Education Portal: The Logistics of Learning and Teaching Made Easy

Formal education teaches many things. It is essential that those things provide quality value to our lives. The logistical side of formal education is messy, to say the least. Good teaching faculty is difficult to come by and therefore schools are often understaffed. Students are not always given much choice about certain classes or class hours. Apart from this, they have no intimation of their attendance level and this often impacts their graduation. The institutionalization of formal education becomes too negatively hierarchical rather than focusing on what is important, which is the growth of young minds.

As academic professionals, one should treat education as a constant exchange. We believe that this exchange should be seamless. Technology comes into play here. There is a neat solution that large educational institutions or smaller schools can use. It is a custom web portal. Web portal solutions are for everyone. You have to get a custom portal development company to design one for you. Before you do that, let’s dive deeper and look at all the possibilities of using an education portal.

First, the basics: You must already maintain a database of all your students, admin staff and teaching faculty. If you manage this database in a CRM, these components can be interconnected. The right people can have the right access. The level of access will depend on whether they are a member of the administrative staff, teaching faculty or a student. Let’s break it down, to see what each level of access would enable what functions:

Admin level:

If you are an admin staff member, the education portal can streamline and aid your work to a great degree. As the principal of a school/college, you can see all the operations of your school.

Here’s how:

With your data and resources being managed online, redundant paper-work gets eliminated.
Personnel management streamlines with faculties managing their schedules, classes, and grading work using Education portal.
You get an overview of the institute’s financial status with the fees & receipt management system.

Now, it may not be essential to monitor each student for you, but you’d easily be able to have an overview of the highest scoring students, or ones who are in the running for school-wide various competitions, or the topics of higher-level papers they are writing. You would also be able to look at how the teaching staff is doing in course completion, or in conducting extra-curricular activities; how they are doing their own research work or handling grading.

General Admin members can easily handle records of students and teaching faculty. They can assign classrooms for lectures, help students sign up for courses, ready a consolidated grade report for each student, arrange examination schedules, etc.

Admin Level benefits of Education Portal:

Once an education portal is set up, it drastically cuts down on redundant tasks.

Lecture rooms won’t be double-booked.

Professors would not have a conflicting timetable, and neither would students.
They can also manage the fee details of each student so that the portal alerts the students and their parents when the fee is due.

Teaching Faculty:

A teacher’s responsibilities are not limited to merely teaching four classes a week. It is much more than that. A teacher can accomplish their tasks with relatively more ease with the help of an education web portal.

Here’s how:

As a teacher, you can have all your classes at hand.

At the beginning of a semester/year, when students have to register for courses, you would be able to see as students sign up for your course. Once that is decided, you can feed in details of each course and breakdown of each class. This way a course plan is set and you can keep a track of it throughout the semester.

You can easily set assignments for students, grade them, mark daily attendance, accept medical leave requests from students and even request leaves for yourselves that the admin staff can approve.

As a teacher, you can also keep a track of each of your student’s progress based on class tests, exams, and attendance records.

If you need to take any extra session, you can add sessions to the portal which will notify your students that they have an extra class. The portal will automatically let you book a slot only when none of your students have another class.

You can see the calculation of students’ attendance percentage in your class, their grade percentage, etc. once the metrics are set. Then each faculty member can send in the grade report for their course so that the admin staff can create consolidated reports for each student that would have all of their courses and extracurricular.

Student level:

Almost all the modules that are available to students are with ‘view only’ access. Basically, this portal provides them with an overview of how they are doing during a particular academic year.

Here’s what they’ll be able to view/do:

All the courses they are taking, and their timetable.

All the grades; this helps in case they are lagging behind in one test. They can improve their overall graph, by working for the next tests.

Students can use this portal to submit medical leave requests along with a medical certificate. The respective faculty member can approve it for their class and grant them the required attendance.

They would be able to see their overall attendance, as well as a breakdown of each class.
Students can submit their paper for rechecking when they get grades for any course. If the professor rechecks it, they can change the grade and the student can see the replaced grade. The change would reflect in the final overall/average grade too.
After each semester, when the student’s entire grade is ready, they can see it and even print it. It would automatically include the school’s logo and important details like the affiliated board.

A school or college is a very complicated structure with plenty of variables. It shapes the lives of students and the careers of anyone who is interested in the way education functions, from professors to admin staff. Running a school is no mean feat. With more than hundreds of students taking a variation of over 20 courses each, it can be challenging to manage, especially along with managing what professor teaches what course and which student needs to get extra credits to graduate.

An education portal aims to streamline that complex workflow. Since a school would require an enterprise-level solution so that it can expand when it needs to, you can use a Dynamics 365 Portal solution that helps you address your pain points and helps you in your operations.

A portal development company can configure this Dynamics 365 portal tailored to specific needs. This will help you streamline your school or college operations.

Happy Support Staff, Happy Customers!

Many companies have Twitter accounts. They use the platform to interact with customers, and sometimes solve their queries.

Customers, in turn use the platform to show their displeasure and to alert others when a company gives them subpar service. Take a look:

No company would like to read this on their Twitter handle.

Would you?

Of course not!

You can check the entire tweet thread and see how the customer is dissatisfied and feels cheated by a DTH connection company named Tata Sky.

You might also have had a similar experience with customer service from one or the other brand and would have gotten annoyed. After a point, you might’ve also reevaluated your decision to purchase from them.

