What Is a Customer Portal and Why Is It Important for Customer Success

Didn’t you just adore your first pocket money or your first car or the first taste of independence? There is always a certainty of excitement that is followed by the newfound independence in each of our lives. While the customers today live and breathe in the era of DIY (do it yourself), tech booms, and rising expectations, going self-dependent is heavily sought after. Whether you see it as a traditional business portal or an online customer portal, the essence stays common. All of which caters to empower their presence with technology, evolve with the demand for customer self-service options, and augment the overall customer experience quotient.

The recent years have seen a huge shift in meeting the rise in customer expectations with self-service channels. In fact, 91% of a survey respondents claim that they would anytime prefer an online knowledge base if it were available and specifically tailored to their demands. To know exactly what a customer portal is why is it so crucially benefitting to your company, read on.

• What is a Customer Portal?
• Elements of Customer Portal 
• Benefits of Customer Portal 

What is a Customer Portal?

A customer portal is a one-stop-shop for online self-service support and more like a single point of access to the product or company’s information. Via a portal a user can request services, resolves issues, and find more information about a particular subject. It is also a great way to boost up customer-company relationships as well. Moreover, it makes it easier for a customer to solutionize their query without the need for a real customer support executive.

Elements of Customer Portal 

• FAQs: Frequently Asked Question is a must-have element in your company’s site answering queries related to the products, policies, or services. This is where you address the most commonly asked queries of the customers and throw a spotlight on the common objectives, concerns that a user might come across. Generally, FAQs include links to some of the relevant articles, blog posts, videos, or tutorials too.

• Knowledge Base: A Knowledge Base is a hub of all the relevant content related to the company’s services and products. You can find it in easily searchable chunks of content pieces – articles and blogs. This mostly hovers over how-to blogs, getting started guides, troubleshooting techniques, and any other valid information.

• Customer Feedback: This feature allows the users to drop in their valuable feedback and suggestions as they like. This is where the customers are encouraged to be absolutely candid about their product reviews and suggest improvements on the go. It might cut a sorry figure to garner the feedback and throw the caution to the wind. It is one of the best practices to implement their recommendations and allow the user to track the progress of their implementation too.

• Informative Tutorials: Customers find tutorials of great help to ascertain how to use a specific product. That is where informative video footages teach the users and make it easier to apprehend and engage better. Further, these comprehensive video-based or content-based self-service tutorials can come in handy to the users and augment the customer service factor in many ways.

Benefits of Customer Portal 

While the reasons behind a client using your customer portal could depend on a multitude of factors, there are still some common drivers that increase online engagement within the community. Let us explore them.

Leverages Personalized Information

A well-defined customer service portal aids in saving time and locating information to the clients by scouring the past issues, if any. The second a customer logs in, they can be addressed with a welcome back message.

Additionally, the portal can track their previous purchases and suggest specific topics of expertise based on that. By imbibing this personalized treatment, the customer now knows that their presence is being valued and their concerns are being taken care of.

Centralizes Information and Tools

Driving customers away from your site to find information does not sound like a good marketing strategy. However, a customer would love to find it all under one roof. This is exactly what a portal does – it centralizes the resources into a bundle so that a customer knows where to find them without getting lost in the confusion.

Eventually, this triggers the volume of customer satisfaction and customer engagement. This will also work in your favor by converting a new prospect into a loyal brand advocate in no time.

Reduces Customer Support Costs

The more a customer can ascertain an answer for his queries himself, the lesser will be the dependency to go for a customer support executive. This in a way reduces the amount of support needed and the rise in the number of tickets will also decline.

In simpler terms, the cost incurred to hire a customer service rep will reduce as now the customer can find all the help he needs in the portal itself.

Brings in more Traffic

When people come and access your site to fetch answers, this in a way pulls in more traffic intelligently. This shows that the potential customers trust the credibility, given by the company and thus sees a massive increase in the visibility, by bringing in users that are searching for a related issue.

And when more users reach your site and browse, it triggers more traffic and gives more chance to rank better in the search engine as well.

That’s a Wrap

Managing your customer portal just about right passes a soft message to the people that you are serious about your business and that you truly care about your audience. Moreover, when effectively managed, it won’t only cut down on the support tickets but also regale your customers with 24×7 information. As you use a portal, you will have the power to delve deeper into the transactional data and revamp your customer satisfaction rate on a broader scale. Over and above, you can now save a fortune on your time and resources and give personalization a nudge.

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