After all, it’s the customers that make up your business. It’s necessary that you fulfill their demands, provide exceptional service, and solve their problems.
If they like your service and products, there are high chances of them returning back to you. If they don’t, you might lose a customer.
So, the question is, how can you provide them with a better service and quality products?
Web Portal Solutions!
A web portal can act as their self-support and your digital support team. It can help you provide your customers with the best services and support without a human support team.
Let us see how.
Increase Customer Retention
With a web portal, you can create support tickets, live chats, and schedule appointments with customers. Customers can learn about their order and ticket status. They can chat with the support team directly from the portal and clear their doubts or queries. Along with this, FAQs, documents, and how-to guides can help customers solve basic queries.
Web portal development will streamline your operations. It will free your support team of unnecessary tasks and help retain customers. In short, your support team can work efficiently, and provide better customer service.
Security
Data security is the most crucial factor. This is also the reason behind customers’ hesitation to share data with businesses. Customers avoid sharing data with businesses. To curb it, many businesses use highly encrypted solutions to ensure customers of safe and secure data.
Web portal solutions, for example, use the latest security standards. They come up with two-way encryption so that no one can retrieve the data. Additionally, they use market standards for purchases and payments to keep data secure.
Custom Features
A custom portal development can help you customize your solution according to your requirements. You can add features like payment, invoices, quotations, accounting, and more.
Web portals can help your customers to pay directly from the portal. Vendors can generate invoices and pay their remaining amount.
Along with it, you can assign role-based access so that no one without authority can access or manipulate the data. In addition to all these, web portals can help you conduct customer surveys. You can ask them for their problems in retrieving data or the features they would like to have in the portal. Similarly, you can do so for your employees, partners, and others.
Branding
Visibility is a sure-shot way to build a brand. You can do so with a custom web portal. With an intuitive logo, theme, UI/UX, consistent look and feel, web portals can help you with brand building.
They not only provide a smooth experience and attractive designs but help build your reputation.
Customer engagement is also another way for brand building. So along with consistency, they provide features like forums, discussion groups, and a knowledge base for engagement.
CRM Integration
No one likes handling multiple solutions—a CRM, a separate portal, and so on.
Therefore, web portal development companies provide you with custom web portal solutions to integrate with your CRM.
A custom solution has all the features and syncs well with your CRM. It makes sure that there’s a single login point so that no one needs to go through multiple logins. Besides, any changes in the CRM reflects in the portal and vice versa. It means that you don’t need to worry about rework or rechecking.
Wrapping Up
Web portal solutions can be your true companion in attracting and retaining customers. They can help you serve customers in a better way. A custom web portal will ensure that your customers don’t have a bad experience.
People are so used to the idea of the internet that they look for everything on it, whether it’s searching for a website, product, real estate agent, broker, dealer, etc. The search doesn’t stop here. In terms of the real estate business, the prospects even look for properties online. (In fact, NAR’s statistics reveal that 95% of home buyers search online.) They don’t feel like visiting 50 houses to confirm one. They rather prefer you having a real estate web portal development. A virtual space that shows them images, virtual tours, comprehensive study with ratings and reviews of the properties to create a final list or probably make a deal.
And a SuiteCRM WordPress Plugin would be quite profitable. Further, you can partner with a development company to help you in the customization.
With the portal, you can easily advertise your properties and listings. Users can search for properties, book appointments, etc. Your team can focus on providing the users with the best possible properties. You will have a complete business flow process in front of you, in numbers and graphs. There’s more to it. The CRM plugin will help you develop organized communication with the team and customers. You can access CRM data, provide customers with role-based access, and simplify the entire process.
And this is the right time to proceed with the development. The real estate industry’s revenue is expected to be $4263.7 billion by 2025.
So, what features should you incorporate in your real estate portal?
Listing Comparison and Detailed Feature
After finding potential properties, customers want to compare the listings to confirm a suitable one. Make sure you include a feature that lets them compare the listings. It will also help agents to view the listings’ statistics.
Besides, a detailed listing page will further give agents an idea about places near the property, like schools, parks, grocery stores etc. Customers can view if they have all the specifications required nearby the property. You can add images and videos to provide a better description of the properties.