No one in today’s time would prefer or even tolerate bad customer service. Similarly, no company would even want to give bad customer service to their customers.

And now, in fact, customers without giving a second thought directly go online and diss the companies as you saw in the above example.

If companies will not provide immediate support or solve customers’ issues on time, they will go online and directly raise their concerns publicly. This does affect a company’s reputation with its other users and especially with people who are still in the consideration stage. Because nowadays we all judge companies, their product/service quality, etc. on the basis of their online profiles, what their customers have to say, and their Google ratings.

In the middle of all this chaos, there are employees who suffer. Especially the support department which provides 24/7 support to your customers.

Support staff is one of the most important departments yet they get less importance.

As an owner, it can be difficult to do a minute level of monitoring of your support department. Not only that but setting up an entire support staff also requires a lot of investment. An oversight here and there can cost you customers, social reputation, or even money. Moreover, as an owner, you might have seen your support staff getting irritated and exhausted because of the rude behavior of clients. This might have resulted in some leaving the company too.

To overcome such issues and to make sure that your support staff is handling your customers properly, we have a perfect solution for you i.e. “Portals”.

Yes!

A customer portal is a one-stop perfect solution to your support staff’s day-to-day problems.

If I were you, I would be thinking what is it? Why should you use it? Or which companies actually use this solution?

But don’t worry, we’ll be covering all your questions about portals in this blog. Let’s start step by step.

What is a Customer Portal?

According to the world’s biggest customer relationship management company Salesforce, customer portals are:

“Customer service portals are designed to be accessed directly by clients without the need to involve a service agent. Accessible through the company website, these portals operate completely over the internet, and include functions, databases, FAQ pages, etc. that are open to the end user. Clients simply connect via a standard web browser, and are able to perform a variety of self-service tasks.”

Sounds something your customers will love?

Imagine being there for your customers 24*7*365 days without actually having to invest in a huge support team.

Apart from that, there are many other benefits. Let’s explore them.

Why should you use a customer portal?

Your customers might not want to talk with your support staff every now and then for the smallest of issues. Most of them would like to resolve the issues on their own using an FAQ or a knowledge section of your website. Or they would rather choose to live chat with your support staff.

In such scenarios, customer portals will come to your rescue. Customer portal becomes a one-stop destination for your customers to get their queries resolved, talk to your staff if required, manage their profiles, quotes, orders, and much more. Because customers using the portal to get answers, here’s how your support staff will be benefited.

How will it help your support staff?

Less Ticket Generation

Having customer portals means that there will be fewer support tickets to handle. How? Because most of the issues that customers face, they would be able to solve them from the portal itself. This will give space and time to your support staff to attend customers more attentively and provide quality service to them.

Less Staffing

Portals will reduce your hiring costs of the support staff. This directly means less operating and training costs for your company. You can invest the same money in acquiring new customers and the portals along with your support staff will retain them for you.

Increase your Website’s Traffic

These customized portals can redirect the user to your website which in turn will increase the traffic of your website.

You need to make sure that your company’s website and portals have similar and good UI/UX and are user-friendly. When we say similar UI/UX, it means that you need to pay attention to call-to-action buttons, screen transitions, button style, button texts, the actions, etc. Additionally, you have to make sure that you have your company’s logo, graphics, themes are similar across both the channels.

Transaction History:

If the customer has done any online transaction with you, then they can easily check all the details from the online portal without having to call your customer support. They can even opt for live chat if they have any issues with the order or place an exchange or return request right from the portal.

This saves ample time of your support staff and reduces their burden. The same time can be invested in researching and learning something new that can help them enhance your customers’ journey with you.

There are many companies that use portals to handle their customers and decrease the workload of their support staff. Portals help companies to enhance their brand reputation as happy customers always have something good to say about your brand and they become your promoters.

Well, in short, in the end, it makes everyone happy be it customer, support staff and you.

About us:

CRMJetty is home to innovative customer relationship solutions. Our tools ensure that you can render enhanced interactions at each stage of your customer lifecycle. So, if you are searching for a portal development company, we are here to help you in building the right customized portal. We have served in this industry for a decade and have built many custom portals like knowledge sharing portal, self-service portal, web development portals,customer portals, etc. Get in touch with us to create customized portals and we’ll help you kickstart your journey towards growing with portals.

We have specific solutions as well like Dynamics CRM customer portal, SuiteCRM customer portal, SugarCRM customer portal, and many more.

Conquer the Next Big Wave of Customer Experience with SaaS Portal

According to a Walker study, customer experience will overtake product and price as the main brand differentiator by 2020. And the best way to go about providing a holistic customer experience is to pay attention to the overall customer journey. Maintaining consistency throughout their interaction with you and your different departments is paramount.

Sounds easy, right?

But, in practice, it can be one of the most overwhelming tasks you’ll undertake.

The main hurdle is the misalignment of the goals of different departments. Because of which, the right information is not passed down to the right departments at the right time. For example, your support team might not understand the questions of your customers if they were not informed of the latest developments of the customer account. This not only frustrates your support department but usually results in your customers leaving your company.

And I am sure, no company wants or likes that.

To bring all your departments on the same page regarding your customers’ journey, a SaaS Client portal can be the perfect solution.

Thinking how?

Well, first we will have to understand the concept of SaaS portals.

What is SaaS Portal?

