All You Need to Know About WordPress Client Portal

If you have a business, it means you need to have smooth and clear communication. 

You can keep the communication intact through a live chat system. Otherwise, you can implement a ticket system, where customers can raise tickets for queries and wait for the reply. 

You can also dedicate a separate team for customer support. There are several options on hand. However, the best option would be to set up a WordPress customer portal. A customer portal would allow easy sharing of documents and other relevant information between customers and businesses.

Want to know more about it?

Alright! Let’s see how this WordPress client portal can do all the communication work. 

What is a client portal

Before we dive in to know about the perks of a WordPress customer portal, let’s first understand the meaning of the client portal.

A client portal is a platform where your customers can access their details and share important documents with the organization. It allows customers to interact securely.

Customers can access their dedicated space using login credentials. 

Why you should go for a WordPress customer portal

Though there are loads of benefits of having a WordPress customer portal, let’s see a few:

  • Saves Time

It is one of the most important benefits of a WordPress client portal. Customers can find and sort their documents and data independently rather than spend hours writing emails and waiting for a reply.  

  • Data Security

When it comes to the WordPress client portal, they have security features like firewalls, SSL certificates, and malware protection to safeguard customer data. Further, it allows us to define the levels of users and their access to the portal.  

  • Increased Productivity

Along with saving time, the WordPress customer portal also enhances your business and staff’s productivity. Your team can focus on priority-based work rather than on communication channels.

  • Improved Collaboration

WordPress customer portal allows customers to access their dedicated space whenever they want. This feature enhances the customer experience and their relationship with the business. No inconsistency or inaccuracy in the data favors a strong association. 

Different ways to use WordPress client portal

WordPress client portal streamlines communication between the customers and the business. It offers a lot of benefits and is easy to implement. Its nature of integrating plugins and extensions in a few clicks makes it more demanding. 

Here we will see about the different ways you can leverage the WordPress customer portal.

  • Virtual Classrooms

The client portal can be used for virtual classrooms where there’s constant back and forth communication between instructors and the students. By creating a separate portal for students and staff, you can provide them with a dedicated area to access their information. It will also reduce the instructors’ workload. Instead of sharing similar information with each student individually, they can upload it on the LMS, and students can view it from their dedicated space.  

  • Membership Sites

Membership sites need customer portals more than others. With customer portals, members can manage their subscription and personal information. They can easily upgrade to a new plan or subscribe to a new service. Through a separate portal, members can also view their activities. 

  • Ecommerce Customer Support

Do you need to provide your customers with constant support?

Maybe to check their order history or track current orders?

Ecommerce businesses benefit the most from customer portals. With portals, you can provide your customers with a space to check their order information, update delivery date, edit orders, or request a refund or exchange without asking your team for support. 

The Last Words

WordPress client portal can automate the communication between you and your customers. It can also help to streamline the operations and reduce the back and forth activities. So, if you are planning to bring in a WordPress customer portal for your customers, do not hesitate. Go for it!  

7 Benefits of Using Customer Portal for Freelancers

Being a freelancer is cool but comes with a lot of responsibilities and constant changing requirements to fulfill. Your clients reach out to you any time of the day. This makes you available on calls and emails round the clock. Many times it becomes difficult to have proper personal and professional balance.

To manage all this as a freelancer let’s see the top seven ways a customer portal can help you in your work: 

  • Professional appearance:

The portal plugin works with your WordPress website. With this plugin, their requirements are better managed and so is their communication with you. Your brand appears more put together and streamlined to your clients. 

  • Speeds up communication process:

Now with the help of portals you don’t need to look up old emails every now and then. You can just search any emails in the portal itself. With the customer getting direct and real time access to the work, it eliminates the need for emails and calls for updates. 

  • Working hours:

With the help of WordPress customer portal you can easily show your working hours to customers. This will make it easy for them to know the correct time and medium to contact you. It will also add a perfect personal and professional balance which is much needed as a freelancer.

  • Easy to use:

Providing ease to your customers is the first rule. Some of your customers might know ways to use the tool you are using while some might not. But, with WordPress client portal plugin this becomes easy. You customers can easily get along with this. When the platform you work on is user friendly, customers will automatically associate that ease of work with you and your brand.