Bookings and Calendar Synchronization
Let your customers book a visit or inquiry through the portal. Make sure you have a booking feature that allows customers to book directly. It will help you view all the bookings and plan your schedules accordingly.
If you integrate the SuiteCRM WordPress plugin, you will be able to access the CRM data and sync it with your website.It will help you avoid double booking and miscommunication.
Alerts, Notifications, and Live Chats
Some customers might have shortlisted a few properties or booked a visit. You can send them notifications and reminder alerts about the same. Emails about the property sale, details of the property, or other news would be better for conversion.
Also, ask your real estate web portal development to provide a live chat feature. It will enable your visitors to get answers to their questions. To make it more efficient and reduce the support team’s work, you can integrate chatbots into messaging. It would automate customer service.
VR Integration
What could be better than 3D property visualization? By integrating VR and 3D images, you can let your customers have a virtual tour of the property, right from their home. It will increase the chances of buying and the rating of the property. If customers know what they are buying, they will review it honestly. They might even refer you to others.
Mortgage Calculators
It’s time to free your agents of manual calculations. Automate the calculations. Let customers know the monthly payment, number of installments, and interest rate without contacting the agent.
You can choose to go with a readily available solution. Or, you can choose to go with a solution as the WordPress CRM plugin that has a whole set of features and still allows customization.
Bottom Line
The feature list doesn’t end here. You need to integrate marketing tools, rating and review, admin features, agents related, customer-related, and extras. A real estate web portal development company can guide you.
Not every customer prefers interaction with customer support representatives. Some even wish never to call the team and ask for updates, support, or any other reasons. For them, calls, live chats, texts, and customer support are like stepping out of their comfort zone. And that’s not the kind of dissatisfaction you would want for your customers. However, you can’t make everyone happy. But you can always try your best by providing better customer service through a customer portal. Even the stats say that 75% of customers prefer a self-service system to be more convenient than talking to a representative.
Opting for a portal will not only benefit your customers, but even you will be at an advantage. By providing customers with a Salesforce customer portal, you can free your representatives of repetitive, unproductive tasks. Instead, they can focus on pressing services. Also, fewer support requests mean less investment in training the customer support team. Besides, it will help you bring more customers, thereby increasing your page authority. Last but not least, you can give back to your customers by educating them to understand your product and technology at a larger front.
Portal is the right solution. Yet, there’s a far more difference between empowering customers to find their solution and providing them with a tool to track answers. A useful customer portal is a multichannel solution that offers customers detailed information. There are several factors that together build the bridge. Learn what they are, to provide your customers with superior support.
Omnichannel Support
As of 2019, 51.5% of customers rely on mobile devices for accessing the internet over a desktop. Based on this number, do you think it would be wise to make customers access the portal via desktop? Certainly, not.
Show them you genuinely care for them by adopting a Salesforce customer portal that’s compatible with multiple devices.
Let them log in via a mobile phone or a desktop. Give them the privilege of anywhere anytime with responsive web pages or native apps.
Knowledge Base
Often, customers have more questions that a mass email can answer. Consider providing your customers with a pool of knowledge. It can be FAQs, informational blogs, trending topics, how to guides and articles, documentation, or more.
Discussion forums or online groups would also help customers find solutions together. It would help them learn and grow, further reducing the dependency on your support team. Instead, as the business grows, these forums can act as a community of a support team. You won’t need to invest in it.
Coming back, I would suggest going with a Salesforce customer portal. Because it easily integrates with WordPress, the king of CMS. Besides, you can create forums and discussion groups for your customers.
Accessibility
The last thing a customer wants to deal with (if unavoidable) is technical complexity. They look for easy to use functions, like a single click to land on the blog page, a few steps to view history. If your customers can’t access the knowledge base or other features seamlessly, they may abandon the portal. And it may affect your business directly or indirectly. Because losing even one customer is a huge loss in the long run.
An effective portal will ensure that you and your customers don’t have to deal with complexities. They integrate with different solutions and are easy to use.