SaaS is an abbreviation of Software as a service. Using this, your users can connect to or use cloud-based apps and software over the internet usually using internet browsers. Now, what a SaaS client portal essentially does is it puts your data and customers in a unified space that is made accessible to your customers as well. Not only that but it also streamlines the processing of the information in an organization. It becomes an effortless unified point of interaction for your customers whereas it brings all your departments on the same page.

Apart from helping you provide an integrated customer journey, let’s see why it is imperative for all the businesses, from small to enterprise level to adopt this solution.

Why SaaS Client Portal?

Mobility: Did you know that the concept of SaaS dates back to the 1960s which was back then referred to as ‘time sharing system’. Even though personal computers became cheaper to own, the concept of SaaS seeped its way back into our lives because of the mobility it provides. Having a SaaS client portal eliminates the hassles of installing and maintaining applications for your customers as well as your employees. Everyone can just log in to their accounts and go about their queries or work without having to stick to a stationary desk. They can even reach out to you while traveling. This adds brownie points to your reputation with your customers.
Pay as you go: Now this point doesn’t directly impact your relationship with your customers but it definitely brings down your customer retention costs. Since you will be paying as you add more and more customers and bringing all your departments on the same page, you’ll see a positive change in your customer retention rate. Most importantly, since the right message reaches the right department with this enterprise portal, there’ll be lesser support tickets enabling a smoother interaction with your enterprise.
Constant upgrades: There are constant updates for every software or app that you might be using. The advantage here is that your customers and employees won’t have to go through the tedious process of first downloading the updated software, then installing the same in their PCs/laptops. With a SaaS customer portal, they’ll be using the upgraded version all the time without any of the above mentioned hassles.
Data management: This portal works as a data manager for both parties. You and your customers. Using this your customers can manage their personal data, orders, invoices, and if you have vendors, they can manage quotes, proposals, etc. Not only this but since this solution is customizable you can also integrate it with your CMS and manage your content from it.
Fully customizable & scalable: Every company plans on growing and expanding their customer base. So, if you invest in a static solution at the beginning that works for you when you have a limited number of customers, then you are going to face problems sooner than you expect. Apart from the future solution costing you more money plus data migration, there can be a lot of frustration from your existing customers for this switch. Because they will have to learn and understand new navigation and logic. Basically, what we are trying to suggest is that it will be a better idea to go for a solution that is scalable and customizable to accommodate your growing business’ needs.
Customer self-serve: A SaaS enterprise portal bridges the gap between your customers and your support staff. It gives your customers the liberty to play around the customer portal and look for answers to their questions as well as get a better hang of your products or services. With the knowledge base, they can simply type in their queries and get their answers. They can also update their details without having to get on calls or wait for your emails.
No hassles of hosting & maintenance: Since the software is hosted on your solution provider’s servers, you wouldn’t have to worry about any of the hosting and maintenance problems. However, make sure you are choosing a reliable solution provider as you might require prompt services in case anything goes sideways. Also, 24*7 services if you are offering the same to your customers. Otherwise, it will be hard for you to maintain a quality level in handling your customers and their queries.
Communication consistency: Since all your departments will have their separate logins and all the required information will be shared with them, it will be easier for them to communicate well with your customers. They will know exactly where the customer is in their journey, what price has been quoted, and what their previous queries were. All the departments across the company will have a 360-degree view of the accounts which in turn helps your company grow rapidly.

Before investing, do your due diligence and check if they have all the below-mentioned features to help you achieve your targets.

Must-have Features in SaaS Enterprise Portal

Secure customer log-in: Secure and single customer log-in to ensure your customers that their data is in safe hands and isn’t being misused for targeted marketing. This will not only build your brand’s credibility but will also get you a positive word of mouth.
Control over access: It goes without saying that you can’t share all your CRM data with your customers. Hence a solution like the SaaS enterprise customer portal should give you control over access of the data. It can have role-based accessibility feature as well where you can add contacts in a certain group and provide access accordingly.

Enterprise search: When we say enterprise search, it means the functionality of global search where customers could simply type in their query terms in the search bar and the portal fetches results from all over the database to help your customer navigate seamlessly through the portal.
Customizable page layouts: Every page or every module is different and serves different purposes. Some are to communicate with customers while some are to maintain CRM records and data. So, it is not possible that the default layout goes with every one of them. For proper functioning of any module, you’ll need to keep the right buttons, text, and actions at the right place and hence in such cases, you will need the feature of customizable page layouts in your SaaS customer portal.
Clean and intuitive dashboard: More than the right layout of the page, your portal needs a clean and intuitive design language throughout. Especially when it comes to the dashboard as it is the first thing your customers will see when they log in. So, make sure your SaaS portal has a clean, informative and intuitive dashboard for easy operations.
Integrated calendar: There is always some kind of interaction happening between you and your customers. Be it a quick call, weekly newsletter, unresolved support ticket, an appointment or a meeting. To give your teams as well as your customers an overview of these interactions, an integrated calendar is a must. This will allow your teams to manage their schedules effectively.
Knowledge base: Having an integrated knowledge base is a must as this is the basic functionality that all the companies provide at this point. It encourages your customers to self-serve and reduces the friction between them and your support team. As a result, your support team can take proactive measures and dig around to enhance your customers’ overall journey with you and lifetime value.

Wrapping up

In the era where every small, medium, and enterprise company is becoming customer-centric, no company can miss out on the opportunities that come with staying in touch with their customers.

