Online Travel Portal: The Future of Travel Business

When was the last time you visited a travel agency office to book your travel ticket? Or to understand holiday packages to pick from? Well, I am sure it was a long time back when the online travel business was in its nascent stage. This was a time when it wasn’t widely accepted and popular because people had apprehensions about such transactions being fraudulent.

Well, that time has passed and the online travel business is a thriving industry today. Big players like Airbnb, Expedia, Booking.com, etc., have revolutionized the travel industry. They have made online travel services reliable and secure and therefore gained people’s trust and support.

After a drop in 2020 due to COVID-19, the online travel agency sector worldwide is forecast to snowball again. According to Statista, it is forecast to touch $820.18 bn by 2023. It is clear that the online travel business is a booming industry and will continue to be so.

Rising to the occasion, even small travel agency owners are also looking to go online. For them, an online travel portal can be an ideal fit. It is because it lets them manage their agents, partners, and customers centrally and efficiently.

If you also run a travel company or are looking to start one, this post is for you. In this post, you are going to learn about the importance of an online travel portal in detail. You’ll also know the features you must seek in a travel portal.

Benefits of an Online Travel Portal

A travel portal based on your CRM can help manage your travel business easily. For example, a SuiteCRM customer portal for your travel business would be suitable if you use SuiteCRM. And Salesforce portal for Salesforce-based organization, and so on.

Reduced Running Costs

If you run a travel company, hiring several travel agents to explain tour packages and booking tickets may be costly. Instead, a SuiteCRM customer portal or any other portal for your travel business can save you expenses.

Moreover, you can also cut down the effort of maintaining records of all costumes in spreadsheets. This is because you can view all your customers’ and agents’ details centrally and manage them better with a travel portal.

Real-Time Access

A travel portal provides real-time access to all details like prices of tour packages, hotels, rental services, flights, etc. to your customers. Customers can also vet and compare the prices of hotels and packages during peak season and normal times. It helps them make a more informed choice of a tour package, hotel, etc.

Customer Care Support

A travel portal helps customers communicate and convey issues easily via a chat or call option. This helps customers get quick solutions to their travel-related issues or answers to queries.

They can also get help in selecting the right package for their tour plan via customer care support. This way, a travel portal eliminates the need to call or visit a travel agency office for every small issue or query.

Enhanced Transparency and Convenience

An online travel portal helps display accurate fares with any hidden costs. This helps build customers’ trust in your company and connect with you more. A complete comprehensive breakdown of applicable charges brings more transparency.

Besides, booking tickets and packages online is convenient. Customers don’t have to visit any office or branch to book their tickets, hotels, or rental services. They can do it all right from within the portal. Using a portal for this also helps get a much clearer view of comparison metrics like pricing, amenities, etc. This saves both their time and money and enhances their experience. Similarly, customers can also easily cancel or reschedule a booking without calling the company’s office or visiting there.

All this helps takes customers’ convenience, and booking experience, to the next level.

Large Variety of Options

An online travel portal helps gain access to a large list of hotels, rental cars, flight or bus tickets, and tour packages. Customers can get numerous options to choose from unlike in the case of an offline travel agency.

All this is not feasible with a travel agent due to time constraints and limited knowledge available on the internet.

Features to Look for in a Travel Portal

The travel portal you pick should be easily accessible to the admin, agents, and customers.

For Admin

As the business owner and admin, you should have control over the complete management of your customers and agents. For that, there are a few admin features below that you must look for when picking a travel portal:

As an admin, the travel portal should allow you to view, manage, and update customers’ booking details on the fly.
You should also be able to manage hotel bookings easily and efficiently from within the travel portal. The portal should provide a centralized view of all bookings to help you get better visibility and avoid any errors.
There should be a built-in process for the online identification of customers within the portal. It will help you avoid the hassle of manual identity verification after check-ins.
The portal should allow you to manage tour packages and their details like prices in real-time. You should offer the best tour package recommendations based on your customers’ preferences and budget.