Customization
Every customer is a designer in their own way. They often look to customize their spaces. It can be as easy as turning the app to dark mode, adding custom background wallpapers, or personalizing the screen’s look using available templates.
When it comes to portals, many businesses prefer open source. It’s not a bad idea. By customizing the code, it’s possible to change the layout of the portal window. However, that’s more of an advantage for technical people. As a general user, your customer may find it difficult or impossible to create the attractive portal. However, a simple drag and drop with templates would help them customize the portal quickly.
Data Security
Businesses often look for solutions that are safe and secure because it would be catastrophic if customer information and business critical information leaks. A plugin that integrates with CRM and CMS but doesn’t store the data of your customers is exactly what you need!
Salesforce Customer Portal is precisely what you want. It doesn’t store or fetch the data to the providers’ database. It merely integrates and acts as an interface to access the data.
In a Nutshell
Customer behavior has changed, and also the business process. Turning towards portals is not an option anymore. Instead, it’s a necessity. Only an effective portal that implies with factors mentioned above can yield you results!
Choosing the perfect operation software like CRM and ERP for your organization is vital as it complements and meets the goals. Microsoft Dynamics is the best platform for a 360-degree vision of insights and processes of business operations.
The impactful tools of Dynamics 365 assist your sales and marketing teams and help you stand ahead of the competition. Additionally, you can integrate it into your CRM and portals and use the combined power of the Dynamics CRM portal. It provides excellent functionality, performance, and security. It helps you scale and change your solution according to your organization.
Let’s discuss the top twelve reasons on why you should choose Microsoft Dynamics 365 for your company:
Data Centralization:
Data centralization happens by integrating other applications, cloud services, and external data sources. It includes accounting databases, email marketing, websites, surveys, etc.
Using this, you can find your strengths and weaknesses. This helps you measure performance using data visualizations. Apart from this, it keeps the organization informed with essential metrics and helps you make better decisions.
Customer relationships:
Consistency in customer experience can help businesses keep their client base. Integrated sales, marketing, and customer service platforms help connect every source of customer information across all channels. Additionally, you can even integrate this information with webchat and self-service portals.
Integrations:
Dynamics 365 integrates with Office 365 and other Microsoft platforms, which has more efficiency and productivity. It integrates with useful and familiar applications like Outlook, Excel, and Word. You can also integrate Dynamics 365 with other CRMs like SAP and Salesforce. Apart from this, you can use various portals like Dynamics CRM customer portal, a self-service portal, etc. to bridge the gap between CRM and websites.
Data Security:
Microsoft is known for securing its customers’ data. All its products, along with Dynamics 365, meet the EU criteria, including GDPR. When we go through MS Dynamics 365 compliance, it shows that all your customers’ data is safe in the Microsoft cloud.
Timely updates:
Microsoft has a strong team of researchers who try their best practices for Dynamics 365. This helps them stay ahead in the rat race and make sure their customers’ lives are easy.
Process Automation:
With Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can create a rule for processes that can customize it based on your business needs. This will help you to put an end to repetitive manual tasks. It notifies you to approve the process of seamless by following some guided procedures. It helps you in reaching successful outcomes and also provides great data quality.
Accessibility:
Using Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can synchronize it across iOS, Windows, and Android devices. This enables productivity and helps you and your team members to stay on the same page.
Usability:
Microsoft prefers to add a touch of its Windows everywhere. The same thing is with Microsoft Dynamics 365. You feel like using your Windows computer only. This familiarizes you with the interface and increases your and your employees’ productivity.
Accessibility roles:
System administrators can provide accessibility roles to certain users. This ensures the right information is delivered to the right person regardless of using Outlook or a web interface.
Targets marketing campaigns:
Currently, customers must know about the offers and new services a business provides. Microsoft CRM offers a marketing automation module which simplifies the following tasks:
Building customer
Lead lists
Developing marketing campaigns
Target specific customers
Tracking results of these campaigns
Creating follow-up marketing campaigns
Keeping employees updated:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM design helps your staff be more productive both in the office and out of the office. They can filter needed information like meeting updates, sales details, or customer information from anywhere at any time.