A SaaS customer is definitely an upgrade from emails, calls, or online chat which your customers are eagerly waiting for.

So, let’s catch your business up to speed with a cloud-based customer portal!

3 Custom Features in SuiteCRM Portal for Better Customer Service

SuiteCRM is a customization boon. You get to set up your CRM as you want it. This includes things that your business flow needs.

Apart from these customizations, if you want a way to connect with your customers, adding a SuiteCRM WordPress customer portal can do the trick. However, it can often get overwhelming to know what features are must-haves in the portal and how much flexibility you need to manipulate those features easily. Some features are classic must-haves and others you build on top of the ones that SuiteCRM provides. Let’s take a look.

Custom relationship

SuiteCRM provides two kinds of relationships. One is one-to-one and the other one is the one-to-many relationship. If you integrate a portal, it is possible that you would have to configure it to work for the relationship settings that you have in place. But some portals can be dynamic in terms of code. No matter what relationship you have established in terms of your contacts, the portal should be able to handle it. The advantage here is that you won’t have to configure the portal especially to reflect this.

Custom module support

SuiteCRM provides a bunch of modules. But you may want to add more depending on your business logic. However, wouldn’t it be convenient if you could handle the configuration of this on the portal side as well?

Certain SuiteCRM customer portals come with all the modules that SuiteCRM provides. You can enable or disable them according to your business logic. You don’t have to go through any special configuration to view the module you actually need to see in your portal. A simple toggle can give you all the modules you need.

39111174 – the customer service target market support assistance concept

This makes your update cycles fast and your customers can get your new modules quicker.

Dynamic user accessibility

Once you configure all your modules in the portal, the next thing you would want is to provide access of these modules to the users. For that, it is imperative that your portal has the functionality that allows you to dynamically provide access to different types of users. Even for the custom modules added in the portal, you need this functionality.

This feature allows you to securely share data with only necessary people. It also builds a sense of trust among your customers.

Lastly,

These features are a must-have for when you want to get things done without special configuration cycles. They enhance a regular SuiteCRM customer portal and give you a little something extra. Your portal should reflect your business requirements and logic. These features go in addition to the usual features like secure sign in, unlimited sign-ins, etc.

When you are looking for a customer portal, keeping your customers in the center is important. But keeping your staff in mind is equally important so that they can take care of your customers effectively.

Knowledge Sharing Portal: Educate Your Customers, Teams, and Partners

Remember the days when you are not able to decide what to eat or where to eat? Well, we all have those days and what do we do? We directly go online and search for good nearby restaurants or if we are in the mood to explore, we search for must-try cuisines available in local restaurants.

Deciding about the restaurant was just a small example. Today, because of the internet, everyone can access any information easily. And we make so many decisions based on the available information, reviews, and feedback.

Almost all our decisions like purchasing clothes, gadgets, booking hotels, tickets, etc. are based on the information, reviews, feedback, etc. available online.

Our decisions are largely affected by what we see on social media or the Internet as a whole.

Because of these changes in the customer behavior landscape and the excessive amount of data generation, it has become mandatory for companies to share the right knowledge with their customers, partners, and employees directly. What knowledge you have to share with whom might vary but the means remain the same.

“Knowledge Sharing Portals”

First, let’s explore what a knowledge portal is.

According to IGI Global:

“A knowledge portal is an Internet-based computer program that constitutes a single point of access to organizational knowledge, integrating knowledge repositories, expert directories, collaboration tools, and other knowledge-intensive applications”.

In simple terms: Knowledge sharing portals work as a gateway between you and your customers, employees or any other parties you interact with. It is a perfect medium to share organizational knowledge, product knowledge, technical knowledge, etc.

Now let’s see what’s the importance of knowledge sharing and knowledge portal that makes a must-have for every company.

Currently, millennials are the biggest target group for any tech company if not for any company and according to research done by Salesforce, 89% of millennials are using search engines to search for answers to their customer service questions. Additionally, 84% use self-service portals to find answers to their queries.

Pre-portal, it is possible that your employees were facing issues in handling customer requests, sharing documents, user manuals, handbooks, guides, etc. And to answer a single customer query, they had to go through the long email trails to provide the right support.

Additionally, being in touch with the customers through multiple channels like calls, emails, messages, etc. can be straining for employees as well as your customers.

And this is where a knowledge portal plays a vital role by providing your customers with a unified space to explore everything about your organization. It also automates the process of sharing data, information, etc. with your clients, partners, teams and any other people who need to have the knowledge of your organization. These people can log in to portals and get the information as and when they need it.

Not only this, but they can access user manuals, handbooks easily to find the solution to their technical queries.

We can easily say that with the help of portals, knowledge sharing is just a few taps away.

These are not the only benefits of knowledge sharing or knowledge sharing portal. Let’s look at some more:

Easy document sharing

This is one of the key features of knowledge sharing portals. They make sharing documents with your customers, partners, and teams effortless and efficient. This is one of the most secure ways to share important documents like invoices, contracts, NDAs, user manuals, product updates, analysis reports, etc.

Now, they can access these documents easily from anywhere at any time in a secure manner. Additionally, it also maintains the logs for the documents uploaded, shared, edited, etc.

Marketing campaigns

Knowledge portals let you send the marketing content directly to customers and portal users. This allows you to successfully run marketing campaigns and understand your customer base. You can even send notifications about new product launches or any new updates in product features.

