Self-service is the future of customer service, and businesses have started realizing it. Gone are the days where customers would have to call or email companies to register their problems and follow up on them until they are solved. Instead, businesses today look for customer service solutions that endow their customers with more flexibility and enhance their experience. Similarly, companies are also on the hunt for ways to automate their employee management and reduce dependency on emails, calls, or other manual processes.

All in all, companies want to give their customers and employees the option of self-service. And for that, they need a self-service portal. When customers and employees get the solutions to most problems themselves, it won’t only help speed up the process but also reduce the burden on support agents.

In this post, we are going to talk about the self-service portals for Dynamics 365. By the end of this post, you’ll be clear about Dynamics 365 self-service portal and its importance. You’ll also get an in-depth knowledge of both the Dynamics 365 customer self-service portal and the Dynamics 365 employee self-service portal separately in detail.

So, let’s start with the basic overview of the Dynamics 365 Self Service Portal.

What Is a Dynamics 365 Self-Service Portal?

A Dynamics 365 self-service portal is basically an interface like a website or an app that contains information and resources to enable users to find solutions and resolve issues. Be it a Dynamics 365 self-service portal or any other CRM portal, the primary role is to help users cater to most of their common needs without any manual intervention. A self-service portal complements an organization’s service agents and shares their workload.

A self-service portal is great that saves both time and money for an organization. When human resources get more free time, they can think of better and innovative ideas, work on more complex problems, and help the company grow. It can also help you build a community to teach customers new skills.

What Is Dynamics 365 Customer Self-Service Portal?

As the name suggests, the Dynamics 365 customer self-service portal helps organizations provide a self-service option to the customers. There are also features for assisted service scenarios present in this portal.

Here are the resources that a Dynamics customer self-service portal provides to help resolve issues.

Knowledge Articles

The Knowledge Base articles benefit an organization by reducing the volume of logged cases and complaints. This is because customers can find answers to their questions in the knowledge base in the portal. It also helps improve customer service and satisfaction levels as they don’t have to go through a long process of generating a support ticket every time and waiting for it to close.

Forums

Forums help staff track customers’ problems, and your staff takes part in giving answers to those problems. When the staff answers the questions over a long time, they all pile up and create a public archive for reference for all the others with the same problems.

Support Cases

Cases allow customers to submit support cases. It is one of the most important features and provides an organization a way to converse and interact with customers. The main benefit is that customers can always reach the customer support team if they don’t find anything relevant to solve their problems in knowledge articles, videos, or blogs. This way, they don’t feel they are by themselves and can always get in touch with the right support agent.

What Is a Dynamics Employee Self-Service Portal?

A Dynamics 365 Employee Self Service Portal provides organizations with a way to assist employees to find specific human resources, access the company’s relevant information, and resolve employees’ issues easily.

The resources to help resolve issues of employees are as follows:

Knowledge Articles

This is also similar to the one in the Dynamics customer portal. The difference is that it contains information that concerns employees rather than customers. Knowledge articles contain general company information, procedures, rules and regulations, policies, emergency procedures, and other relevant information.

Forums

The Forum functionality works in the same way as it does in the customer self-service portal. However, the discussions here are about topics related to employee self-service. Besides, it may also contain general topics, company’s goals, announcements, opinions, etc. These are mostly the topics that employees can access anytime and participate. However, there is a difference. The forums in the employee portal are accessible for only the internal staff.

Support Cases

Here, employees generate support cases for issues they face in different things like filing ITR, calculating salary, leave-count error, system breakdown, etc. The cases are mostly around the issues that customers may face at times while working in an organization. Based on the support case type, the concerned team takes the appropriate action.

For instance, if A generates a case that their system has crashed, the IT department gets back to the employee and helps them fix the issue. In the same way, if there is any issue concerning leave miscalculation or general query, the HR department mostly takes care of it all.

How Does a Dynamics 365 Self-Service Portal Benefit?

Coming to benefits, a self-service portal helps solve customers’ problems proactively. This helps increase their trust in your brand and win loyalty. When they get information beyond simple answers to their questions, it helps them know more about your products and services. A portal also helps boost site traffic with a custom knowledge base. You can encourage your customers to use your portal by inserting the link to your blog, FAQs, etc. A Dynamics self-service portal also allows users to personalize their accounts. Whenever a customer or an employee logs in, they can get their name, profile photo (or custom avatar), and curate content on their home page. This helps the users get only the relevant information they need and save their time, engaging them further.

A Dynamics self-service portal also contributes to the enhancement of productivity of customer service agents. At times, support agents are swamped with so many redundant questions or queries that they fail to focus on bigger issues. A portal frees them up to dedicatedly solve major issues, unlike small redundant queries, and focus on the big picture. The proper utilization of their time in this way brings more productivity to your business.

