Access management is a crucial part of any business. It provides improved security but mitigates threats.
As your organization grows, you need to provide multiple logins for high-volume users. However, managing high volume users in the Salesforce customer portal is a big challenge.
In this post, we will cover all the aspects of understanding high volume customer portal users and how having a custom Salesforce portal can help you easily take care of high volume users.
What are High Volume Customer Portal Users?
These users, basically, are portal users with limited access. These users will not have complete access, whether accounts, objects, or records. They are important for an organization that has thousands of portal users.
High volume customer portal users include both high volume customer portal and authenticated website license types.
Compared with other portal users, high volume customer portal users do not have roles. This further helps eliminate any kind of performance issues that are associated with role hierarchy calculations.
Characteristics of High Volume Customer Portal Users
Following are some characteristics that determine high volume users:
They are contacts enabled to access a customer portal.
They are assigned to Authenticated Website license, Customer Community, External Apps, or High Volume Customer Portal.
These users can only share records they own with other authenticated Salesforce users in the high volume customer portal users sharing group.
They can share records they own in guest user or criteria-based sharing rules.
Further, only if the following conditions are met high volume users can access records. The criteria being:
They own a record
They have update access to the account they belong to
They can access a record’s parent, and the Parent controls the organization-wide sharing setting for that record.
The organization-wide sharing setting for the object is Public Read Only or Public Read/Write.
They access the account or contact that they’re enabled under via the API (not via the standard account or contact detail page)
Understanding the Limitations of High Volume Users
High-volume portal users can not manually share records they own or have access to.
Can not transfer cases from non-high-volume portal users to high-volume portal users.
They do not own accounts.
They can not be included in personal/public groups, account/case/opportunity teams, Salesforce content libraries, etc.
They also can’t be assigned territories.
How Custom Salesforce Portal Can Help You
In an ideal scenario, you will need a Service Cloud User License. That way, you can give your contacts unlimited logins to your portal.
Users who have this license can access accounts, cases, documents, and such based on their permission settings.
However, if you do not want to go through the pains of getting licenses, the other option is to have a Custom Salesforce Portal built exactly as per your unique business requirements. It can help you use hierarchy-based and criteria-based sharing rules for high-volume users.
With the help of the portal, you can manage roles and permissions along with page-level permissions for all customers.
Along with this crucial functionality, several other features can help you easily manage your customers.
Our Salesforce Customer Portal is totally flexible, and you can customize it as per your needs. With drag-and-drop functionality, you can design and style easily.
All of these features, with security and ease of use in mind, see how our Salesforce Customer Portal can benefit your business.
Only some businesses have realized that partnership is the key to upscaling their business in this competitive landscape. But when it comes to partnership management, it’s essential to know that not all strategies can spur impact or get the desired result that you may be working to achieve. Effective partnership relationship management is crucial for promoting products and building strong relationships.
Many successful brands, including Microsoft, Hubspot, and Salesforce, have achieved tremendous results via channel sales and PRM. Amazon Web Services is one of the leading examples of having strong partnership management skills. Another brand that outshined with channel partnership was Zoom. They reported that channel partners in Japan contributed to 40 percent of their Japanese business. 70 percent of their US Federal Government business was due to channel partners.
So how do you think all this was possible? The answer is strategic partnership management. Businesses have realized that implementing partner management strategies has enabled them to reduce potential communication breakdowns, which ultimately leads to poor performance and affects brand reputation. As a business owner with multiple partners, you may have challenges managing your partners. With this being said, here are six ways you can build better long-term relationships with your partners and propel your business to the next level using a PRM portal.
Steps to Strategize Partnership Management
Successful partnerships are the result of proper nurturing, transparent communication, effective tools, accountability, and the willingness to change if needed. If implemented correctly, it can help partnerships thrive and achieve expected results.
1. Establish Clear Foundation
Discuss common goals. Because in strategic alliances, businesses often assume that being in the same department means everyone is on the same page. That increases stress on partnerships and reduces the odds of success.
Your workflow and processes should meet both your and your partners’ needs. Your negotiations, plans, and strategies should be transparent. Include all the individuals involved in the day-to-day lead operations.
A partnership relationship management portal provides a centralized interface to track and manage the pipeline. It gives your partners and internal staff a unified platform to share ideas and insights and view progress. It helps them identify loopholes. For instance, when registering deals, everyone has visibility of the possibility of the lead at every stage. Besides, partners can easily find all the information they need to approach a client along with numbers like win/loss opportunities, customer requirements, special pricing offers based on manufacturers and developers, etc.