Sharing case studies

It becomes easy for your customers to know about your work through case studies on the knowledge portal. Your employees can upload case studies, FAQs, etc. in the knowledge portals making it easier for them to understand your products and services.

Apart from all these benefits, knowledge portals also lessen ticket generation. As you will be providing almost all the necessary information about your products and services, your customers won’t need to contact you as much.

But before you go on investing in a knowledge portal, here are a few knowledge sharing practices you need to follow.

Go for custom knowledge portal development

Every company has a different way of operating and business logic. Of course, you can purchase a knowledge portal online. But, we would recommend you reach out to companies that can create a custom knowledge portal for you. This will save you those extra resources otherwise spent on customizing the original portal. Having custom portals gives you the freedom over the features, workflow, and logic of the solution too.

Add accessibility rules

With a custom portal, you can decide who should have what level of access. You can make your knowledge portal public or login mandatory. Not only this but you can even add extra security measures like two-step authentication if needed.

Add pre-sales queries

Nowadays, customers want to have in-depth knowledge of the product before purchasing it and so it becomes very obvious that they’ll do detailed research. And while doing so, they will have lots of queries.

In such scenarios, the pre-sales queries section comes to your rescue. Here, you can add all the answers to frequently asked pre-purchasing queries making it easy for your customers to make a decision. This will also help in building confidence and trust among your customers.

Integrate it with CRM

The integration of the knowledge portal with your CRM makes it easy for you to know more about your customers and business partners. Additionally, if any query raises, you can see it in the CRM and assign it a salesperson to resolve. This integration streamlines your operations. So, make sure to integrate your knowledge portal with CRM.

Wrapping it up:

Knowledge and data are the new oil that can take your organization to the next level. And sharing the right pieces of information with your customers can help build rapport with them giving you the upper hand of your competitors.

This Blog is Originally posted here: https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/knowledge-sharing-portal-educate-your-customers-teams-partners/

How a Customer Portal can Win You the Race in 2020

One of my pet peeves is to have to ask for help to fix tech problems, both software and hardware ones. On that note, I also don’t prefer asking for directions. Ever since I saw Google Maps, I have depended on it, not only in familiar places but also in strange cities, on hilltops and everywhere else.

In my research, what I noticed was the vibe of these communities. The ones that were official forums by HDD manufacturers had replies from the people working at the company, helping out, replying to each repeated question and tailoring their solutions for each question. Seasoned tinkerers and the company members sounded like they knew each other and remembered their previous interactions. Even though the product was proprietary, the company members did not insist on fixing it only at the service center. When I wanted to fix my hard drive, I poured over online forums, learning which ones were genuine, which ones were more likely to brick my HDD and everything in between. Then I threw caution to the wind, risked my assignments on the HDD and followed detailed instructions and fixed it!

More or less, the tech community has realized that there are people who like to fix these things themselves. So they give the information and use their staff’s time to fix the problems of the people who don’t want to get inside their gadgets themselves. It saves them time, money, and resources.

Since tech is one of the most impactful industries of this decade and the last, the way it does things is noticed and replicated. This has given a welcome rise to client portals.

Kodak. Radio Shack. Toys “R” Us. They are some of the companies that went bankrupt due to their inability to successfully innovate.

One of the reasons was also because traditional business models are not working for most of the industries now. That’s why CEOs ranked this as their number one challenge. Updating and reinventing their business model.

Business models need to keep up with the ever-changing customer landscape.

And building a dynamic customer portal can help you tackle these challenges. On top of that, here’s why a customer portal can help your business scale in 2020:

Tailored support

No matter what the product or service is, customers have various pain points. They don’t want the common answer, “turn it off and turn it back on”. A customer portal becomes the place where they can come and get the answers they need, and more importantly when they need it. Prompt customer service, whether it is by the support staff or a portal goes a long way in customer retention and loyalty.

An information repository

For someone like me who learned everything I know about gadgets outside the classroom, such a knowledge base was one of the best tools. Not only does it work as a way to give your customers a platform to get information about the products they have, but also as a way to give information that can help them make their buying decision.

The knowledge base in a client portal gives customers and potential customers a way to learn about your product and how it can benefit them. Pretty much what this blog is aiming to do. The knowledgebase is sneaky that way but that’s the fun of it!

Emails are ancient

Recently, one of my friends ordered a bunch of bags from a store and coincidentally got the same ones as a gift from her partner. She was out of $100 and so was her partner and two sets of the same things. So, they had to return one set. When she went back to the website to hunt for a return button, there wasn’t one! So she had to resort to emails.

It gets worse though.

The store claimed that they never got her emails and the return window had closed but if she still wanted to, the shipping cost would be on her. It is safe to say that the less than acceptable customer service overshadowed the superior quality of the product. This happened because of not having a fully equipped customer portal and instead of having to use emails!

In 2020, if you want your business to get anywhere, focus on customer experience and I can promise you, email helps you nowhere.

Proactive offerings

Your CRM is a database of all the customers’ information and your products. If your business is lifestyle products and services, you can automate surveys to get your customers to tell you their preferences. Apart from surveys, when they buy a product, for example, trousers, you can have the portal ask whom it is for. You can configure your portal to proactively alert them about the preferred styles and even suggest sizes based on previous purchases.

This shortens the time that they need for making a positive buying decision. The effect of that is, of course, positive for you.