When you can improve the customer support experience, it is sure to boost your overall sales. The satisfied customers will return to your store for future purchases and contribute to increasing your repeat purchase volume. Over time, these repeat customers will also help you gain more customers through word-of-mouth publicity.

Coming to other advantages, you can offer 24/7 customer support that runs day in and day out for your customers. How? As support agents work in shifts, there may be some non-working hours when your customer may not get the service they need. However, if you have the customer portal, the customer can easily log in and find out the solution to the problem – especially if it is self-solvable. Similarly, an employee can access the information relevant to them at any time irrespective of office hours.

A Dynamics 365 self-service portal also helps you enhance your content management. You can track customers’ and employees’ queries, questions, etc., and update the content accordingly. For example, you can revise your FAQs, documentation, manuals, etc., for customers to refer to. You can also include informative visuals and videos to cater to customers more engagingly.

Moving forward, the overall expenses of customer support go down. This is because calls, faxes, emails, etc., may require you to invest more money and effort. Unlike this, a portal helps address the most common queries and questions of customers. This helps reduce the volume of calls, emails, etc., to serve customers and brings down the total expenses significantly.

A self-service portal also helps level up social media visibility and outreach. If you have multiple social media accounts, you can increase your interactions with customers on your accounts. You can also participate in various forums relevant to your industry and answer their questions. Through all these social media channels, you can redirect your target audience to your portal. This way, you can get more visibility and social media outreach that can be good for your brand-building.

So, if you want to build your customer self-service portal or employee self-service portal, our portal solution can help you out.

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CRMJetty – Your Right Portal Development Partner to Build Your Portal

Now that you have understood how a self-service portal can help your organization grow, now is the time to develop one for your organization. However, while building your portal from scratch may sound attractive, it may not be feasible – especially if your business is in the nascent stage. Well, there’s a way out of this situation – a launch-ready portal solution.

Our Dynamics 365 portal solution helps optimize your business operations and improve customer relationships. It provides you with the following benefits:

• A unified space where you can interact with your customers and channel partners.
• Provides self-service support to customers in a hassle-free manner.
• Helps provide more flexibility to manage operations on the go with a phone.
• Enhances security by providing role-based access.
• Helps build an efficient sales pipeline to shorten buyers’ cycles.

We also provide configuration freedom for entities like cases, knowledge base, appointments, invoices, documents, forums, hierarchy management. If you also need a full-fledged Dynamics 365 self-service portal exclusively built for your business, we can do it for you. Our developer team can collect the portal requirements, build a development roadmap, and proceed. It also gives you iterative updates on the progress in development, and once it is ready, the QA team checks it. If it finds it all ready to enter the market, we hand it over to you for your business. We can also provide repair and maintenance services for your old portal to make it future-ready.

So, let’s get your portal off the ground right away.

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Source : https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/dynamics-365-self-service-portal-manage-operations-better/

For any organization, there are various aspects that you need to take care of. And support service is an important one among them. When it comes to IT support services, case management holds great importance.

What is Case Management?

Case management (also referred to as a ticketing system) is a vital aspect of an IT organization. Case management involves providing customer service by handling the cases (or tickets) that customers generate.

Case management happens when a customer encounters an IT issue or requests an IT service. The support staff then uses the case management software to optimize the customer experience throughout the resolution process. The IT support team takes care of critical case management key performance indicators (KPIs), including response time and resolution times. The service team may also need to maintain a knowledge base to compile common issues and reduce resolution time.

Case management is important for an organization because inefficiencies in case management cause unprecedented service downtime. The mismanagement of cases causes unnecessary escalations, which can increase support costs for the business. It may lead to reduced ROI and profitability. To add to that, delays in case resolution can also impact customer satisfaction levels.

Salesforce is a popular CRM out of various CRM systems due to ease of development, scalability, and customization. If you are a Salesforce-based business owner and looking for Salesforce case management best practices, you are at the right place.

This post will guide you through the various practices you can adopt for Salesforce case management and make it efficient.

So, let’s start.

1. Encourage Self-Service to Avoid Overload

Digitally smart people today seek solutions to their problems before they get in touch with the support team. So, you can also encourage them to solve some minor problems themselves by providing a fully comprehensive knowledge base.

Yes, a knowledge base is crucial for any organization because customers can refer to it for common issues. They can read articles, FAQs, etc., and watch video tutorials to answer their common queries. This prevents unnecessary creation of cases by them which helps reduce the burden on your Salesforce case management team.

It is also essential to keep updating your knowledge base. Keep analyzing the most common issues, compile them along with the steps for their resolution, and keep them in the knowledge base.

2. Set the Priority of Cases – Rightly

Organizing and prioritizing cases is as important as solving them. Have a proper grading system to organize your cases according to urgency. There are two common models of grading that organizations use.

• First-in-First-Out People also call this model the “first-come, first-served” model at times. In this Salesforce case management model, the support team handles cases in the same order as the customers generate them. First case first, second case second, and so on.
  