  • Customization options:

You can anytime add or remove extra modules in the portal on the basis of the services you provide. Suppose, you are providing one service, let’s say graphic designing, then you start providing photo editing services as well, then, you can add that module in your portal.

  • Manage Contracts:

Paperwork can be a tedious task. But, with WordPress client portal you can easily manage contracts directly from the portal. Your clients and you will have access to it from anywhere at any time. So, now be it local or international clients, get the contracts signed directly from the portal. Increase transparency and serve better!

  • Security:

Security is one of the important aspects for any product. Client portals have a lot of confidential data about your clients so it is important to use the latest security algorithms. So, make sure that you provide a secure customer portal.

Conclusion:

Being a freelancer can be a difficult job as you might need to be a multitasker. This is when a customer portal can come to the rescue. Get the best out of the customer portal and serve them the right way.

Salesforce Customer Portals Vs. Communities: What to Choose?

When we talk about CRMs or portals the first thing which comes to our mind is Salesforce. They are and have been ruling the industry for more than a decade now. The reason for their success is that they understand their market deeply and have been known to launch products that complement their CRM creating a perfect flow for customer communication for their clients.

The complimentary products that we are talking about here are portals and communities. If you’ve been following Salesforce or have been using it for a long time now, then you might be aware of what they are, their functionalities, and how they benefit organizations.

In this blog, we are going to discuss:

– Types of Salesforce portals and their functionalities

– Salesforce communities

– Difference between Salesforce Portals and Communities

– Which one to choose?

Today almost every organization we interact with is through Portals. Believe it or not, it’s true.

These portals have taken up the market and revolutionized the ways people interact with companies and vice versa. According to research done by Nuance, 67% of people prefer to use self-service portals instead of getting on a call or emailing with company employees.

Portals not only changed the way users interact with the companies but they also gave users a chance to learn and explore things on their own.

And these portals are not limited to customer interactions. They go beyond.

Three major types of Salesforce portals:

Self-service portal:

Nowadays customers prefer to solve their problems even the technical ones on their own. Self-service portals help them by redirecting them to the right FAQs, blog posts, technical documents, videos, etc. so that they can resolve the issue on their own. This reduces the communication between your customers and customer support while creating a win-win situation for both. Your support can work more productively and customers don’t need to wait to get their answers.

Customer portal:

Salesforce.com Customer Portal provides customers with an online channel to communicate with customer executives and solve their issues. They help to streamline communication and provide easy and fast solutions. Portals are also helping companies to provide 24/7 support to their customers regardless of time zones and geographic shortcomings.

Their customer portal is somewhat similar to the self-service portal except that you’ll be providing your customers with a different interface to interact with you rather than doing it directly from your website or web app.

Partner portal:

Salesforce partner portal is for your sales and channel partners. They have access to the core features of Salesforce CRM. The partner portal also provides partners with leads and customer conversion opportunities.

Portal is a neat way to communicate with different entities associated with your business. But, this is not all where Salesforce stopped. They wanted to make portals more branded, collaborative, and bring a change in the way users and companies interact with each other.

Hence in 2013, Salesforce introduced Community Cloud with an aim to share information and collaborate with people more effectively. It provides companies with the tools to create online communities by connecting with customers, external partners, and employees.

Salesforce Community Cloud is available in three tiers. They are:

– Customer Community

– Customer Community Plus

– Partner Community

Depending on your company’s requirements you can purchase any one of the licenses. The customer community is useful for support and feedback. For online collaboration, handling internal employee communities, HR, or IT teams, the customer community plus is useful. Lastly, the partner community is useful to B2B businesses as you can create a flow for qualifying leads, tracking revenue, and providing product training.
Community clouds are taking over the market due to its high scalability, no coding requirements, libraries filled with rich scalable templates, easy third party integrations, and custom made components, and more.

You can build communities based on the entities you interact for different purposes.

Now let’s look at the differences between Salesforce customer portal and Communities:

Portals and community clouds have the same structural features but differ in the way people interact with them.

– Portals provide external users the ability to access Salesforce whereas community clouds connect the internal users together in Salesforce.