Improves efficiency:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM workflow engine enables businesses to automate business processes in many ways. It provides an ease to your employees from tedious work by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks.
It notifies your staff about customer issues and sends important messages to customers and partners. This helps to solve customer problems and provide better service.
Conclusion:
Many CRM and portal options are available in the market, but Dynamics CRM and Dynamics CRM portal add on still lead the market. With every update, they try to make it better to bring ease to businesses, their customers, and employees.
Serving your customers is one of the main aims of any business. Fulfilling their demands, offering them hassle-free solutions, extraordinary customer service, and keeping them happy is the key to run a successful business.
If your customers like your service then they are very likely to come back but if they don’t, there are chances you might lose them.
Let me share with you my personal experience with Pepperfry:
Their marketing strategy is omnichannel which I definitely was not aware about. I had ordered 2 bean bags and 2 pouffe (had no idea it was a pouffe cover) and had paid a good amount of money for those.
After a month when one bean bag and two pouffes came they were not at all good quality and I was not getting value for the money I bought them for. Upon contacting customer service to return the products, they refused by saying that my reasons were not good enough for them.
This is definitely not something you should ever tell your customers. You are very likely to lose them. Even if you cannot take the product back it’s better to end the conversation on a better note rather than implying that their issues aren’t valid when you were the one that made the mistake. Especially when you were the one that made the mistake.
It does not end here. After a few days my other bean bag came and this time instead of one, I got two bean bags. When I told them I don’t want another one they said, “ Ma’am just keep it if the company is giving it for free.”
The free bean bag is lying somewhere in my store room for the time being. The solution to customer problems is not free stuff. It is solving them.
Now a question comes, how can you serve your customers better and provide them with good quality products?
Web Portal!
A Web Portal bridges the gap between you and your customers.
Let’s see how:
Increase customer retention:
Web portal solutions will help you with creating support tickets, live chat, and schedule appointments with customers. It will streamline operations for your support staff and in turn help, you retain more than 33% of customers. In short, your support team can work productively, provide better customer service, and fulfill customer needs.
Security:
Security of your customers’ data is the most important part and most businesses work hard to make sure it stays secure. Most of the web portals developed today use the latest security standards. Additionally, while purchasing web portals you can make sure that it follows the latest market standards to keep the data secure and your customers safe.
Payment gateways, Invoices, and Accounting:
You cannot imagine web portals without payment gateways. Web portals help you by providing payment gateways which makes it easy for your customers to pay directly from the portal itself. Additionally, in some of the vendor portals they can generate invoices, accounts and pay their required amount.
You can use web portals in more than one way. But, rather than purchasing ready made web portals it’s better to opt for custom portal development.
Why?
Custom features:
Custom portal development helps you with adding features according to your business plan. You can sit with your web portal development company and together on the basis of your business model and customers’ needs ask them to create features. Not only this, but you can also carry out customer surveys and ask them for any specific features they would like to have in web portals.
Better branding:
With the help of a custom web portal you can make sure that UI/UX, logo, theme of your website, look, and feel is consistent. These things will help your user to get better with portals and also help you to keep up with your reputation. So, make sure to have consistency throughout your web portal and website.
Easily integrate with custom CRM:
There might be chances that your company is using a custom CRM. In such scenarios having a developed web portal is not a good solution. It becomes very difficult to integrate that with your custom CRM. Thus you can solve this issue with the help of a custom built web portal. The company which provides you with web portal development services can help you with integrating your custom web portal with your custom CRM.
Wrapping it up:
Connect with our experts and let us help you walk through the entire process of developing a custom web portal for your company. Don’t let your customers have a bad experience and let us help you serve your customers in a better way. I am sure you don’t like displeased customers tweeting!
Salesforce is a well-known name in the world of CRMs, portals, and communities. We can’t deny that their products are world-class and provide organizations like yours an upper hand. And sometimes that can raise further questions like which portal to invest in? Should you be going with a portal or a community?
We’ve already written a well-researched article on Salesforce Customer Portals Vs. Communities. Hence, in this article, we are going to discuss its two well-known portals i.e. Customer portal and Partner portal. And help you choose the right solution for your organizational needs.