  
• Pick and Choose This model, “Pick and Choose or VIP,” is where the support team handles customers’ cases based on the case’s urgency.

Based on your requirements, you pick and stick to one model. Alternatively, you can switch between both models if required. No matter which model you pick, your ultimate aim should be to make your customer support 100% satisfactory for end customers.

3. Always Track Salesforce Case Management Progress

Without staying abreast of your Salesforce case management progress, you can’t determine the success rate. Therefore, keep track of all the cases that customers create and monitor their status regularly.

For better clarity, segregate your cases into different categories based on the stage they are at. Typically, the cases can be:

• New/Open
• In Progress
• On Hold
• Closed

Work out and follow consistent criteria to classify any case in one of the above four categories. Also, make sure that a customer doesn’t generate a case twice to avoid duplication and unnecessary effort.

4. Utilize Case Information to Grade Urgency

There should be a way to grade the case urgency according to the information provided. The team should check for the customer’s contact information, the description of the issue and assess its effect on the customer’s business. All this information can help you gauge the urgency of the case and grade it accordingly.

Developing a standard procedure to analyze and determine ticket urgency helps ensure that the support team aligns priorities with the customer’s needs.

5. Prevent Junk Emails

Don’t let junk emails enter your help desk. This is because junk emails can be a big problem for the support team, and filtering them manually can be time-consuming.

Sometimes, due to these junk emails, there can be instances that your team overlooks actual cases that may need a timely response. To avoid this kind of problem in Salesforce case management, there should be a mechanism to eliminate the need for manual filtering of junk emails. There should be a way to configure spam filters for the support desk.

6. Streamline IT Service Request Validation

Before your IT staff start working on any case or request, validation is a must. Validation has different components, which include:

• Ensuring that the support agent who passes the case to the IT staff is authorized to do so.
• Ensuring that the end recipient of the service genuinely requires the service requested.

It is, therefore, advisable to have one or two persons who validate the case a user generates before sending it to the IT support staff. The department heads can help analyze the cases and determine whether they are self-solvable or not.

Accordingly, they can pass it on to the staff or pass the relevant information link to the customer to help them solve the case themselves.

This won’t only prevent unnecessary overload of cases but also make Salesforce case management faster and better. The team will be able to focus more on valid cases that genuinely need intervention.

7. Avoid Lengthy Email Conversations

Try to collect as much necessary information at the time of the creation of a case. It will help avoid lengthy email conversations after your customer creates a case. You can use a portal or case management software to configure request templates to ask customers all the relevant questions when creating the case. This will help back-and-forth conversations with customers over the phone or via email and speed up the process.

8. Segment Your Cases Well

The better an organization segments support tickets to meet SLAs constantly, the better is Salesforce case management. When you segment cases accurately, it helps ensure that incident reports, service requests, etc., about a particular technology or the customer journey stage, reach the most qualified person.

In other words, you should categorize the routing of cases based on their type. For instance, you can route hardware problems to your hardware team and software problems to your software team. If there is any service inquiry related to billing, shipping, etc., you can route them to the logistics team. Whichever way you segregate, there should be the ability to grade support requests with segregation. The lesser the first-response time, the better is the customer engagement.

9. Stay Proactive to Avoid Unwanted Escalation of Cases

There is a need to avoid the escalation of cases to a higher support level. This is because it increases the overall cost of case resolution. Hence, be proactive and keep a check on the tickets that are approaching Service Level Agreement violations. Sometimes, case escalation may also happen if your team unintentionally misses a case and the deadline to solve the case is about to approach.

So, make sure that your IT support team doesn’t take too long to resolve the more minor cases, don’t miss any cases, and escalate tickets only when genuinely required.

10. Create a Proper Support Workflow

Define a proper support workflow – a system that describes how the support staff should handle new cases as the customers generate them. A support workflow gives a predictable set of steps that the support team can follow for Salesforce case management and tackle different cases. It also helps manage customer expectations in regard to how you handle cases.

11. Follow the Data and Track KPIs

Take care of service metrics also known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). You should measure the KPIs including average response time, overall resolution time, average overall Salesforce case resolution time, case escalation rates, and self-service usage rates.

12. Empower Your Support Staff

Last but not the least, empowering your support staff is vital. You should equip your team with the right tools and technologies to help them streamline Salesforce case management.

Maintaining a knowledge base, handling cases, compiling reports, etc., centralizing them all can help. This is where a Salesforce customer portal solution comes in handy.

If you also want to remove bottlenecks in your Salesforce case management and make it seamless, our Salesforce customer portal solution can be the right fit.

CRMJetty – Your Smart Salesforce Customer Portal Development Partner

Now that you know how Salesforce case management is an integral part of the Salesforce organization, it’s time you revamped it. There are various Salesforce case management best practices, as we elaborated above.