– External users like partners or customers can communicate via Chatter in Communities. While on the other hand, portals don’t support Chatter.

– Communities are visually appealing and have easy to navigate user interfaces while portals’ user interface might look a little outdated.

– Cost-wise portals are reasonable as compared to Salesforce community cloud.

– Portal is an extension of your CRM and users can access or view information limited to their account. Whereas, communities reside inside your organization and can be accessed globally.

– Various portals like knowledge portal, self-service portal, customer portal, partner portal, etc. are used for different purposes. Whereas, communities provide one platform to share knowledge with users, easy communication between users, employees, and partners, drive more sales by connecting with distributors and resellers, enhance user engagement, workflow, and content all from one place.

– Community cloud comes with the integration of site.com for content management, android and iOS version, integration of Salesforce Einstein, Chatter, enhanced security, and many more.

Now, comes the main question, what should you use: Salesforce Customer Portal or Communities?

Even today Salesforce portals are the most searched and most used products. But, over the course, they will soon be replaced with Community Cloud. So if you are a company using a customer portal for a few years now, then it might be time to start looking to switch to community cloud.

But if you are a company that’s just starting out or is just starting to scale then the Salesforce portal is the right option.

Portals and communities are the same in some ways and a lot different in others. The right decision lies with knowing your requirements, the stage your company’s at, and especially, what your customers expect from you.

Portal: Your Perfect Business Partner

Customers, the one and only boss for any business.

As an owner of a company you will have many responsibilities. But, interacting with customers is crucial. Simultaneously, it is difficult to handle complex situations which involve various roles, obstacles and different processes.

With the help of CRM technology, you can streamline your business operations and customer interaction. CRM software helps you organize your business operations as it stores and provides all necessary customer details on time.

But, when it comes to managing real time queries of customers, CRM needs a solution that can work seamlessly. During such time, WordPress client portal comes to our rescue. It fulfills the gap and easily integrates with your CRM.

So, what is a portal?

Let’s put it simply, it’s a connection between you and your customers. It is a role-based authorization. On the basis of this authorization your customers can have easy access to CRM’s data whenever they want and can reach out to you in just a few simple steps. This even makes it easy for your sales team to provide real time solutions.

Before we begin bombarding you with benefits of client portals, let’s understand challenges you will encounter if you are not using customer portals.

  • Ticket generation: 

Generation of thousands of tickets is one of the most common issues companies face when they are in constant touch with customers. 

For example, you own an eCommerce business and your customers have different types of questions which your FAQs can not answer. In such a scenario they reach out to your support staff.

This in turn keeps your support team on their toes round the clock and decreases productivity. In a longer time, such things might affect your business as well.

  • Spending more time on field, phones and emails: 

Providing customer service is the most difficult yet important part of business. At same time it is also very time consuming. Your support team will have to answer thousands of requests over phones and calls to understand clients’ issues and provide solutions. A back and forth of emails is nightmarish to everyone who works in support. 

Sometimes they also need to go on the field and get a clear picture on the problem. Your customers might also have to come to your office and all these things consume lots of time. 

  • Security Threat:

Data is the oil of the 21st century and securing this data is very important. Nowadays data leak issues have become very common. So, when your organization is communicating with customers, exchanging data has become very easy. And such incidents do create a doubt in our mind with regards to data security.

  • Unavailability of curated data: 

Sometimes if you want to see details of any particular customer then there are chances you might not get an updated information of your customers.

Just imagine, one of your customer wants to re-order some product. In such a scenario you will need to go through an ERP or CRM software and check if product availability, shipment and many other things.

These problems will help you understand the need of having portals and ways it can help you grow your business.

Now let’s look at the benefits of having portals:

  • Ease to customer: 

Portals give your customers freedom to solve small issues on their own. You can provide information about your products using WordPress portals in the form of FAQs, knowledge base, etc.

Information which you have provided online will help your customers regardless of their location or time and avoids issues of raising support tickets. 

  • Reduce operational costs:

With the help of portals you will be providing all the necessary information on it. As we saw in the above point this will help you decrease support tickets. In long run it will help you reduce burden from the operational team and will help your business grow.