2020 is the year that the experience industry builds excessively on the last year’s experience. You can learn a lot from a year that brought to light how large companies treat consumers (not that great), their employees (absolutely horribly).

A customer portal serves both these parties well. And you most certainly want to make sure you don’t do what they did to their businesses because they didn’t focus on the right things.

Source: https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/how-customer-portal-can-win-you-race/

SalesForce and WordPress: Integrating Two Powerful Products

The first thing which comes to our mind when we hear the words Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is “Salesforce”.

Right?

It’s the company that made businesses realize the importance of using a CRM platform. Not only this, but many businesses claim their CRM platform to be the best.

Spotify, American Express, Canon, Toyota, and many other big brands use Salesforce CRM. These companies with data-heavy operations reflect why it is popular among thousands of businesses.

Similarly, when you hear the words Content Management System (CMS), what comes to your mind?

“WordPress”.

Correct?

It’s just five years junior to Salesforce, but has made a strong reputation in the market for itself. Any person who wants to start blogging usually prefer WordPress because of its simple hosting and easy to use interface.

Just imagine the combined power of these two highly functional products. Salesforce to manage the data of your customers and WordPress for the content of your website. Both have a unique set of features. But the major complexity arrives when you have to integrate these products. It is essential to make this integration seamless to get the best of them.

With this integration, lead generation and nurturing become effortless. Capturing leads from your website and directly collecting the information in your CRM leads to more organized data and lesser human errors.

Going further if you wish to give your customers a more personalized browsing experience and boost engagement then you need to include plugins like Salesforce customer portal for WordPress or any apps or customized integrations. It depends on your requirements.

Let’s see the ways you can integrate these powerhouses.

Integrating with Other Applications

Businesses prefer using third-party apps when integrating Salesforce CRM and WordPress. Using these third-party applications, you can implement additional functionalities. Let’s say, you are running an email campaign and you wish to link your email with Salesforce, then you can use the famous email marketing software named MailChimp. A third-party app. You can easily add sign up forms for your websites, get details of subscribers and even send the broadcast emails.

MailChimp comes you with an option to integrate with Salesforce easily, which allows you to even import your Salesforce contacts with your lists and easily access it from anywhere. Most of the third-party applications are easy to integrate and get the work done. Yes, you might need to invest in these apps but they are cost effective and user-friendly.

Customized Integration

There would be times when you would come across complex requirements. This is when custom-built integrations or customizations come to your rescue. Using these integrations, the sky would be your limit. One such customization is adding a WordPress customer portal to your CRM. This enables your customers to update their details and manage all the other aspects of interacting with your business.

But developing these solutions you might need to have an expert by your side to help you. Even though availing these services can be expensive but you won’t have to spend on licensing costs. You’ll have control over style, interface, and experience that you will provide with these customizations.

Pro-tip: While integrating Salesforce and WordPress, it is very obvious that the number of leads will increase and their quality will get better too. Your choice of plug-in depends on the budget and features you require. Being a first-time user, it is better to go for a third-party plug-in which already has features rather than investing huge chunks in developing one. This will also help you understand whether or not you can work with it. If you think this is not flexible for you, then you can go for a customized plugin according to your requirements.

Wrapping it up:

Using Salesforce WordPress integration is one of the great decisions as it helps you in growing your business and generating quality leads. Not only this, but it also helps you in keeping the customer data organized.

Client Portal Platform: A Unique Key to Have Happy Customers

WordPress Customer Portal, WordPress CRM Portal, WordPress Portal

Remember when you were a kid and tried to learn how to ride a bicycle? And then there was no stopping you. How you didn’t want any support from your parents and wanted to do it by yourself?

Why?

Because riding it, on your own, brings a sense of independence, determination and an achievement that you can do something on your own.

That’s the exact same thing your customers wish. Most of the tech-savvy people in this “I can Google it” era want to do everything by themselves. Even the product/service support that you want to provide. They want to learn and explore your business products or services on their own.

That’s one of the reasons why client portal platforms are popular among most B2B as well as B2C organizations. According to a research, 89 percent of US customers wish for brands and organizations to have an online customer support portal.

Why?

As mentioned above, your customers prefer to solve issues related to your product on their own first.

And that’s not the only reason why having a client portal platform is a necessity for every organization. There are many other reasons.

But, before looking at the necessity of having a client portal, let’s discuss what is it:

Client portals are the first step of communication for your customers. It works as a gateway for your customers to track their orders, chat with your support team, check order history, make payments, access important files, etc. It works as a central hub or central storage system to access resources or gain information about their dealings with your organization.

Now let’s look at why having a client portal platform in this DIY era is a necessity.

Happy Customer Base

In a portal, you can create and share the knowledge base of your products with your customers. Which helps them to find and solve their issues on their own. Most importantly, if they are not able to solve, they can chat with your support staff right from the portal or can add their query as a case too.

Portals help to reduce your ticket generation which, in turn, allows your employees to productively utilize that time in researching or learning something new. Hence, having a customer portal results in saving time and resources and creating a happier customer base.

Security

Portals use the latest security measures such as SSL encryption, firewall, etc. to make sure that there are no cases of the data breach. These encryption measures make sure that your organization’s and customers’ data stay protected. Additionally, it provides you with the functionality to provide only necessary access of the data to your customers.

Yes! you heard it right, these centralized portals give you the privilege to decide who can access what data of your company as well as of your customers.