If you are looking for a feature-rich customer portal to help you optimize your business operations, CRMJetty has got you covered. Our Salesforce customer portal is a scalable and secure customer portal solution for Salesforce. This can help you surmount all your productivity challenges in Salesforce case management.

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Following are the highlight features of this portal that can elevate your operations.

• Drag & Drop Builder – With the drag & drop functionality, you can personalize your portal easily by dragging and dropping templates, layouts, and other portal components. There is no need to write a single line of code to change and personalize the portal’s appearance.
  
• Multi-Language Support – The support for multiple languages helps you translate your portal content into various languages for customers from different regions across the globe.
  
• Role-Based Access – When you have different users from different departments who need information, role-based access can ensure security. You can assign roles and permissions to various portal users and grant them access to info as per your assigned roles.
  
• Real-Time Synchronization – With real-time synchronization between the portal and Salesforce CRM, you need not change anything in two places separately.
  
• Easy Flow of Information – You can leverage the on-demand exchange of information between CRM and the portal without any hassle.
  
• Enhanced Customer Engagement – You can send emails and notifications to your users and customers to keep your customers informed and retain their engagement.
  
• Reduced Operational Costs – It is an easy to configure portal where all the entities are managed centrally. This, in turn, lowers your operational requirements and cost.
  
• Mobile-Friendliness – Be it you or your users, mobile-friendliness enables both to access anything they want on the go.

Besides providing a ready-to-integrate portal for Salesforce case management, we also provide customization and custom development services.

With 14 years of experience in portal development, we can build a portal exclusively for your needs. Our development team can gather your requirements and figure out how to cater to them. If there is no need for heavy customization, they can customize our portal to fit your business. If the requirements are way too different, we can build a roadmap for your portal’s custom development. Our team starts development, gives iterative updates to you, and comes up with the final product after accommodating all the run-time feedback. After that, our QA team tests it to confirm that it is ready to hit the market. Once we hand your custom portal over to you, it’s ready for your use for Salesforce case management. We also provide limited-time support to help you get familiar with features if you request.

Let’s get started to smoothen your Salesforce case management.

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Source : https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/salesforce-best-management-best-practices-follow-2021/

The channel management process is a cost-effective way to expand a business globally by partnering with aligned organizations to sell your products and services. The channel management process involves some level of control over the performance of an individual or team as your partner. While managing these channels, there may be some challenges that your business may face to ensure a mutually beneficial relationship.

If you are also a business looking to manage different channels, this post will walk you through the common challenges in the channel management process. You’ll also learn how to overcome those challenges in an effective way.

Challenges of Channel Management Process

1. Channel partners are companies, not individual persons. While talking of management of employees, consultants, or contractors, there is some control over people. However, when talking about managing channels, the level of control is comparatively much lower. This is because it is an indirect sales force, and channels are companies instead of people. Although those companies consist of salespeople, technical people, and marketing people., the companies are entities rather than individuals. This implies that the amount of complexity involved is huge.

2. In the case of a direct sales force, there is a hierarchy. Channel partners don’t report to vendors. There is a manager who may report to a VP in a company, but with a channel organization, it is not the same. This is because there is a company reporting to a channel account manager or partner business manager in channel organizations. This reporting relationship is indirect, and if some partners fail to perform over one or two subsequent quarters, they don’t get fired immediately. They sometimes may miss incentives, but firing doesn’t take place as immediately as it would while managing a direct sales force.

3. Channel partners, at times, have their own sets of priorities. These priorities may not align with those of vendors. If a vendor tries to promote a particular product or penetrate into a specific niche market – say, manufacturing or healthcare or any other, your partner may not find it valuable.

4. Different types of partners require different engagement models. Some partners sell to small-size businesses, some to mid-market organizations, some to enterprises, and some others to a combination of two or more segments. For an organization to align with various partners’ needs, there is a need to have appropriate programs that require a significant level of thinking and homework. Further, there are also differences in relationships based on revenue each channel partner gives. Sometimes, vendors tend to give more importance to the partners who yield more revenue than to those who yield less revenue. Aligning the suitable level of resources with high-velocity and high-volume partners and low-velocity and low-volume partners is complex.

5. By and large, financial motives drive a partner’s loyalty. Like in a startup environment, where a belief or cause of inspiration motivates people, the prospect of financial gain drives the relationship in the end. As the expectations change or the path toward the financial gain is not clearly defined, it can cause friction and complexity.

6. A channel partner’s success depends on the competencies in an ecosystem. Chances are rare that a partner – especially in the technology or solution domain – sells only one product. For instance, if a partner sells to the construction industry, technology sector, or manufacturing, the partner may have two, three, or more vendors. A partner’s competencies play a crucial role in determining its interest in a particular set of solutions. Understanding those interests and aligning with those competencies is critical and complex.