  • Customer satisfaction:

This is the goal of each and every business. The core focus behind creating customer portals is customer satisfaction. All features that you develop are around an idea of focusing on solving customers’ queries.

The more ease you provide to your customers to solve their issues on their own, the more they will help you to promote your business. Hence, portals will help you nurture your customer relationship, grow your business and help your branding.

Final Words:

Having portals is always a go to solution for businesses to grow and stay connected with their customers in long run.  As you know they help you bring more ease and streamline your operations. And which customer will not prefer to be with a business who keeps their customers’ satisfaction first?!

Here’s Why Customer-Centric Firms are At the Top

Do you remember the days when ordering food was a newly introduced concept?

Yes? What came to your mind? Mobile applications?

Nope. That’s not it. Let’s backtrack to the beginning of the food ordering and delivery industry.

Phone calls.

Yes!

We used to order food over phone calls. Ask all the 90’s kids. They know the struggle. It was quite real. Where do you think the term Hangry came from!

Well, before mobile apps took over, we used to wait for good 45 mins to an hour if not more just for a single dish. There were yellow pages involved, a lot of back and forth, waiting, bad food, some yelling, and plain dissatisfaction.

And the problems would still exist. Like returning that order or food, asking for your money back, and then going through the same process again because you are still hungry. Remember?

At that point, it was natural to feel the need to never order food and just make an effort to go out if craving anything specific.

But, now those days are gone. Today we are living in an era of technology. It has made our lives easy. How? Purchasing things like gadgets, household appliances, clothes, medicines, etc. be it big or small everything now is just a few clicks away.

Ordering food too!

Continue reading the article to find out how technology has revolutionized the food delivery industry and made some hungry people very happy, while I go and grab my wrap that I ordered only 20mins back! 

WordPress customer portal

Apart from ordering food online, you can now, live track it, cancel it easily, talk to the support staff, the delivery person, change address and many other things.

The first company to introduce online food ordering was FoodPanda but soon due to some bad operational decisions, ineffective communication, and technical issues, they failed to make a dent in the industry.

Soon after, Zomato launched its online food ordering application. And to no one’s surprise they became a huge success.

How?

By providing easy to use and hassle-free user experience. And exceptional 24*7*365 chat support.

How do they manage to be there for their customers all the time?

Knowledge/support portal & customer portal.

These portals help you bridge the gap between you and your customers by minimizing the queries and request load and enabling customers to self-serve. This not only makes it easy for people ordering food to solve their issues that might include instructions to the delivery person, change of address or order, without having to wait for a single minute but also renders complete customer satisfaction.

Apart from self-serving, these support portals can also serve as a ticketing system where your customers can add queries for which they couldn’t find any answers. And if the customers want to talk to directly talk to you, then they can opt for the online chat support too.

They made it big in a really competitive industry by being there for their customers and closely paying attention to their behavior.

And this is exactly what all the customer-centric firms do. To grow. To expand the customer base. To retain current customers.

Not only this, there are many other benefits of having a support or knowledge portal. Let’s look at a few of them and the ways these portals can help you in growing your business and customer base.

Increase Productivity of Your Support Team

With Help and Support Portal, native screen pops give your agents instant access to contextual Portal data, including the caller’s user record and tickets. This empowers agents to provide personalized interactions and eliminates the need to ask time-consuming or repetitive questions.

WordPress client portal

Turn Any Device into a Support Portal

The web real-time communication facility turns your employees’ web browser into a phone. Thus, Portal enables agents to respond to customer requests from any location. It also eliminates time taking procedures like hardware, maintenance and set-up time, while allowing an enterprise to focus on organization’s resources to deliver exceptional customer service.

Turn Interactions into Insights

Every interaction matters… To read in depth about the works of a support portal, download our support whitepaper.

About Us:

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

Integrate the Power of WordPress and CRM

There are so many platforms available for website creation. But, many developers prefer working with WordPress.

You might also be using WordPress.

In fact, according to a study done by Kinsta, more than 29% of websites’ development is in WordPress. This number is huge. It means that more than one-fourth of the websites on the internet use WordPress.

It truly showcases the power of open source software. Today WordPress is a large community. Not only on the developing side but, millions of people use WordPress to manage their website’s content.