What is Salesforce Partner Portal?
Salesforce partner portal allows partner users outside of your organization to login to Salesforce. It helps companies by empowering their indirect sales channel and this increases their ROI. Users of the partner portal have limited access to Salesforce and can only see the data of the modules for which they are granted access. With the help of partner relationship management (PRM), companies can create multiple portals to manage, track, and handle their indirect sales.
Let’s talk about three main benefits of having a Partner Portal:
Increased efficiency of your channel sales funnel With the help of partner portals, you can provide your partner a platform to collaborate with your organization for any and every sales activity, task, lead generation or capturing, nurturing, conversions, etc. and thereby increasing the efficiency of your channel sales, and marketing.
Increased ROI
As you provide your partners with easy-to-setup tools to track, manage, and analyze their marketing campaigns with Salesforce partner portal, you will directly see the effect on your ROI. Additionally, you can provide them with exclusive access to your content which will help them align the strategy and marketing around your brand.
Access to data from anywhere anytime
Your partners will be able to access the data and its insights on the go. You can easily share reports and documents from anywhere and help them understand KPIs and other sales opportunities.
What is Salesforce Customer Portal?
Salesforce customer portal is an interface that is useful to provide support to your customers, help them solve issues about your products/services thereby better overall user experience. As a company, you can create a personalized customer service portal including features, sections, information, modules based on your requirements to streamline communication with your customers. And here are the top three benefits of using the customer portal:
Omnichannel support
According to research, 51.3% of people use the internet via mobile. In such times while developing a customer portal, you need to make sure that you make it accessible for your mobile users via mobile application or just making it mobile compatible. This will help you provide omnichannel support and be present wherever your customers are. This makes it more user friendly and an easy to access platform for them.
Easy integration
Salesforce customer portal is easy to integrate with your web pages or the entire website. This can help your users have easy and simplified access to your knowledge base.
Online forum
Customer portals help your customers solve problems more effectively by letting you create online forums, various group learning, informative articles, and more. This provides them a much needed 24/7 customer support without you having to spend extra resources and also eliminates the drawbacks of having customers in multiple time zones. Now that we are clear on both of their concepts, let’s try and understand their differences.
Salesforce Customer Portal Vs Partner Portal
– Purpose: Partner portal shows leads and opportunity to partners whereas customer portal is useful for solving issues independently without interacting with representatives. – Audience: Partner portal is useful for channel salespeople or other third-parties, whereas customer portal is for end users. – Access and Cost: Partner portals have more access to core CRM features and hence are expensive. – Role-based access: Using the partner portal you can provide specific role-based access to your partner whereas that’s not the case with the Salesforce customer portal.
There is a thin line difference between both the portals but each has its own uniqueness and functionality to serve.
On the basis of your company’s requirements, you make your choice. If you are looking for a portal that helps you to manage your customers then having a customer portal is the right decision. Whereas, if you want the portal to manage your partners then opt for partner portals.
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 the right portal solution for your company, then you can choose from our wide range of solutions for Salesforce, Dynamics, and more. We have served in this industry for a decade and have built many Salesforce portals like customer portal, self-service portal, non-profit portals, etc. Get in touch with us and we’ll help you kick start your journey towards communicating better.
Four months into a pandemic, it would be funny if I said what everyone has already said. Times are tough, hold on to your businesses, and hope for something better.
But we are not here to tell you that. We want to talk about how you can win and progress in the new normal world we have around us.
For a while there, we hunkered down and held on tight to the things we knew and the things we are great at. Once we accepted that this is a much more permanent change in the way we think about the world, we changed the way we thought.
This is why after weeks of reflecting, strategizing and working on plans, we are happy to announce that CRMJetty is hosting a free webinar on Winning the New Normal with Portals! A webinar where we will be talking about how to innovate even in the face of pandemic and address some of the real-world challenges that you as a business owner might be facing or have faced in the recent days.
Here are some other details that you might be curious about.