7. Forecasting is very tough when it comes to running large businesses. One of the toughest challenges in the channel management process is developing sales forecasts, especially when a company is in its nascent stage. In cases of a revenue business like a retail or franchise business where the revenue doesn’t change much every quarter, predicting demands within a few percentage points is easier. However, if the economy is in distress or some particular product categories are growing faster, working with the partner base to come up with an accurate forecasting model can be one of the major challenges. This is where understanding different types of partners and their sales velocities holds importance. Without proper systems and processes in place, businesses may find it extremely challenging to develop these forecasts.

Solutions to Overcome Challenges in Channel Management Process

Now that you know the major challenges that businesses face in the channel management process, let’s look at the solutions to help you overcome these challenges.

1. Structured Channel Program – Every company requires its channel program to be structured. It should not be just a single program but a set of programs aligned behind different types of partners based on their verticals, competencies, sales mix, locations, etc. Developing a channel program as per partners in a systematic way can help reduce waste and friction between both parties involved as you try to grow your business.

2. Ease of Doing Business – Ease of doing business is a major factor in channel management on both the partner and vendor sides. Often the account manager spends more on-time fielding emails, phone calls, etc., from partners. Therefore, it is important to address this problem through a proper structure. When larger organizations acquire smaller organizations, they tend to roll the acquired organization into their existing structure. Even though this integration may look even on the surface, supporting infrastructure may be falling apart on the inside. This may lead to the failure of the merger. This is why a proper structure to optimize the acquisition is necessary in place beforehand.

3. Systems for Partner Relationship Management and Partner Marketing Management – Businesses should deploy structured partner relationship management and partner marketing management systems. With a proper partner portal in place, a business can realize significant returns, reduce labor costs, enhance ease of doing business, and increase the efficiency of partner management.

CRMJetty – Your Key to Managing Channel Partners Effectively

If you are looking to overcome the challenges in channel management and streamline your channel management, our partner portal can help you with that. Our portal is a ready-to-integrate portal solution that you can always configure as per your business logic. It has some features that make it an ideal partner management solution, as below.

1. Lead Management

For businesses with a high volume of incoming partnership requests, our portal helps make workflow smooth. It helps create a workflow as per your business logic and automate the process of management of partnership requests.

2. Role-Based Access

Providing access to CRM entities is crucial for any business. But there is a need to restrict access to different CRM entities as per the type of the user. Using our custom partner portal solution, you can decide to provide role-based access to your different partners and their team members to enhance security and streamline operations.

3. Sharing Confidential Business Data

There are certain product installation videos, lists of use cases, and several other types of confidential data that you would want to make available to only a small group of confidants. A partner solution can help you make that possible and provide confidential data to only certain users.

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4. Purchase & Invoicing

While entering into a channel partnership agreement, the end goal of any partnership is commercial benefits. Whether it is enabling specific discounts for partners, generating POs and invoices, or generating payments, you can manage it all using a partner portal solution.

5. Security

Using our services, we can build an Online Partner Portal for your business that is an extension of your CRM. Alternatively, you can choose to develop a web-based portal independent of the CRM. Either way, the database remains on your servers, and your security remains intact.

We are a CRM consultancy with over 14 years of experience in portal development solutions for various leading CRM systems, including Suite/SugarCRM, Salesforce, etc. Our development team follows two approaches – launch-ready portal solution integration and custom development.

First, our team gathers your portal requirements and analyzes them. If they don’t differ much from our portal’s features, our team provides you with the ready-made partner portal that we have. If your portal requirements require slight customization in our ready-to-integrate portal, we do that for you and provide you with the final product. If the product you require is largely different from our current product, we also adopt a custom-build approach to build a portal exclusively for your business. We keep giving you updates on the development throughout and test the final product for market readiness. Once everything is fine, we roll out your partner portal to you for your final use.

So, get your partner portal ready and streamline your channel management process right away!

Manage Channels the Right Way

Source : https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/all-you-need-know-channel-management-process/

According to a survey by global statistics consolidator Statista, real estate website visits were more than 120 million times each month. Another study, according to a 2019 National association of Realtor’s profile of home buyers and sellers, states that 52% of buyers purchased on the internet. To put this in perspective, only 29% found the home they bought through their realtor, and 6% from a yard sign.

The dynamism and interactive nature of the web have influenced every possible business domain. This includes the highly competitive real estate domain as well. The real estate industry has seen both individual customers and businesses line up to buy, sell, rent, or lease properties online.

On the other hand, customers have become increasingly techno-savvy as well. They are choosy and require multiple options as far as seeking information from online sources is concerned. Property portals come to the rescue of real estate firms and help them address the requirements of both the customer segments.

A robust and trendy web portal can help you stay competitive. Your property portal should be highly engaging, SEO friendly, and feature-rich to address the needs of both buyers and sellers. In this article, we are going to discuss certain important features that a real estate portal must have to meet the competitive edge in the current market. Without further ado, let us begin:

I. High-definition Display

Pictures speak louder than words. They’re easy to understand and friendly to the ears. Especially when it looks like your next dream house. It is the first thing that buyers scan through. Therefore, you’ll always benefit from using high-quality images.