Build Community

Using these portals, it becomes easy for your customers to not only reach out to you any time, but they can also interact and share their knowledge of the product with each other. Portals work as a platform for your customers to interact with each other and share their insights and knowledge. This helps you to build up a community and even helps your company in increasing your customer base.

Enhance Customer Relationship Management

Building a community, answering your customer queries immediately, securing data of your customers, all these unique features of portals will help you to enhance your relationship with the customers. It is very obvious that when you attend their needs on time, they are likely to stick by your side.

Another good thing about the client portal platform is that they can easily integrate with your CRM platform. Which means whenever a customer raises a new query, your employees get notifications which allows them to solve their query as soon as possible.

Improved Communication

Your organization will be uploading almost all the important resources about your products in the portal which helps your customer to easily find the solution of their issues. Because of this, there will be less redundant and repetitive questions from customers which will help your employees to manage time and communicate more skillfully.

Centralized Information

Your customers expect to reach out to you if they face any issue in your products. For that, you might be redirecting them directly to your website’s knowledge section or contact us page. But, as your company grows, you might not be able to help each and every one of your customers, quickly. You might not be able to provide proper attention to them.

And unhappy customers will definitely leave. This is when having a unified information platform for storing and sharing important information is a necessity. For which, portals are the best fit.

Wrap up:

In this ‘I can Google it’ era, it is necessary to have a good relationship with your customers and provide them what they ask. And how they ask for it.

You can go in the market and search for a client portal platform or you can also opt for a customized portal. For a customized solution, it is necessary to keep your vision user-centric to get the best results.

About us:

CRMJetty is a hub of innovative customer relationship solutions. Our tools ensure that you can render enhanced interactions at each stage of your customer lifecycle. So, if you are searching for a portal development company, we are here to help you in building the right customized portals. Something that your customers will love. We work with multiple CRM and CMS platforms. Be it a WordPress customer portal, WordPress CRM portal or with any other CRM or CMS platform like Dynamics, Salesforce, etc. We are serving in this industry for a decade now. Get in touch with us to create customized portals and we’ll help you kickstart your journey towards growing with portals.

Web Portal – A Way to Success

Whenever your customers visit any e-store, they might have come across various statements that read:

“To submit any product related query, you can contact our support team at this email id.”

“If you need any additional information about our product, you can check out the FAQs page.”

“Our support staff operates between business hours only.”

In such scenarios, it becomes difficult for your customers to find where they must contact in case of a query. Being an e-store owner when it comes to interacting with customers, it is necessary to have proper flow to help your user navigate your e-store. And it is obvious you don’t want the products, contacts, services and new query emails to come to you over email.

The best way to handle this problem is to use web portal solutions. The portal is a perfect solution to handle customer related queries. They make it easy to solve real-life problems of your customers. But have you ever thought of building a custom base portal for your business?

Having a custom web portal is the best decision for your business. It helps you to handle your customers and grow your business graph.

Here I have mentioned some of the must-have features you must consider while developing a customized web portal:

Interactive Dashboard:

Dashboard is the first thing your customer interacts when they log in. So, having a dynamic and interactive dashboard is a must. It is necessary to provide users with quick modules of all the important features they might require directly on the dashboard. You can make it even easier for your users by categorizing your dashboard more minutely. It can be on the basis of their history and or a display of products that they generally prefer. Don’t make the dashboard complex for the user to understand and use. A dashboard is a quick summary of all the important features using a simple representation. Hence, you must ensure that it has the following things:

Make sure dashboard is properly categorized to make it easy for your customers to search around.

Provide quick features like “Add To Cart” or “Wishlists”.

Provide better UI/UX for better customer experience.

The most important factor while providing these facilities is to make sure that the interface is tidy and clean. Avoid displaying lengthy messages and content. Because such lengthy messages distract your customers while purchasing things.

Tracking:

Tracking is a basic feature. We all track our food, online orders, support tickets, etc. It has become an important part of the customer service. Providing your customers the ability to track their orders, tickets, food, etc. gives them good experience. Hence, it is necessary to provide your customers with updates on their orders.

Providing tracking features to your customers will make it easy for them to track the status of their goods, shipments, etc. You can even send your customers important updates regarding delivery via email or messages.

Using tracking features you can make it easy for your customers to make next order, because this helps them to know the estimated delivery time. You can even claim that the delivery is faster than usual as this inspires your customer to come back to you.

Knowledge Base:

Today we are obsessed with mobile phones and technology and as a result, customers need businesses to provide answers or solutions to their problems immediately. Currently, for any issue, your customers would be interacting with the support team. But, the best way to provide better support to your customers is to provide them with the perfect knowledge base that contains details and provides solution to your products. The knowledgebase provides the user freedom to search for a solution to their problems on their own and understand it till some extent. This helps your support team in turn as this knowledge base helps in decreasing support tickets and your team gets an opportunity to invest their time in some productive work.

Multiple Device Accessibility:

Today people need mobility. They cannot stick to one place and work for the whole day, as there are many other activities they manage simultaneously. It is necessary that people can access their data from anywhere at any time and can handle critical business communication. Mobile responsiveness is the number one priority for almost every industry to improve customer interaction. Similarly, it is necessary to have your web portal development done such that it supports multiple devices like smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc.