Because of its robust features, WordPress has turned out to be a favorite tool for many people.

This was all about CMS. Now, let’s look at the CRMs. Companies use CRMs to maintain the records of their customers to provide them with better user experience and customer service.

CMS handles your website and CRMs handle your customers’ data. But, the real magic happens when they both are in synchronization.

For this, portals play a vital role. They bridge the gap between CRMs and CMS. Portals are helping companies a lot to manage their customers, optimize their customer journey and serve them better.

There are various types of portals available like CRM customer portal, knowledge portal, self-service portal, etc. each with a unique use case and companies either purchase or develop them according to their needs and business model.

These various types of portals are available on a variety of platforms. So, you can decide which portal you want to use on the basis of the CRM and CMS you have. You can even decide which type of portals you want to serve your customers with.

Let’s say you are using SugarCRM for your storing your clients’ data and WordPress as your CMS then, you need to make sure that your portal integrates with both of them.

Many small and medium sized businesses use SugarCRM. It is known for its open source nature and robust functionalities. It helps you to streamline your business by helping you manage all your customers and their data.

Just imagine the power of SugarCRM WordPress Integration with portals as a cherry on the cake can be.

SugarCRM WordPress Synchronizing: 

SugarCRM WordPress integration is the best combination for small and medium sized companies. This integration is a good opportunity for your employees to reach out to your clients easily.

Let’s explore the benefits of using this:

  • Lead Data Management:

When your visitors fill up the form on your website which is in WordPress, you will be able to see their details in the backend in your SugarCRM. This makes it an easy way to collect, store and manage your leads’ data in your CRM. 

Not only this but with the help of these leads also you can start cold calling and try to convert them into your clients. Your CRM will have your clients’ data and this will help you analyze and understand your users. Additionally, it will even help you to streamline various processes to help you grow bigger.

  • Precise Data:

When your CRM and CMS are in proper sync, the data within will be precise and it’ll be easier for you to maintain data hygiene. The data travels from CMS to CRM and then SugarCRM with its functionalities gives you the freedom to utilize that data the way you want. Both of these platforms being secure also gives an assurance that there’ll be no data loss in the process. 

  • User Activity Tracking:

You can know which web pages your clients are visiting and track their activity on your website. This data, in turn, will help you to understand your users’ behavior better. You can send them custom messages on the basis of their interaction with your website, decrease bounce rate, and enhance your customer service.

  • Create Custom Form Designs:

SugarCRM provides you a feature called a WYSIWYG builder. This lets you create a custom field for your form. You can have complete control of what you wish to develop, you can even showcase your creativity, maintain your brand value and use color combination with respect to your brand.

  • User Specific Access:

You can provide specific access to each user according to their use and WordPress assures you that only authenticated users can make changes in your WordPress site.

  • Optimized Lead Journey:

This integration will let you engage and analyze visitors on your WordPress website and helps you to convert them into efficient clients for your business. It provides you insights into what people are looking for on your website, you can know about your target audience, customer habits and understand their behavior.

Final Words:

This integration will help you get the best of both worlds. You can easily create responsive websites using WordPress and SugarCRM and the portals, an interface for your customers, will work as a cherry on the cake for you. It will help you understand your users effectively; gain insights and help you increase your business.

Top Customer Service Challenges In 2020 and One Solution

Handling customers is an extremely difficult task. Every customer has different requirements or issues and dealing with these becomes difficult for your staff.

But, in the competitive world of business, your customer service speaks louder. It is one of the factors which defines whether your business will flourish or not.

There is constant pressure to innovate and innovation is not easy. So while you put efforts there, you also have to put efforts in customer service. That can be the differentiator between you and your competitors. 

One of the reasons that a company loses customers is because they only focus on unhappy customers. Now of course, that is easy to do. They are upset with you and they are demanding your attention. This makes it difficult to focus on and cater to satisfied and happy customers. 

Bad customer service will bring your reputation down, while good may go unnoticed. This is why you have to be proactive with how you treat them. You need to take care of things like time taken by the customer service team to react or help your customers or how they behave and talk with your customers.