For Agents

If you provide an online travel service that supports individual travel agents and associates; your travel portal should have the following features:

Individual hospitality agents and associates should be able to manage their commission for every booking. The portal should also let them track total bookings and negotiate the commission to pay to you.
The portal should let travel and hospitality associates and agents implement the credit systems for customers. It will help increase repeat bookings and expand the customer base.
The portal should also facilitate offering discounts on bookings for agents to attract more online bookings. This way, they can also adjust the commission fee according to the overall profitability of your company.

For Customers

Last but not least, the travel portal you pick should be user-friendly for your customers.

The portal should make the booking experience seamless for customers. It should let them check for the availability of travel tickets on specific dates and book them.
There should be a choice of multiple payment options to book. The portal should also provide the option to save a payment method for future bookings for fast transactions.
There should be an exhaustive list of hotels, ratings, charges, and facilities displayed. Comparison and filter options should be there to allow customers to vet and pick a package carefully.
Your travel portal should let customers view travel booking history and update booking details. They should get to update, cancel, or reschedule their bookings without hassle.

Launch Your Travel Portal with CRMJetty

If you own a travel company and are looking for a travel portal, we’ve got you covered. Our development team can help you develop a travel portal based on your CRM.

We provide ready-to-integrate industry-specific SuiteCRM client portal, Salesforce portal, WordPress

portal, etc. If you want to expand your existing portal’s capabilities, we can help you with that also. We can discuss your portal requirements, analyze the feasibility of development or customization, test limitations, and deliver the final portal.

CTA – Request Personalized Demo

4 Features of SuiteCRM WordPress Customer Portal

We know the importance of portals in a business. The endless self-service options, integrations, and features simplify the business operations and keep the communication with the customers going.

If you want to give your customers an enhanced experience, integrating a SuiteCRM WordPress Customer Portal would be a good trick. However, it is overwhelming to identify the features of a customer portal. There would be a list of must-have features, whereas the one that might be required but not mandatory. Also, the system would have some standard features. You might choose to customize the standard features or add additional customized features. Overall, you need to consider a lot of things before finalizing a customer portal, or you can go with a SuiteCRM WordPress Plugin that allows easy customization of features along with a set of quality integrated features.

Below, we have explored a few SuiteCRM WordPress Customer Portal features and why your business needs them.

Organized Communication Channel

To keep the communication intact, you might have to consider customers, vendors, and partners. Besides, it could be one-to-one and one-to-many. Thus, if you integrate a portal, you will likely have to configure it for relationship settings. It has to be in a way that communication remains seamless. There are customer portals that are dynamic in terms of code. It means you can communicate without configuring the relationships with the contacts. The advantage is you won’t have to invest your time in handling the backend work or in discussion with the tech partner.

Custom Module Support

SuiteCRM WordPress Plugin provides numerous modules. You can customize the modules as per your specifications or leave it as it is. Some SuiteCRM customer portals consist of all the required CRM modules. You only need to enable them to use it. To simplify it further, the portal provides an easy configuration method. You can directly configure the modules from the portal without the help of a technical person. The custom module will automatically be in sync with contacts and other data modules in the CRM. It means everything would be effortless. Also, you can update the front-end quicker with the WordPress admin.

Case Deflection

Case deflection feature in SuiteCRM WordPress Customer Portal would allow your customers to self handle their queries. It will help customers to look for queries before generating a new ticket or case into the system. On the other side, your support team will be free of repetitive work instead can focus on more productive work. The feature would eliminate the need to solve repetitive questions. As for you, it would be easier to track your team’s performance.

You can enable the case deflection feature from the backend of your SuiteCRM WordPress Plugin.

Dynamic User Accessibility

With all the configurable modules, you would want to provide your customers with accessibility. But for that, you would need a feature that allows you to give access rights dynamically to all the modules. It would be required for custom modules too.

Not only access, but also you will have to restrict the access for specific modules for specific customers. Thus, a role-based access feature would be of more use. It will help you share the data with necessary users by setting the user group. The security will further strengthen the trust in the customer relationship.

Conclusion

These features are a must-have for your customer portal. It gives you the freedom to improve the SuiteCRM customer portal services without any configurations. However, the features of the portal should align with your business requirements. They should be in addition to other features like sign-in, notifications, contacts, etc.