Business Logic:

I know, it is an easy solution to have a readymade portal solution but they have pre-decided workflow. However, different businesses have different workflow. Therefore, it is better to have a web portal development team on board or outsource web portal development services to a company that helps you customize it according to your business logic. The main purpose behind opting for a custom portal development is you can easily have full control over it. You can easily customize from scratch according to your business logic and add the flow of features and activities according to your needs and your customer’s requirements.

Final Words:

Web portal solutions are the key to customer management. When working with portals the primary goal is to make them scalable so that it supports your customer’s requirements.

Author Bio :

Mr. Maulik Shah is the founder & CEO of CRMJetty, the hub of innovative customer relationship solutions, provides ready to CMS integrate portal solutions for various CRM, including Web Portal Solutions. Maulik is a tech enthusiast and writes about the various aspects of e-commerce technology.

Source :- https://www.sooperarticles.com/internet-articles/web-design-articles/web-portal-way-success-1751911.html

Empower Your Customers, Employees, and Vendors with Self-Service Portal

We are all familiar with the functioning and advantages of the intranet. It’s a secured computer network that enables individuals across the organization to access the internet for sharing information and collaborating.

But it only lets you connect and engage with your colleagues and management. This computer network leaves out your outside connections like customers, vendors, suppliers, partners, and people who are not directly employed by your organization.

That’s where the extranet comes in! It’s a secure and controlled private network that lets you and your employees to communicate well and clearly with all the outsiders sharing only the necessary data with limited edit rights.

An extension of your intranet network.

The same way, organizations using CRM to store and share all the necessary information is limited to your office. And a self-service portal can be its extension.

If you are reading this article that means you are currently using SugarCRM and looking for a way to smartly engage your customers. So, let us help you understand the concept of the SugarCRM customer portal, its features, and how it empowers your customers, employees, and vendors.

What is SugarCRM Customer Portal?

A portal is a gateway that provides access of your data to outside entities like customers, partners, etc. in a secure and limited way. Not only access, but you can also provide them with the edit and manage rights to bifurcate some load of your support agents. Hence, a portal bridges the gap between your organization and the entities you deal on a regular basis.

For example, with a SugarCRM portal, you can provide your customers the access to their profiles and to a certain extent, they will be able to manage it on their own. This means one less task on your humongous to-do list.

This is only one of the many advantages of investing in a self-service portal.

Let’s explore some of the must-have features in SugarCRM portal and how they help you expand your customer base.

Customer Portal Features

Case Deflection: No need to be present 24/7 to provide impeccable customer support. With the customer portal, they’ll be able to log in, search for their queries and get answers without any hassle. In case they don’t find the answer of their query, they can add a case with their question which later on you can add answer to.

Role-based Accessibility Management: With this feature, you will be able to provide access to necessary CRM modules to your customers, vendors, suppliers, employees, etc. Such a feature helps you protect your data.

Scalable & Customizable: To ensure your ever-growing organization’s needs, you need to make sure that your portal solution is scalable and that you can mold to your business logic.

Online Chat : Another feature that is a necessity in today’s information-hungry world is online chat. Having an in-built online chat in your portal will directly affect your customer interaction. They’ll be able to reach you as soon as they log in to the portal. Imagine a customer’s issue getting resolved in a matter of minutes. How happy would they be?

Now, let’s see how your organization will benefit from such a solution:
Streamlined Communication: If you sit with your support team or even just overview their daily activities for a day, you’ll find that it’s really hard to communicate with customers over multiple channels. There are emails, calls, social media, direct messages, and whatnot. With a CRM portal, you will be taking away your team’s misery by giving them one platform to handle everything. Support tickets, calls, emails, all at one place.

Reduced Costs: As you streamline customer communication, you’ll realize there is no need to have a huge 15-20 people support team. Only 3 can support your whole customer base. Then you can reallocate some of your resources to different departments to maximize the efficiency of your organization. This can reduce your overall departmental and hiring costs.

Lesser Redundant Tasks: Have you ever had someone asking a single question at least 10 times over a period of one week? Well, ask your sales and support team. They deal with this on a regular basis. Customers asking them about that one complicated feature over and over again. What if you could put a rest to this once and for all? How? With the portal for SugarCRM. The knowledge base feature will let you create an inventory of such questions and your customers can easily log in and enter their queries to find ready-made solutions. So, your support team will answer 2 questions in place of 20 each day. And more importantly, they focus on other important things like enhancing the customer journey, coming up with unique ways to pitch clients, etc.

Enhanced Productivity: The above two points make the case for this point as well. With lesser redundant tasks and streamlined communication, your team will be focusing on impactful tasks. Yielding better results for you with improved customer interaction.

Satisfied Customers: Imagine you are a customer and you had a small question about how to start with complicated software. Would you want to wait for 24 hours for a representative to reply to your email or would you just go online and look into their customer base for that query? Definitely the online option, right? Well, again the portal comes in the picture that will help you be there for your customers even when you are not in your office space. This will not only reduce your response time, but will also improve customer satisfaction, increase team productivity, and a lot more.

Wrapping Up:
If your customers are at the center of all your marketing, sales, and product development strategies, then a self-service Sugar portal is something worth investing in. You can just search for ‘customer portal’ on SugarOutfitters and choose from the many available options. Take the features we’ve mentioned as a checklist to find the best suitable solution.

Source :- https://www.sugaroutfitters.com/blog/empower-your-customers-employees-and-vendors-with-selfservice-portal