Good images help gain the confidence of prospective buyers. The importance of proper, relevant images can emphasize that graphics are easier to browse through than reading long descriptions.

Therefore, your real estate portal must store, save and display high-definition images. You should make sure that different dimensions and parts of the property are visually represented through high-quality visual media.

II. Comprehensive Listings

The property portal you choose should have extensive listing features. Make sure you view every detailed listing with the template for your property page. Your listings are the direct reflection of the best features and amenities. You can ease your listings and make your properties more visible through the following two aspects:

Flawless Navigation

Flawless navigation is a must for real estate portals. You lose a client if your potential buyers cannot reach the listings that they might be interested in. Information scattered over the page, wrong CTA placement, menu not properly designed, and so on, contribute to failure in navigation.

The navigation system of your website will make it possible to guide visitors to their pages of interest seamlessly without having to click on various links. Make sure you get an interactive and stunning menu. The menu must be well-arranged and well-tied with menu titles and submenus.

Listing Categorization

Pick a property portal that allows you to divide your listings into various categories and subcategories. Categories help the buyers find properties faster. Implement a comprehensive categorization in terms of the type of property, the number of rooms, garage, balcony, as well as other details like amenities, etc.

III. Seamless User-Onboarding

Make sure your real estate portal has comprehensive user onboarding and management features. You must be able to add, manage and define access to various sellers, brokers, customers, and agents. Provide a simple sign-up and two-step verification process and let your users join your real estate portal within minutes.

Categorize your users accordingly and provide access based on it. You can also provide flexibility to your users and let your brokers, agents, and sellers manage their profiles as they want. Let them add details like name, contact information, properties, documents, and more.

IV. Omnichannel Communication

Omnichannel communication simply means providing multiple options to your buyers to reach out to you. Choose a property portal that lets brokers communicate with potential buyers in real-time through multiple ways. You can integrate a live chat option for customers to solve all their queries. You can also put contact details through various CTAs and let them communicate easily.

Having multiple channels of communication also contributes to building your brand identity. It makes sure that the buyers reach out to the brokers in one way or another, and you don’t lose potential buyers because of the communication fiasco.

V. Secure Data Management

Data management is an integral part of a real estate portal. Hence, secure handling of large-scale data is important. Handling the portal, CRM, and multiple other tools to quantify the data may result in data loss. Make sure the portal you choose provides secure data management features.

Choose a Synchronized Solution

Make sure that your CRM integrates with the portal, and you can transfer data easily. It saves you a lot of manual data-related tasks and gets seamless sync between your database and portal.

Secure Access to Everyone

As discussed earlier, make sure your property portal allows you to define role-based access to control data mismanagement. Enhance security and manage operations better with the right role-based structure and defined access privileges.

Unified Interface

A unified interface simply ensures that you do not have to switch between multiple tools while managing your property portal. Select a portal that lets you collaborate with other third-party tools from a single interface. This way you will be able to manage the real estate listing, sales, marketing, and lead funnels from a single place.

CRMJetty’s real estate portal is known for its security and seamlessly personalized workflow. It lets users perform all the operations from a single interface through a custom dashboard. It integrates with your CRM easily and allows you to add multiple roles and categories. Its extensive listing section creates a win-win scenario for both buyers as well as sellers. Would you like to take a look? Get in touch with our experts today!Request Consultation

VI. Neighborhood and Amenities Guide

The quality of life depends on the surroundings and the availability of basic amenities. Aspects like access to basic transportation services, nearest local stores, and so on make a huge contribution to the buyers’ decision-making. Therefore, adding a few lines about neighborhood areas adds more meaning to your property listing.

Whether it is a rental property or a new house on sale, buyers are always curious about the neighborhood and localities. Therefore, you must provide detailed information regarding the neighborhood, the locality, the nearby landmarks, and so on.

Also mention the quality of life in the area, and the size of the family it is best to fit for. You should always try to include all the property features and amenities for the sake of clarity. More information about the property helps the visitors decide better. Even a minor feature that might not look like a highlight of your property may attract potential buyers.

VII. Personalization

It is important to understand the subtleties of design, UX, and UI for a real estate portal. Users will not prefer your property portal if it is identical to every other portal out there. Hence, portal personalization comes into the picture.

Personalization builds a unique brand identity that sets you apart from your competitors. Therefore, your real estate portal must provide you customization features. You must be able to design templates, layouts, and components of your real estate portal identical to your website. Give your real estate portal a personal touch with ready-to-use standard design components with custom data binding.