While choosing your customer portal features, make sure they are in accordance with your customers’ and employees’ needs. The satisfaction of both is mandatory for a successful outcome.

CRM Portals Through the Customer Perspective

CRM is a powerful tool. Since its inception, it has helped many companies gain insight into customer behavior. CRMs have a specific purpose and they serve it well. But they have a limited scope. That is why we need plugins. Plugins significantly increase the scope of the CRM. Perhaps the most important example of CRM plugins is a customer portal.

New technology can be overwhelming. Because of this, it is easy to overlook a few details. Ironically, while using the CRM, sometimes you might end up overlooking the customer’s perspective. How does CRM affect the customer? When you think about it, you’ll find how perfectly the customer portal fits into this picture.

The core function of a CRM is to facilitate orderly interactions with the prospects and clients. However, this is the era of self-managed customers, who can access the quotes, invoices & contracts with minimal involvement of your team. This is your average customer today. And to appease such a customer, you need a way to give him role-based access to certain modules of your CRM. Like a Salesforce customer portal integrated with CMS will help you materialize this idea and wrap it up in an elegant package.

A portal will overcome certain drawbacks while enhancing other features. To understand how this works, we must consider the various factors involved in this process:

Customer Services: Many companies use CRM to assist in customer services. You may consider a call center software to be a good example of this. Portals take this one step further by giving access to a well-documented knowledge base. They let the customer issue support tickets and allow live chat options through the portal itself.

Customer Response: For large companies with a big database of customers, it was previously impossible to keep track of customer feedback. CRM helped to overcome this challenge to a certain extent. A portal improves upon it further by keeping track of your chat history with the customer so that you can review it when required.

Response Time: Giving the customer access to the knowledge base reduces the need for you to engage directly. And when you do need to engage, the ticketing system makes sure that you deal with the customer queries promptly.

Additionally, when based on a CMS like WordPress it gives the customizability that you need to enhance its looks and charm; highlighting the simplicity that it is known for. A customer has access to the following features to customize the way the portal looks:

Change the name of the portal, upload a logo, and choose the records to display on the page. You may even set and change the theme color.
Use templates to make it easier to customize.
Add a profile picture using the portal.

All these details add up to a simple and effective client management system. One may infer that a SuiteCRM Customer Portal or SugarCRM customer portal or any customer portal is going to be an indispensable piece of software in the near future. Presently, it is undergoing mass adoption with early-users lauding its simplicity.

It is evident that adopting a WordPress client management plugin will have a positive impact on customer satisfaction. Happy customers make happy companies. Let us analyze how using this plugin can affect you as a company.

Brand Loyalty:

One distinguishing characteristic of great companies is that they treat customer retention with due importance. Inculcating this in the company philosophy leads to long term relationships with the customers. A CRM plugin like this gives you the tools to achieve brand loyalty.

Automated Communication

You can address common customer queries by making the required information available to them through portals. This is important; especially when you need to keep the info private and share it with relevant people only. The customer portal is an easy solution to this.

Insight into Customer Behaviour

Modern businesses are built on the premise of customer behavior. This knowledge can be leveraged in many ways. You may base your product research on customer tastes and needs, or optimize your marketing plan based on this info.

And that summarizes how a customer portal can guide your business to greatness. Most online businesses are opting for some form of portal. As a result, it is becoming habitual for the customer. Eventually, they’ll start expecting them and it’ll appear to be the most obvious way of customer engagement. However, you can take advantage of it right now and position yourself as industry leaders.

In this way, the CRM customer portal extends the functionality of a CRM. This improves customer retention by empowering them and giving them control.

Customer Satisfaction

The self-managing customer can be of great benefit to the company. If you map your customers on Everett M. Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations, you will find these to be the innovators. These are the proactive users that you can convert into evangelists. This is the machinery that drives your word-of-mouth marketing. Therefore, you must consider serving them to be a privilege.