Our Speakers
The webinar will be conducted by our Digital Marketing Manager, Parth Pandya, and Product Manager, Jay Jagani. With a combined experience of over 20 years, they have seen the industry landscapes change and been a part of the same.
When is it happening?
Date: 25th August 2020
Time: 7:30 IST/ 10 AM EDT
What you’ll learn:
– Addressing the current global crisis and challenges
– Traditional business model challenges
– Industries that need serious innovation [need of the hour]
– Customer retention and new revenue streams
– How portals can help
Along with an interactive Q/A session!
How to join?
Just click on this button and register yourself by entering your email address. As simple as that!Save your spot!
You won’t have to download any app or set a reminder, as our webinar platform can be accessed from anywhere and on any browser. For reminders, we’ll send you email notifications [not in annoying frequency, we promise]. And since you’ll be visiting our CrowdCast profile, maybe follow us?
During the pandemic, a number of companies are struggling with how to pivot their business and how to stay afloat. The right question to ask, however, is how to help our communities.
As a business, your thinking should be less about selling your products or services and more about helping people out. At one point, if your clients and customers can’t pay you immediately but need your help, they will remember your company and you for looking out for them when they needed it. This will forge a long-lasting relationship between you and your customers.
Reaching out and asking questions about their needs will give you an understanding of how things are at their end and in the industry, as a whole. Even if the product they need is not yours, when you help them out, they will appreciate it.
Be open to listening. If you understand the education sector, for example, create solutions that are accessible and inexpensive. Your business may be about smart boards in the classroom, but with classes taking place online, work on your product in a way that teachers can use the concept of that product on their computers from their homes. You can even let schools borrow more smart boards to give to their teachers’ homes while distance learning lasts.
The key is to innovate and catch up to the changes that are happening at the speed of light. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and there is no greater necessity than right now.
And to invent in the right direction, you need to communicate, and communicate well with all your customers. All the good ideas lie in the problems they are facing currently.
So how to communicate with customers the right way during a crisis like the one we are in? And most importantly, how to communicate to retain the customers you have currently?
Let’s see!
Create openings for dialogues:
Nowadays there are so many platforms for you to reach out to your customers. Create question posts, polls, feedback forms, or just genuine posts asking your community how they are doing and what is something that might help them. Create a personalized campaign sharing some of your valuable resources for free to your customers making a way for them to connect with you about any kind of help they might require.
The more they feel like they can rely on you during such hard times, the longer they will stay with you. Be their source of support, security in these uncertain times.
Mostly, some of your hard-earned relationships with your loyal customers might’ve been shaken up by these uncertainties but you can easily prevent that by opening a raw and authentic dialogue between you and them.
Choose candor over charisma:
That sounds like a gimmick. But with marketing, we often forget that charisma isn’t everything. Sure it helps to seem so cool that people want to automatically know more about you. But it is temporary. Truth and authenticity will always work when people are anyway too occupied with their struggles. They don’t need you to be out of reach. They need you to make yourself available and on the same level as them.
That paragraph was an example of us not being charismatic.
Integrate a unified digital channel:
When your customer is trying to reach you and if they have to send you an email, or call you, it is not ideal. They should be able to get all the help they need via a singular communication channel. With a customer portal, this communication is cleaner and more organized.
Help them get answers before they ask for them and help them solve issues on their own with step by step instructions and guidance. Make sure that your portal has bifurcated issues in categories so they don’t need to dig around for topics. Give them access to their invoices, personal information, etc. within the portal so they don’t have to go look through their inbox. Eliminate the need for them to have to email you anything.
The point is to provide a digital-first experience which is easy to access for them and is scalable for you so that you are prepared for such big changes, crises, etc.
Use the portal to its maximum potential to truly make it simple for your customers to interact with you.
Unclutter internal communication:
You don’t want an episode of lost in translation happening at such a crucial stage. If you work in departmental silos, then it is time to unlearn some processes and adapt to the new normal; open communication.
What can happen with different departments in charge of small and different things, aspects of your offerings is miscommunication. If not that then definitely delays in addressing what might be some important requests or messages. A small delay or a small miscommunication can prove to be fatal for your organization because people are sensitive now more than ever.
