, you must know ways to make sure that your business flourishes.

The first step towards making your business successful is customer interaction. Be it via phone, website, customer portal or in person.

Therefore, if these interactions are impressive your customers will stay with you forever. To provide better customer service, companies have a variety of approaches. They setup call centers, provide toll free numbers so customers can reach out to them easily, etc.

But, now in the digital era, customer portal replaces the work of call centers and reduces that of employees.

Yes, you heard it right! Portals play a vital role in providing better customer service and building a healthy relationship with customers.

Let’s try to understand, why is it important to have portals?

Portals provide benefits to customers to interact with you anywhere and anytime. Using this you can share files, chat, plan, discuss, manage tasks, organize documents and more.

Portals ...
... simplify the flow of data between employees and customers. Businesses can easily customize it according to their industry and their use.

Here, I have listed down some of the most common use cases of portals:

Collaboration:

If you and your client are working remotely then this feature of portals will help you a lot. A client portal makes it easy to download, upload, edit, preview project documents and give feedback.

File Sharing:

File sharing is the most useful feature of a client portal. Many businesses have to deal with lots of paperwork and these should sync and be accessible by clients as well as employees whenever required. Portals provide a facility like intranet to clients where they can upload their files in a structured manner.

Knowledge Repository:

Knowledge base is one of the most widely used ways of engaging your customer and expanding your business. Such portals help you to empower your customers and employees and find the necessary information in regards to your business. This helps make your tasks easy, as you won’t need to go around the office in search of the right person when your client is waiting to get an answer.

There are many platforms like SugarCRM, DynamicsCRM, etc. on which you can develop portals but I would recommend having a Salesforce customer portal.

You can use the Salesforce customer portal with various content management systems. But, most people prefer having a Salesforce WordPress portal. This is because WordPress makes it easy for you to handle the content and Salesforce is one of the leading CRM platforms in enterprise.

Let’s know the benefits of having a Salesforce WordPress portal.

Reduce costs of customer service, software, hardware and employees.
Optimize and enhance customer experience.
Identifying potential customers.
Service oriented architecture to enable scalability and less maintenance costs.
Improves return of investment and increases the customer value, satisfaction and retention.

Below mentioned are some of the customer benefits of using portals:

Fast solutions.
Improves customer service.
Users get support instantly, anytime and anywhere.
Secure access to portals.

A client portal can help businesses move ahead in business in the constantly changing world of technology. Client portals provide benefits to each and every sector and have helped businesses become well managed, professional and digital.

Consider below given things while integrating your portals with different CRM platforms:

Objective of Customer Portal:

Today most of the companies need portals, but each company has a different business logic and on the basis of that, they have different requirements.

Suppose, you are an accountancy firm you will need a customer portal to share sensitive information with your clients, securely. Or if you are an ecommerce business owner then you might need a customer portal to handle all your customers and provide customer service. So, before customizing or choosing portals you need to define your goals and objectives of having it.

Personalized UI:

Personalization is the key in any business. We get thousands of messages, emails in a day. And how many of them do we actually open? Barely any, right?

Below given are some of the examples:

Let’s say you are getting emails with three different subjects:

“Hello, we are going for lunch!”

“Hello, please check out the new products launched.”

“Hello Abhi, we have curated a special list of TV shows you might like.”

It is so obvious you will be opening the third email. Why? Because it provides personalization. It serves some value and makes you feel special. This is the reason personalization is an essential part.

Consistency Across the Portal:

Consistency is the key to anything you do. The same applies in business as well. Customers expect consistent experience. The portal should have the logo of your company and work correctly when integrated with other brands. Client portals represent your company and you, so you should make sure that it looks professional and at the same time provides personalized experience.

Final words:

Running a business is difficult but fun as well. One needs to take care of thousands of things at a time. You will need to balance between understanding your employees as well as clients. Thus, having software that makes your tasks easy is a must. It helps your business and makes sure operations run smoothly.

Mr. Maulik Shah is the founder & CEO of CRMJetty, hub of innovative customer relationship solutions, provides ready to CMS integrate portal solutions for SuiteCRM, Sugar CRM, Salesforce customer portal, and Dynamics CRM including WordPress Customer Portal. Maulik is a tech enthusiast and writes about the various aspects of ecommerce technology.