VIII. Analytics and Reporting Features

Tracking analytics to identify the most effective marketing strategies, trends, roadblocks is important in an ever-changing industry like real estate. Look for a portal that provides a well-arranged admin dashboard. See if you can set and save quick links to widgets like recent activity, counter block, etc. for any required entity. You can also go for portals that provide customized dashboards. This way you will not have to keep switching between various interfaces and tools. You will simply be able to manage and control all entities from a single well-arranged custom dashboard.

IX. 360-Degree Entity Management

You must exercise full control over entities such as sellers, buyers, customers, properties, and so on. 360-degree entity management is necessary from both sides, i.e., your CRM as well as the portal.

User Management

You can use all the available default entities in your CRM and configure them as per your business requirements. As an admin, you must be able to manage properties along with brokers, sellers, and agents. You must be able to add, edit, delete, approve and reject properties added by brokers and sellers based on set criteria.

Allow brokers/sellers to create customized tags from the backend to manage potential buyers. Let them manage their lead data as they want, to keep a clear understanding of where they stand with a particular customer.

Media Management

Your property portal must allow your agents to add high-quality property photos and videos. They can upload high-definition 3D and VR tours to give a detailed idea about the property’s features, space, floor plans, outer space, and so on.

X. Mobile-Responsive

Since more customers use their smartphones to browse the internet, a mobile responsive site helps to reach out to customers on the go. The main objective is to let your potential customers seamlessly access the properties listed on your site from any type of device.

Therefore, it is important to get a fully responsive and engaging mobile interface that enriches the customer experience by allowing them to access the portal whenever and wherever they want.

Bonus Features

So above were the ten must-have features for a real estate portal. However, there are some other trending features that you must consider integrating with your real estate portal. These features can prove to be a bonus in building a brand identity as they’re rich with the latest digitization trends.

I. Video tours

Video tours have become a common thing nowadays. You can compile interesting videos of the properties to provide a better idea to the buyers. You can let sellers add videos of different areas of the property, a testimonial video, etc.

II. VR Features

These days virtual tours are becoming popular. It is almost equivalent to visiting the premises personally. It is a digital tour where potential buyers can see the entire property and experience it as if they’re physically visiting it. They can do all this simply by sitting on their sofa. Hence, embedding VR features into your property portal can be a plus for your real estate business.

III. Rental Property Features

You can include a listing of rental property on a real estate directory website. Make sure you provide all the necessary details that a tenant would like to know. This includes approximate apartment rent, included appliances, amenities, and whether they’re supposed to pay extra for certain facilities.

Make it more detailed by mentioning the type of tenants the home is best suited for. For example, a property with multiple rooms is suitable for big families, while single rooms are great for students.

IV. Google Maps Integration

You can integrate Google Maps along with the location details in your property listings. This way, potential buyers can track the exact location. You can also include guidelines on how to reach the place. They can also see the area surrounding the property, distance from schools, hospitals, public transport, etc.

V. Social Media Sharing

Integrate your property portal with popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. These links can help your site visitors share property information and listings to their social media profiles. As more people share it on their social media, the popularity of your property portal and real-estate website increases. This helps your site to garner favorable search rankings as well.

Ramp Up Your Real-Estate with Latest Digitization Features

Property portals have, without a doubt, become the most popular home search method. A well-crafted property portal can bring lots of opportunities for your business. And only experts can bring together a well-crafted property portal.

With 14+ years of experience in portal development, we bring you CRMJetty’s real estate portal. It is a one-stop centralized solution that overcomes all real-estate challenges and caters to B2C and B2B businesses. It is embedded with multiple trending features that help you solve problems like scattered information, mismanaged task flow, inefficient communication, and dispersed databases that seem to hinder the current real estate industry. Innovate and adapt synchronized technological solutions. Let’s get in touch.

Request Consultation

Source : https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/10-must-have-property-portal-features/

Managing and maintaining records is always a tough and tedious task. But as the saying goes, ‘There is always a solution for each problem.’ Here, a Dynamics 365 portal is a solution that can resolve all of your small or big business problems.

From gathering engagements to analyzing progress or managing inventories to track a shipment process, every work is possible to manage by a single portal. It is a combination of ERM and CRM applications. Here are some industries that benefit from portals.

1. Education Industry

Education is not limited to only classrooms. Right? Now, we have shifted to online education. And we know how hectic it has become to manage everything online. So, to make the online student-teacher interface more easy and manageable, portals came in. They provide individual dashboards for each student to view their assigned projects, results, exam dates, information of courses and notes.

Teachers can access features like tracking students’ progress, conducting online exams, sharing enotes, etc. Faculty can conduct quizzes, online debates, and other fun activities to engage students in learning. From new or small schools to well-known schools, this portal is helpful for all. Admin can access the stats and information about students and staff both. They can have a glance at the growth graphs of every student and faculty member.