So disintegrate your hierarchies and department silos and try and streamline the flow of internal communication and information. The key here would be identifying the right stakeholders who can handle pressure and are good with people.
You would also need to keep your employees up to date with any major developments in your company because chances are they are as anxious as your customers are right now. If you hear any negative chatter around some things, then try and address them organization-wise as soon as possible.
Put yourself in the shoes of your customer, and take it from there. The pain points will be abundantly clear to you then and that is the first step to eliminating them.
In this web portal vs website article, we are going to talk about small yet considerable differences that’ll help you choose the right one for different stages of your customer interaction. The main difference between the web portal and website lies with the access your customers have. Website is open for all and it fetches traffic from a lot of different sources, whereas a web portal is limited to your customers or your prospects or people who decide to create their personal accounts with you. Generally, your website is the gateway to enter into your web portal. Essentially, it’s not about portal vs website or the differences between them, it’s about creating a synergy around them to get the best of both of them.
What we are trying to say is that you need both of them.
But why do you need both of them? How will having different points of interaction help you acquire and retain your customers? Read ahead…
The amount of interaction we have with the companies that make the products we use every day is staggering. And growing. With the existence of multiple social media platforms, our need to talk, express, complain, and collaborate has increased. The pros and cons of that are a matter for another day. But there’s constant interaction with multiple people for a number of reasons or without any.
Writing a letter to the company that makes your body wash, and accidentally used a slightly oily bottle once, was tedious. But 140 character tweets can now hold them accountable.
No matter what your business is, and who your customers are, they want you to be accountable for what you do and how you do it. With this need for accountability, comes the need for transparency. Transparency, within and outside the company.
So there is the concept of a website. Whether you sell on it or not, you had a website. Now, of course, the website itself has evolved. It’s a shop, a business card, a face to the world, a marketing requirement, a place to flaunt your skills and accolades, everything.
If we were to differentiate between website and web portal, a website and a web portal are two sides of a coin. While the website does all that, a web portal catches the business/interaction that the website attracts.
A successful customer journey begins at the website and ends with a purchase that happens inside the portal. But let’s go into details and explore the functionality of each separately.
What is a website and how can it help your business?
In technical terms, a website is a collection of web pages with a common domain name published on a single server, according to Wikipedia. But majorly, it is the face of your brand, your first impression as mentioned above. And here’s what a website can do for your brand:
– First and foremost, it acts like a business card and a portfolio rolled in one. Customers or fellow businesses can reach you, know about your products and services, and see your past work. If you browse around this website here, you will see these things labeled under Contact Us, About Us, Portfolio &/ Case Studies.
– It is a store: CRMJetty also has a store component. From there, you can purchase our products. Similarly, you can browse online stores via their websites. A number of them have a comparison feature so you can easily make a purchasing decision.
– Marketing tool: Once you have a website, you can use it to its maximum potential for marketing. Each component has dedicated marketing value and it is even designed to get attention. The first fold of any website, even if it has 7 words or no words, is given a lot of thought. It will decide what the customer does next. Each button is used to extract interaction, while not trying to look too hard. Website design is tight rope and we all walk it.
– Knowledge base or blog: this part is a display of the company’s knowledge, skills, and interests.
A website must be found when searching for things it provides. The better it is designed, and put together, the more are its chances of discovery.
Now that we have a clear understanding of a website, let’s dig deeper into what a web portal is.
What is a web portal and how can it help your business?
Your web portal takes care of the business aspect of things and enables you to take action on what your website presents of you. For example, you’ve listed out all your products on your website, but when your visitor clicks on the ‘buy now’ button, they are redirected to a sign up/sign in page which is the gateway to your portal.
If they’ve not signed up with you yet and are first time customers then they’ll have to make an account with you and only then they’ll be able to purchase from you. Once they are signed up, they’ll have credentials to sign in your web portal any time they want to make a purchase from you.
A web portal not only allows you to nurture your customers but also create a strong database of your customers in your CRM.