A PRM portal built on CRM lays a strong foundation for relationship management. Partners have access to every data they need – objectives, leads/opportunities, profit/loss, and more.
2. Provide Comprehensive Onboarding and Training
Ensure that partners get all the training and support to promote products and services. There should be a program for new product orientation, marketing strategies, and support. Creating a repository of articles, documents, videos, manuals, and marketing plans is essential to success.
A partnership management portal automates the onboarding process with triggered workflows. Plus, it provides easy access to all the learning materials, including datasheets, manuals, workflows, blogs, etc. It helps personalize training and achieve training milestones by giving partners a chance to self-learn, earn incentives, certifications, and rewards, and experiment at their own pace.
Here’s what kind of process and training you can expect from PRM platforms:
Filtering applications based on the defined parameters. Sorting it on their performance and other metrics. This way, businesses only have to go through the eligible candidates.
Organizational training explaining basic safety protocols, customer service, company policies, and so on.
Product training including features, workflows, technical specifications (if required).
General training includes engagement, communication, and collaboration methods.
Training to understand market demand, grab business opportunities, develop marketing strategies, competitive pricing, and lead generation.
3. Nurture Relationships
Every business that starts successfully can erode due to communication and collaboration issues. Hence, one of the partnership management strategies is to connect with partners. Understand them, their skills, interests, etc. It helps enhance communication and collaboration.
A community feature makes it possible. It helps everyone on the team – partners and members to connect despite the geographical constraints. They can discuss ideas, interests, challenges, and more with fellow mates. Transparency and data visibility further helps recognize each others’ capabilities, culture, and achievements. It strengthens relationships and helps businesses create more opportunities.
4. Invest in Tools, Technologies, and Processes
Bringing in partners from different regions can be challenging as they may have different styles and expectations. Even their way of working may differ. Providing multiple channels of communication can frustrate them. A partner relationship management portal provides a unified interface where all the partners can communicate together. They can share financial reports, converse with leads, learn about products and services, manage their transactions and internal workflows, etc.
You, as a business owner, can track their activities, define key performance metrics, and evaluate their performance. The best thing is that you don’t have to manage everything manually. A partner portal helps automate the workflows. For instance, partners can track their lead count and other updates. Triggered emails and messages can be sent wherever required in the lead pipeline.
It also allows third-party integrations to ensure that businesses and partners can access all the required tools and techniques in one place.
5. Emphasize Accountability with Data
No process is risk worthy unless you have the numbers to justify it. Hence, businesses should define the key metrics/targets that partners should hit to succeed. What should be the average lead count for partners to earn certain rewards? And so on.
A PRM platform helps businesses track their channel partners’ activity and gathers data to provide valuable insights such as:
Total traffic generated from different channels
Transcripts of customer interaction and how they respond to a particular action or marketing campaign. What steps were taken to resolve their queries, etc.?
Performance overview of partners – communication, leads generated, customers turned, and more.
Real-time data of internal processes and strategies yielding results or need revision
Capturing ideas and feedback that can help improve marketing and sales initiatives
6. Provide Dynamic Partnership
Along with digitalization, partners also expect flexibility at the negotiation stage and the stages above. A few reasons are local challenges, integration norms, and compliance policies. So, for strategic partnership management, it’s crucial that you provide partners with the flexibility to grow and request changes as per the changing market trends. They can ask for sharing services, expanding business, shifting to different products/services, etc. You should, in fact, encourage them to change as per the changing customer expectations. They should have the freedom to negotiate on financial aspects too.
In short, give them the flexibility to shape themselves to be beneficial for both – them and the business.
Partnership management is a collaborative approach, and only with the right tools and suitable partners, it’s possible to get the most out of partnership management strategies.
Learn how you can help your channel partners with a PRM portal. If you are looking to build a partner portal from scratch, you can always contact CRMJetty to develop a tailored solution for your business. We take pride in having the best industry experts in our team to help you figure out what will best for your business. Get in touch with us today to know more!
Customer service and marketing are two important and distinct departments of any business. The two departments are very different from one another. While one focuses on improving the experience, the other focuses on increasing sales.
However, in the era of social media and online reviews, businesses realize that the unification of these two departments is essential to achieve goals faster.
The unification of these two departments solves age-old problems. It keeps the customer service team updated about the promotions that the marketing team advertises. The marketing team is well aware of the customer service problem in the area they are targeting. This is on the human level. Wonder what you can accomplish by integrating a self-service portal with a marketing module? The result will be remarkable.