This will of course, make it expensive. There is no guarantee of return on investment. You may think that hiring more people to combat that is the answer, anyone can do that. You need a new solution, one that can help you stand out from the crowd. A neat portal solution like Salesforce WordPress portal will help, but First, let’s look at the challenges that you are likely to face in 2020 to determine how you can use the portal:

  • Delay in Responding:

When customers are stuck with a problem, it is very likely for them to become impatient and expect quick responses. They don’t care if the problem occurred because of them, technical issues or anything else. They just need a solution to the problem. 

Hence, you need to make sure that your customer service responds faster and tries to resolve their issues as soon as possible.If your customer service is not able to solve the issue in the first trial, that is fine. But, responding to your clients immediately is key.

  • Payment Issues:

Unpaid invoices or payment issues are common when you run a company.

You cannot tell your customer service team to track payments or pending payments, etc. constantly. This will result in you eventually losing lots of time for your customer service.

In a business having such issues is very common and you will need to cope with these things.

  • Unhappy Customers:

Your aim as a company is to make a top-notch product and make sure that it is liked by your customers. Problems are common and sometimes unavoidable. But, these things will annoy your customers. They will try to get to your customer service team and complain about it. 

Thanks to social media platforms, customers raise their concerns and issues on these platforms. They go online and complain about the pathetic service your company gives. But, it completely depends on you and your team how well they handle such situations and maintain the company’s reputation.

Disney provides the best customer service. They use the technique known as H.E.A.R.D technique i.e. Hear, Empathize, Apologize, Resolve, Diagnose.

This will tell your support staff the exact things they have to do when they are working with your clients.

While working with angry customers, you need to make sure that you are listening to them. You need to make them realize that you truly care about their issues and you want to help them resolve it.

  • Video Chat:

When people are angry it is very likely that they will prefer talking to people rather than chatbots. They prefer having someone live in front of them who can listen to them, understand their problem and help them resolve it.

It would be perfect if you can use technology and have live video chat option for your customers. They will be happy to talk to someone who is calm and quickly helps resolve their issue.

It’s the era of technology and using it to the full capacity is the best solution. You can use a variety of online customer portals which can solve your issues of customer service.

Yes! You heard it right.

Portals let your customers easily play around and know your products. They can solve the issues on their own with a knowledge base. They can even easily talk with your customer service team from the portal itself and resolve issues.

There are various portals available in the market which can help you provide great customer service. You can go for like Salesforce online customer portal, SugarCRM customer portal, WordPress customer portal, Dynamics customer portal, etc.

7 Ways How Client Portal can Become A Freelancer’s Saviour

If you are a freelancer, your inbox never sleeps. Nor does your phone, or your messages, or you. You know exactly what I am talking about if you have ever answered calls from clients at 11 in the night saying that they can’t find a draft from the previous week. 

This communication and management gets more difficult when you have more clients. This is why you should take advantage of technology and invest in a WordPress client portal. It can be your respite from multiple emails and spruce up the way you manage all the projects that you are working on. 

If you don’t depend on simply email, then you have a document collaboration software, a communication software, file-sharing software and a completely different one for managing your contracts with each client. You can have all of it in one place. Let’s look at how a client portal can benefit you. 

Professional appearance: 

This client portal works in connection with WordPress so it can look like a part of your website with matching or complementing theme. A visually cohesive platform inspires trust in your brand and navigating the portal already feels familiar because of the similar navigation on your website. 

Communication: 

With the WordPress client portal, you don’t have to dig out old emails from clients to double-check, a detail you or they may have mentioned at the beginning of your work relationship. You can simply tap into the individual client’s conversation thread and get all the required details from right there. 

Calendar:

It is very difficult to establish a work-life balance when you are a freelancer. The only way to do it is to make sure your clients know when to contact you based on your availability. Therefore, you can mark your office hours in the WordPress client portal’s calendar. This is also useful when it comes to scheduling weekly or monthly meetings with each client. 

Software ease: 

Not all clients are equal. Some may know how to use all the various collaboration and communication tools you use, and some may find it extremely difficult. Therefore, a simple, intuitive client portal where everything is in a way that the meaning is clear helps your client as well as you. The chances of your client coming back to you for more work are higher if they find it easy to work with you. Additionally, they are less likely to send lengthy emails to you if they can get the work done in a hassle-free manner. 

