Using Chatbots and Customer Portals for Better User Experience

What is a Customer Portal?

Customer portals are secure online platforms where your business can interact and engage with customers. These central hubs can be used to provide customers with a variety of information resources, and self-service tools related to your business. Customer portals can streamline communication, enhance customer service, and improve customer satisfaction.

Key Functionalities and Features of Customer Portals

Customer portals can be implemented in a variety of ways to enhance the customer experience. We have highlighted a few features of customer portals for you.

Account management allows customers to log into their accounts to update personal information and manage their profiles online. Users can view and pay bills, set up automatic payments, as well as access payment history. Your customer portal software should offer robust security measures to ensure customer data is protected.

Customers can also access knowledge bases, tutorials, and access FAQs. These can help customers troubleshoot issues on their own without needing to contact the support center. You can also provide detailed information about your products and services like those user manuals that everyone loses. If your business sells products, you can allow them to track their orders, request returns or exchanges, and view their order history. By having data on your customer’s purchasing history you can create personalized content and recommend products.

You can create a portal that includes chat and messaging features so your customers can interact with your support center team. Service requests for technical support or maintenance can also be requested through your customer portals. Are you conducting market research? You can distribute your surveys or feedback forms from your portals and use the feedback to improve your products and services.

Customer portals are valuable tools that can help alleviate pressure on your support team as well as improve the customer experience by providing resources for users to resolve issues on their own. You can also use these portals to engage with your customers directly to understand their behavior and grow customer loyalty through making improvements to your products and services.

Benefits Customer Portals Can Offer You

Customer portals can benefit both your business and your customers. Keep reading to find out the advantages a customer portal can offer you.

Due to customer portals being an online platform, your customers can access information 24/7 no matter the timezone of your business or hours. This makes it more convenient for customers to interact with your business and can improve customer satisfaction as they can get the information they want when they want it. By introducing a self-service option in your portal that provides troubleshooting solutions for common problems, you can free up your support team to focus on more resource-intensive support tasks.

Portals should include chat and messaging features that enable efficient communication between your business and customers which can improve your customer engagement. Any positive experience your customers have when using your portals leads to customer loyalty ensuring long-term success.

Customer interactions can be tracked in CRM software so you can gain better insights into your customer preferences, behavior, and interactions which can be used to make data-driven decisions and improve marketing strategies.

If you are concerned about security then fear not, customer portals are created with security in mind and include features like encryption and authentication so you can ensure your customer data is secure.

Customer portals are used to enhance the customer experience, reduce support costs, and gain better insight into your customer behavior.

Integrating CRM with Customer Portals

Most Customer Relationship Management platforms do include customer portal features or offer integrations with a dedicated customer portal tool. By integrating your CRM system with your customer portals you can gain a holistic view into your customers to help build better relationships by enhancing the customer’s experience.

When choosing a CRM system and customer portal tool, ensure you consider your specific business needs, budget, and how much customization your portal will require. If your CRM system does not offer a customer portal tool that meets your needs make sure that the tool you do select offers full integration with your CRM system. We’ve covered a few of the most popular software tools below.

Customer Portal Software Options

If you are looking for a customer software tool, you might be overwhelmed by the variety of options available. The tool you select should meet the needs of your business as well as offer full integration with your CRM software. We’ve listed some popular tools for you to consider:

Salesforce Community Cloud is a native Salesforce tool that you can use to build your branded customer portals.
Zendesk Guide offers community forum capabilities that you can use to create customer portals with a focus on customer support and self-service.
Joomla! is a content management system that you can extend with plugins to create customer portals. This tool is flexible but does require web development expertise.
Titan is a third-party app that can be integrated with your Salesforce CRM to empower you to create customer portals for Salesforce. Offering an easy-to-use interface with a variety of components you can create customer portals without needing to know any code. This tool is recommended for a variety of businesses.

How to Create a Customer Portal

There are several steps involved when it comes to planning and creating a customer portal. We’ve outlined a few general steps of this process but this can change depending on your goals and the software you choose.

Clearly define your goals and objectives of what you want to achieve with your customer portals.
What features do you want to include in your portals that will help you achieve your goals and objectives?
Select the platform that best suits your business needs.
Design the user interface and user experience. Your platform should be easy to use by including intuitive navigation, creating a consistent user experience, and designing content that can work across a variety of devices.
Build the portal using the tool you have selected. This could include customization or using the out-of-the-box options the software provides.
Integrate your existing CRM system and other data sources.
Implement security measures that ensure the security of sensitive custom data.
Put your portal through rigorous testing to identify any issues and resolve them before making the portal available to customers.
Once you have your portal picture-perfect, create a plan to launch the portal including how you are going to communicate the launch to your customers.
Offer resources for customers to learn how to use the portal effectively.
Collect feedback from customers on what their experience was like using the portal. You can use this feedback to make vital changes to your portal
Monitor the performance of your portal and ensure you regularly release updates with new features and content.
As your business grows and your customer’s needs change, you will need to scale and expand your portals. It is vital you choose the right tool for your business that can fulfill these needs.
Regulations can often change which can require updates for your customer portals to ensure you are compliant with these laws.
Define how you will measure the success of your customer portals, for example, user adoption rates and customer satisfaction.

Creating a successful customer portal requires careful planning, development, and maintenance. It is important to keep the customer experience the focus of your efforts and seek ways you can ensure your customers have positive interactions with your business.

The Takeaway

If your business is looking to use customer portals to benefit both your business and your customers, make sure you consider important factors like integration capabilities, security features, scalability, and whether the tool has a great customer support team to help you. We hope you enjoyed learning more about customer portals and the tools you can use. If you are interested in finding out more about Titan, reach out today!