There are other things for which a web portal can be used. Following are the same:
– Dedicated space: It gives your customers a dedicated space to store their personal data, browse your products, make purchases, store their payment details, create a wishlist, manage addresses, and much more. For a B2B web portal, the vendors or partners would be able to create proposals, interact through online chat, generate tickets, etc. The functionality of the space depends largely on your business model and the interaction required between you and your customers.
– Customized solution: As mentioned in the above point, a custom web portal can give your customers the right features they need to interact with your brand. Custom solutions are flexible and scalable, letting you expand the same as and when required.
– Nurturing: Since each customer will have a separate space to interact with you, you can study their interactions and behavior and send them promotional offers and coupons according to their choices. This way you will be able to get more out of a single customer.
– Engaging: Since you have their interaction data, you can engage with them on a personal level by sending personalized messages, offers, notifications, new releases, etc. This keeps them engaged with your brand giving you an upper hand over your competitors.
Where to invest?
It’s not a matter of choosing one over the other or website vs web portal but in fact, how to use them simultaneously in order to capture, nurture, engage, monitor and retain your customers. The key lies in using the right solution at the right time.
When to use a website?
– At the initial stage of interaction when your customers don’t know about you at all.
– Use your website to educate your customers about your products and services and to pitch them through product pages, blog, FAQs, About Us, and other CMS pages.
– Attract more traffic to your website by creating SEO friendly product pages and content using the right keywords.
When to use a web portal?
– After deciding to make a purchase with you, move them to your web portal.
– Use a web portal to interact with them on a regular basis to sell more.
– Emails, calls, online chats, are a thing of the past, web portals are the new way to interact with your customers.
Both of them have a different use case and both are necessary for you to build your brand. The only question is when to use which platform and we already addressed that.
So, if you already have a website but not a web portal, then we can help you out with that. We’ve been creating custom web portals for different industries for close to 12 years now. Just like we said, we also began the business of building websites before we started making portals.
In December 2019 the unknown and unseen virus hit us. In early January WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic and we all went into our homes by March. This resulted in loss for many companies and many of them had to lay off their employees.
It made many people hunt for new jobs be it full time or part time and some even turned to freelancing. Becoming a freelancer is not only helping them but it is also helping companies to run their businesses easily.
But freelancing has its own difficulties. It’s very difficult to manage household chores as well as produce quality work for your clients.
Once your work starts speaking and you start getting more clients then it becomes difficult to manage clients as well as work in the middle of a crisis. Let’s understand how easy it becomes to manage your tasks and streamline your operations using a web portal:
Streamlining operations:
Web portals make it easy for you to maintain the workflow for each of your clients. Your clients can easily provide you work or update you on current work directly from the web portal. Additionally, it becomes easy for both of you to stay updated with changes from anywhere at any time.
Availability:
Being a freelancer is a tough job, managing work, personal life and of course clients. Major difficulties come when your clients don’t know when they should reach out to you. This results in you being on your phone the whole day and doing back and forth with your emails.
This is when a web portal brings ease to you. Upon integrating with your website you can add your working hours in it. This makes it easy for clients to reach out to you as they will know your working time. Additionally, this will not make you stay on your phone the whole day and you can maintain some personal time and space.
Custom Portal:
If you are not happy with a pre made portal then you can always reach out to companies like us to help you develop a customized web portal. With the help of custom portals you can have clear business logic and add on the features of your choice. While building a custom portal you can make sure that it suits your website’s theme, functionalities, and is easy for your clients to navigate. You can also ask companies to make a custom payment gateway directly in the portal. This makes it easy for your clients to transfer payments once your work is complete.
Security:
Security is an essential part of any product today. Having a secure portal means your clients’ data is safe and they trust you with it. Your clients will also have individual login credentials using which they can log in their accounts only and have access to their documents. It will work as a secure channel for your client to communicate with you.
Final Words:
I can understand being a freelancer and working day and night to fulfill your necessities in this time of crisis is difficult. But web portals are where you can streamline that process easily. We at CRMJetty are working to make web portals available for everyone’s unique use case.. You can contact us here for getting world-class custom web portals. Get a portal now and make yourself as well as your clients happy.
CRMJetty 