Expansion options:

If you begin from providing one service like content writing, the portal will have modules that fit that requirement. But if you expand and provide more services like photography or graphic designing, you can easily add modules that respective clients require for it. You don’t have to have separate client portals for it, just like you won’t require a different website for each skill in your portfolio. 

Contract management:

More or less all clients will require you to sign contracts. While you can get physical copies of them if they are local, it is difficult to do the same for international clients. Therefore, a contract management option inside your WordPress customer portal can be helpful so that you can sign the required documents from within the portal and all concerned parties can have access to it at all times. 

Security:

Clients can get their own login credentials that you can generate easily. This way they can be sure that their data is safe with and no one else gets access to it without the credentials. 

In this day of working from anywhere, no one is at a desk all 5 days of the week and as freelancers, you need your offices in your laptops. And just because you are a freelancer, you don’t have the right to slack off and provide less satisfactory customer service. In order to stand out in the crowd of freelancers, and to make your mark in the service industry at the same time, you need a professional and easy to use client portal to complement your WordPress website! 

5 Must-Have Features in Your SugarCRM WordPress Customer Portal

SugarCRM is a popular name in the CRM industry. For anyone who wants an enterprise solution the first stop in the enterprise grade options is SugarCRM. Similarly, when it comes to Content Management Systems, the name WordPress is synonymous with it. So it is clear that it has a large market. When you are building a business, you generally look for tools that are established brands in the industry. 

If your business is an ecommerce store, then you must need both: a CRM and a CMS. But that is not all. You also need a customer portal to interact with your customers. Let us look a little more in detail as to what features you need to have in your customer portal:

5 Features of a SugarCRM Customer Portal:

  • Data entry: 

Data entry is an extremely basic task. But does that mean it is easy to do when there is a huge customer base? Not at all. A customer portal gives your customer the access to add in their information, like name, phone number, address, etc. These are basic details that cannot go wrong because they have to be in the invoices. This saves a lot of hassle for your staff because they don’t have to handle any changes in this information. 

  • Live Chat

The SugarCRM WordPress customer portal comes with live chat option. This way, your customer will never have to leave unanswered. And you can chat with them to solve their queries. It helps you give them the best assistance without much effort. This adds heftily in customer satisfaction. 

  • Single Sign On

Single Sign On is an extremely popular and easy way of signing in. This is because creating strong passwords is a difficult task. A huge number of people use ‘123456’ or ‘password’ as their password and this is highly unsafe. With SSO, you don’t have to worry about coming up with a unique password again and it is secure! It’s the best of both worlds!

  • Role based access

SugarCRM customer portal gives you the flexibility to assign specific level of access to certain modules, based on their requirement. You don’t need to give unlimited access to your CRM to every portal user. This way you can limit the potential data leaks, while still making sure all the operations run smoothly. 

  • Mass Credential Generation

Imagine you have to create a username and password for a 1000 people. It can be a tedious task. But if your WordPress customer portal has a feature to create mass credentials, then that task becomes instantly much simpler. 

Your SugarCRM customer portal helps you extend your CRM capabilities and more importantly helps you connect with your customers. Since these are the most popular brands in their respective fields, their coming together for your website gives you the best experience. A portal built on that gives you the best of both worlds. You and your users get to take advantage of it.

Once you pick the CRM and CMS, the next item on your checklist should be to buy a portal. And for this, you have to be very careful. After investing in the right CRM and CMS, if you get the cheaper, gimmicky portal, it will affect your business. You should instead choose one that has all the above features, and a company that can give you customization services

After all, a portal that represents your company should follow the same design and style language. Customization also gives you the option to choose modules, dashboard variants, colour, etc.

A customer portal represents your company just as much as a website does. Even more so, if you think about how it directly affects user interaction in lieu of how a website’s interaction with the user is. Would you let anything affect this interaction negatively?

Pick the perfect SugarCRM WordPress customer portal today!

4 Ways a Salesforce Customer Portal in WordPress Winning a Fusion

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is synonymous to the brand Salesforce. It’s the first name that pops up whenever there is any chatter about CRM. They have set the standard for the whole industry to follow. As of 2019, they will complete their two decades into the business. Two whole decades!