2. Hospital & Health Industry

Almost all hospitals have applied virtual consulting. Through this, doctors can attend 5 times more patients daily than regular patient check-count. They can plan their schedule and upcoming meetings with ease. Home consultancy makes the process of treatment more convenient for both – patient and the doctor.

Patients can view their health history anytime, anywhere, through easy logins in Dynamics 365 customer portal. They can fill the forms online and even upload necessary documents. Booking an appointment is just a click away. Patients can make hassle-free and secure transactions too. Portal ensures complete security of every data and sensitive details. Accessing diet charts, medications, report results, overall health analysis, and what not is possible through a single login. Handicare is a leading example of this.

3. Restaurant & Hotel Industry

Having more than one restaurant or hotel always turns tricky at some point. Relatable? The major problem is the lack of managing records on different systems. To solve that, Dynamics 365 portal provides a one-stop solution to streamline all the restaurant operations. Staff can manage their shifts, priority tasks, leaves, and everything from their login area. Customers can book the table, order food, manage loyalty programs, etc., from their space. Whereas, admin can manage every activity of staff and customers. They can view all the ongoing tasks, pending, etc. Every change they do from inventory to orders will be automatically updated in the CRM. TGI Friday’s makes the correct example for it by using the portal to manage their more than one restaurant.

4. Construction Industry

Construction work requires both machine and man-management. To manage both, it requires necessary resources for technicals and communication. With the help of the Dynamic 365 portal, each employee has access to the portal. They can register an issue via the portal directly; they don’t need to call or wait for a meeting. This works as a rapid issue solving technique. The admin can save all the blueprints and documents of the employees in a safe file by simply uploading the digital copy of it in the portal. Real-time dashboards provide graphs of employee work hours and efficiency. MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions is the best example of it.

Conclusion

Dynamics 365 portal is fully customizable, according to your requirements and budget. It is always beneficial to be one step ahead in any industry, especially when it comes to technology. Upgrading your way of managing can turn the tables. With 0 error efficiency, this portal can help you with all the logbooks and record books.

Source :

https://www.sooperarticles.com/technology-articles/software-articles/how-different-industries-use-dynamics-365-portal-1809187.html

Have you thought about the outcome of a bad customer experience? It can cost your business and even affect the customer base. A research says that 25% of customers will switch the provider after one negative experience. 33% will share their experience in one way or another. 

In the eCommerce era, where every user prefers an online experience, businesses can’t risk letting their users down. And with digitalization, the traditional way of CX and providing support has changed. Customers now prefer to resolve their queries using online guides rather than waiting for a call or a message from the support team. The new era has brought in the need for a self-service experience. And that’s how Dynamics 365 Customer Portal comes into the picture. 

It helps identify client issues and deliver exceptional service.

A Dynamics CRM Customer Portal provides end-users a dedicated space to track and manage their support tickets. It connects them to the knowledge base and other resources. Overall, it bridges the communication gap between end-users and businesses. 

Here are some indicators that help identify whether your business needs to have a customer portal or not.

• There’s a continuous sharing and exchanging of data and documents
• You want to provide better support without increasing employees
• You are planning to provide your users with an automatic ticket generation system so that they can raise and track the status at their convenience
• You want to give your users the liberty to access their invoices and quotes 
• You want to let customers schedule and arrange their payments

If there’s a yes to even one of it, you must go for it. In fact, a study shows that 67% of end-users prefer a Dynamics 365 Customer Portal over a human representative. And this demand for improved CX is only going to increase. This is why businesses need to adopt portal solutions.

Let us see what are other reasons to go for a customer portal.

• Meets User Experience

Portals make it easy for end-users to find the solutions they are looking for. It gives them relevant information such as articles, new launch announcements, FAQs, promotion and update announcements, etc.

And this is how self-service solutions provide a better customer experience, increased brand loyalty, credibility, and customer retention. 

• Provides Immediate Solution

We know our patience level. We want an immediate solution to our problems. Hence, it is necessary to bring in a portal solution. Because it allows users to access it from any device and round the clock. It curbs the process of going through multiple sales reps to get the answer. 

If you go for Dynamics CRM Portal, you can deliver your end-users with quality, 24-7 support. Your customers won’t have to wait for answers.  

• Helps Build Community

The concept, “Be a helping hand. Let one support another,” is why you must go for Dynamics 365 Customer Portal. It can lead you to build a strong community for your products where users can help one another. A good community, in turn, will reduce your workload. You won’t have to increase your customer support team. In fact, at one stage, you could be free of 80% of support services. 

Besides, it can help you improve loyalty and brand name. Most customers are in the community for a long time and can even pitch for new features they would like to have. 

An effective solution will enable them to ask questions, suggest ideas, share experiences, and engage with other users.

In a Nutshell

Dynamics CRM Portal provides self-service, relevant information, and exceptional service. It makes it easy for customers to interact with businesses. Along with it, it helps build trust and brand loyalty.

Having a portal is directly proportional to the customer experience, and business success.