Included now in the Vox Vertical Accelerator 2016 – customer/distributor portal!
But more importantly, why do you need one.
Presently, many companies are offering self-service customer support through client portals and online customers. According to some studies, 75% of the 2,900 users prefer to use online support and 40% of customers are contacting through a call center.
Now you understand? Most of the people like to solve their queries through online self-support as it is well-manageable, accurate and reliable. So, what does it means for your client portal or online customer?
Businesses are creating online customer portals to deliver a great self-service alternative. However, there are some standard drivers behind customer portal strategies that you must follow to provide variations to your online portal according to particular type of interactions.
Why Online Customer Portals Are Must?
Reason 1: Delivering Scalable Customer Relationship Management
Managing and sustaining your relationships with other customers becomes a larger task, if you have more customers. With an online customer portal, you can simply be able to manage your customer relationship in a more scalable manner, no matter how many customers you have.
The best thing is you can deliver better service and make your customer happy, if you are tracking your relationship more excellent and facilitate customers to get advantages from knowledge of your community.
Reason 2: Delivering Self-Service Option and Lower Support Costs
This is one of the most understandable reasons for developing a client portal. Different ways are available for companies to connect with customers and there are many ways that customers want to be engaged.
A web portal makes easier for those people, who are searching for a one-stop knowledge base. Online customer portals function as an exclusive customer-only destinations that were developed to administer transactional data such as bill payments, purchase records, and order history.
Allowing a tracking option to your customers minimizes the number of calls that come to your call center and maybe to cut back your support overhead.
Reason 3: Providing Destination to Centralize Information and Tools
When your shoppers require some information about your products/services, you call them at your company’s website to search out the answer they require, instead seeking information somewhere else.
As the company grows, there are many businesses sending their customers to various locations to access company information, products/service information or any kind of support. In such situation, your online customer portal can integrate information, so customers will know where to find essential requirements, and can access tools for solving problems. It creates an excellent experience for those customers, who want to sign in many places with multiple lo-gins.
Furthermore, you will see an increase in continuing customer engagement and 100% satisfaction by enhancing their customer experience by joining needs into a single customer portal.
Some Fundamentals of a Successful Online Customer Portal
Segmentation
Your business has customers, who are using various products/services. Furthermore, you also have customers at different stages of their use of your products/services. Some customers are just staring their journey while others are seasoned experts.
Not all customers are common, not all customers require same information from your portal. Identifying the difference and segmenting your information more relevant and accessible helps people to search answers easily. You can also create segment by-product line, geographic location, or role in the company.
A Good Search Engine
If you are creating an online customer portal to serve your customer with better information, then you have to be ensure to deliver accurate information. Your search engine would index all text-based information and discussion perfectly along with the text-based files of your portal.
After that, your single search engine of portal will facilitate your customers to make search through files, support documentation, blogs, discussions, and other information available in your web portal.
Updates and Exclusive Information
If you want that your customers are using the online customer portal, then it is recommended to run your communication through the portal. Having effective online customer portals help to create your website the center of the customer communication strategy.
If you want to turn your customer portal into a habit for your customers, then balance the use multi-channel communication. No matter, your portal contains product information or company updates, ensure to share through a portal to connect with your customers.
Peer-To-Peer Interactions
If you are going to give an answer to your customer’s questions in your customer portal, it surely expands your company’s ability. Adding peer-to-peer community features in your portal, one can enhance their support knowledge-base at the great extend as all types of questions are to be answered for future customers that required support.
Increase customer retention by offering your customers an opportunity to build connections with each other through your online portal.
The Final Thought
Having an effective web-based client portal helps online business to decrease support costs along with it provides much-needed access to information to your customers.
Reading this post, if you’re thinking, online customer portal would work for your business, then simple adopt effective portal development service from one of the leading eCommerce development service providers. For more information