In fact, you should consider it a privilege to serve all of your customers. And to treat them in this manner, what better tool than a customer portal? When you put it that way, it seems to be a heavy software but, in reality, it is quite simple.

One More Thing

An important thing to consider is the adoption by people who are not that adept in technology. Though this a minority in today’s time, it is still a large number. With that in mind, any decent portal will come with an easy to navigate dashboard that uses icons wherever possible.

Conclusion

The overall experience of the average customer is generally favorable to portals as compared to the traditional methods that use phone calls and e-mails to communicate. A customer can access the information and address their queries at a suitable time and place making a Customer Portal the best solution for customer relationship management.

View Source: https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/crm-portals-through-the-customer-perspective/

Salesforce WordPress Integration: Things You Need to Consider

WordPress and Salesforce are no less than a match made in heaven. When you go for a WordPress Salesforce Integration (WordPress website with Salesforce as your CRM) lead generation becomes easy. Now, the visitors that come to your WordPress website provide you with their information in two ways. One, by signing up to the newsletter and two, by registering for an event. The task of your CRM is to collect that information and store the data at one place enabling you to keep it organized.

However, if you wish to provide your customers with a more personalized browsing experience and boost engagement, you need to integrate WordPress and Salesforce in the best way possible. This can include anything right from plugins like Salesforce Portal for WordPress and apps to customized integrations. Let’s know about the aspects you need to consider in case you go for Salesforce WordPress Integration:

Integration through Apps

Third-Party apps are a widely used option when it comes to integrating Salesforce CRM and WordPress. You can make use of these apps to implement certain functionalities. For e.g., if you’re running an email campaign and you wish to link your emails with Salesforce, you can make use of a popular email marketing software named – Mailchimp. It helps you to create sign-up forms for your website, fetch subscriber details and shoot broadcast emails with ease.

As MailChimp provides you with an option to integrate it with Salesforce, it is possible for you to import your Salesforce contacts to your list and get an access to the data whenever you want. You might have to invest a little into these apps but they’re quite cost-effective and user-friendly.

Robust Form Builders

Advanced form building tools help a lot when you want to map form fields to and from Salesforce. Although these tools have a lot of features, they can burn a little hole in your pocket. They help you to conduct complicated tasks like pre-filling the fields in the form. The only drawback is, it can get difficult to use them as it might ask for strong coding skills or advanced Salesforce knowledge.

If you are looking for a tool that doesn’t need coding, go for FormStack. It helps you to create mobile-friendly surveys and forms. The best part about FormStack is the native form builder for Salesforce which enables you to set up forms with the help of a drag and drop design. User-friendly and robust, at the same time!

Custom Integrations

Complex requirements ask for a complex solution. And this is when you need custom-built forms. Through custom built forms, you can enable your customers to update their payment details or create a searchable database. Now, crafting these solutions asks for a detailed knowledge of API and development skills; for which you might have to hire an expert to help.

Although obtaining this service can prove to be expensive, you won’t have to spend on licensing costs and you will have control over the style of forms and presentation.

How to Choose the Integration That Works?

When you integrate Salesforce and WordPress, your lead generation is sure to get better. However, the integration plugin you decide to use depends on your budget and needs. To start with, you can try a simple form builder and figure out whether or not you would be able to work around it. In case you feel that it isn’t flexible, you can go for an advanced version or go for a plugin customized to your needs.

If you want to make the most out of your WordPress website and Salesforce CRM, you can choose to invest into CRMJetty Portals.

Here’s why our portals are the best:

We build Salesforce WordPress Plugin in such a way that they take the functionality of your product to another level. To be able to do that, we have put in our best efforts and created a portal that surpasses the Salesforce features.
One of the major goals of our customer portal is to help you lessen your operational costs by offering automation. It also accelerates your customer support process.
Rest assure about the confidentiality of your data as we do not fetch any of your data to our database and you can host it on your servers. Also, there wouldn’t be any vulnerabilities added to your CRM data.

Why not get in touch with us and find out more about our WordPress Salesforce Customer Portal? Book a demo with us now!

View Source: https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/things-you-need-to-consider-while-integrating-wordpress-and-salesforce/