One can safely assume they know what they are doing. Moreover, last year, it was the best company to work for, according to Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. So, you could only imagine the kind of talent working there to keep Salesforce at the top.

Similarly, when you talk about Content Management System (CMS), people are bound to think of WordPress, a company that is five years junior to Salesforce but has a similar reputation in the market. Almost anyone who has ever wanted to set up a quick blog has used WordPress. Needless to say, it is equally popular as Salesforce, for what it provides to the users.

Now imagine the possibilities with the combined power of Salesforce and WordPress.

On Salesforce, you are managing your internal & customer data and on WordPress, you are managing your website content. But how do you create a synergy between the two software? Moreover, more importantly, how can you add the customers in this synergy and create an enhanced experience for them?

All these questions have one answer.

A Salesforce Customer Portal.

Of course, we won’t just say these words and let you do all the research. We have listed down four ways a Salesforce Customer Portal will help you meet your business goals.

  • Activity & Record Tracking

A customer portal’s main purpose is to keep your customers in the loop with all the related activities that your organization is carrying out. They will be able to access & keep records of all the activities such as purchase records, contracts, calls, etc. This will reduce the efforts of your support team, which eventually will result in lower customer acquisition costs.

  • Personalized Dashboard for Enhanced Experience

Now, giving your customers the freedom to choose what they see whenever they access your portal will add delight to their experience. Using a portal, they can create their own dashboard view providing them with easy and efficient access.

  • Secure Sign-In to Build Trust

Providing a secure sign-in to a customer portal can help build trust among your existing customers as well as new customers. When they know that their personal data is in secure hands, then their loyalty with your brand increases naturally.

  • Smart Self-Serve to Save Time & Resources

Customer portal’s primary function is to help customers serve themselves. When provided with a secure customer portal, they will find their own way around your software and look for the answers, which they will get from the solutions module. You just have to make sure that you cover each & every topic & customer query in your the solutions section.

Now, if you are using Salesforce, then you already might know that Salesforce has a customer portal of its own. However, if you go to buy that, you will have to pay a hefty price as they charge per customer.

But that’s not the only solution available.

You can always go for other cost-effective solutions available in the market such as CRMJetty’s Salesforce Customer Portal.

The premium selling point of CRMJetty’s Salesforce customer portal is that it is cost effective, amongst many other great features including:

User Interface:

To add delight to your customers’ journey, it is necessary to provide an overall smooth experience, which one of the strongest suits of CRMJetty’s customer portals. A good UI will help your customers easily find their way around the customer portal.

Knowledge Base:

Customers come with questions. An aware customer wants to make a well-informed purchase decision. Our Salesforce customer portal provides access to the knowledge base, where the customer can know everything they want to know before making a purchase. And if they still have questions, they can always generate tickets.

Data security:

We value data security very highly. In this day and age when security breaches happen every day, we go to great lengths to make sure our products are safe. With this Salesforce Customer Portal, we extend that same security to your business. We don’t store any data on our servers. We simply facilitate the integration of WordPress and Salesforce and host everything on your servers.

Customization:

Your customer portal, after all, should reflect your brand. Our Salesforce Customer Portal is customizable for this exact reason. You can make it look & function however you want. You can select what modules you want to add, the layouts, etc. through the admin access. For the frontend, you can give your users a customized dashboard for a quick glance at their activities.

Apart from these features, there are of course plenty of features that are standard for a customer portal to have.

Salesforce is after all an enterprise CRM, which means you are bound to have a huge customer base. It should be simple to give your customers the kind of ease you experience with the backend of your CRM. This portal is your way of doing just that. It is a great way to share the abilities and features you enjoy on your backend, with your customers.

A customer portal, at the end of the day, is every customer’s limited individual access to your CRM. It also reduces your manual task of having to update the information of a customer. With this access, they can edit their profile, shipping and billing address any time they want, and this syncs with your Salesforce backend.

So, what are you waiting for?

Get started with CRMJetty’s top of the class customer portal to elevate your customers’ interaction with your e-store! Contact us here!

View Source:

https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/wordpress-salesforce-fusion/