The Essence Of An Ebusiness Customer Self Service Support Portal

By Author: Patrick Harris
Total Articles: 7
Comment this article

Some of the major costs which ebusinesses incur include those spent on customer service. In this regards these businesses have in-house or outsourced call centers which can employ staggering numbers of CSR - customer service representatives depending on the scope of the services and customer presence of the ebusiness. This is indeed the reason why almost every ebusiness proprietor is looking to integrate a customer self service portal so as to better address the needs of customers and at the same time cut on the costs of doing so. These platforms are created to serve a multitude of complex issues that take time to solve over the phone and which consequently make the call service expensive.


In general, customer self service portals enable utilities to lower their expenses because they facilitate low transaction rates. However, the only way to accrue such savings is by having a platform which has been well received by the customers you are targeting. Such portals should be able to bring about an enhanced customer experience that will negate the need to make human contact ...
... as the platform will have solved the immediate concerns of the customers. These platforms do not come cheap though and therefore it is of the essence to invest in one which will win over the customers so as to yield the desired and even greater return on investments.


There is dire need to create customer self service portals because the numbers of people willing to transact electronically is growing threefold. For a company that does not have such a portal in place, these huge numbers can be seen as doom rather than a potential market to benefit from. Although many franchises are incorporating appealing costumer portals to their webstores, the numbers of customers making use of them is not encouraging enough to attain the sort of full customer experience that will help make such portals the communication channels of choice. As such, the two main factors which we need to consider in the design and implementation of these customer satisfaction systems are usability and performance.


In the world of ebusiness success is defined by accumulating a greater market share, customer retention, as well as offering a wide range of solutions, and all these while keeping operational costs down. Consumers have been shown to appreciate and prefer web-based customer self service portals and other techs such as voice response and speech recognition units if and only if they can offer what they need without necessitating contacting call centers. Utilities are consequently looking for ebusiness firms which can guarantee or warrant that their customer support systems will do what they are supposed to do, and that is creating savings from each and every transaction which takes place via the portals. These requirements push the designers of these systems to take care of aspects such as correct functioning and end to end flow in addition to the performance and usability factors pointed out earlier.

For more information about Oracle ebusiness please visit http://www.wbsbol.com/