Hence, in this article, we will discover how businesses can integrate Dynamics 365 Marketing module with their Dynamics 365 portal. What results will it yield? Whether it’s the right choice or not.
Overview of Dynamics 365 for Marketing
Dynamics 365 Marketing is a marketing automation app within the Dynamics suite that allows businesses to execute various marketing campaigns, create personalized experiences, generate leads, align sales with marketing goals, get a 360-degree business view, and improve ROI using the required tools and features.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing offers various capabilities such as designing and delivering email marketing campaigns, creating landing pages, automated customer journeys, promoting, managing, and analyzing marketing events, built-in analytical dashboard, smart scoring, etc.
As a writer, I like writing about portals and how self-service changes how we approach business. As a customer, I like that we have a self-service option. It’s not that I have any problem asking for help from support reps. Waiting on calls for hours or a reply email is too much for me. I prefer solving problems on my own with the help of knowledge base articles, videos, and more. While it gives me complete control over my activities, it also challenges me to learn and grow by tackling complex problems independently. If that’s not a success for me as a customer, I don’t know what is!
I am not the only one who prefers self-service. According to Statista, 88 percent of customers prefer self-service over talking to customer support representatives. What would you do if customers don’t want support reps as their first line of support? How will you provide effective support?
The answer is a customer success portal. This tool makes it easy for customers like me to find solutions in a way that’s convenient to us. It helps businesses deliver services efficiently and enhance customer experience without increasing business costs. In this article, we will learn what a customer success portal is and how you can turn your customers into loyal ones with it.
What is Customer Success Portal?
A digital solution that anticipates customers’ challenges and problems and provides proactive answers and solutions to them. Customer portal provides self-service via a knowledge base to help users with relevant information. It focuses on customer support and thus helps customers with help centers like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and DeskXpand.
Plus, it’s a digital gateway that manages customers’ relationships with businesses and provides new opportunities to connect, share, and grow through communities. Examples include the Hubspot community and Drift community.
Apple Support is one of the examples of the self-service that we are talking about. They provide search tools with personalized workflow options for customers to click on. They have links to provide support via community, knowledge base, and social media underneath workflow options.
Customer success is about providing value to your customers and increasing loyalty and revenue.
Customer Success V/s Customer Support
Customer success and support are intertwined. Together they result in customer satisfaction and are often confused as being the same. They are not.
Customer success offers support proactively. Here, businesses stay with customers throughout their journey and improve their overall experience.
Customer support works on solving customers’ problems after they reach out for help.
If there’s one sector which is resilient, it’s the travel industry. We can be certain that they will be back in full swing. The trick in the current situation is to reposition yourself and think creatively about what you can do to attract, convert, and retain customers. It can be about bringing health and wellness to the forefront with no-touch technologies like the one found at Chengdu Shuangliu Airport in China. They have kiosks that use facial recognition to help travelers check their flight status and find their gate.
Or, you can streamline your marketing and operational processes with travel portal development. It will help you streamline operations, reevaluate customer service, demonstrate empathy, earn customer trust, and improve inventory and products.
All you have to do is reposition yourself, understand customer needs, and develop a customer-centric portal. This article will guide you through the entire process of travel portal development – covering what, why, and how.
Introducing the Travel Portal
Why Travel Portal over Travel Website or Agents
Approach to Travel Portal Development
How CRMJetty Can Help You
1. Introducing the Travel Portal
In layman’s terms, a travel portal is an online engine that lets your customers come together and interact for information, bookings, services, and sharing experience. They can book flights, hotels, packages, and other related services, compare prices, seek help, and do a lot more.
Travel portal development is the process of developing that solution for your customers. It includes researching features and technologies, designing prototypes, developing the software, integrating tools, testing the compatibility, and displaying services in users’ preferred way.
Travel agents are adopting this sustainable way. Let us find out why in the below section:
2. Why Travel Portal over Travel Website or Agents
Customer convenience, satisfaction, and retention are the reasons you should go for a travel portal. While your agents can offload some of your customers’ tasks, the options they will be able to provide are limited. Besides, your customers have to visit in-person or call you for their bookings, which they can do anytime with a portal. Plus, they can browse through multiple options and manage their bookings and status themselves anytime with just a few clicks.
Your customers can book through your travel website. However, it is more about the information of your company, packages, and services you offer. A travel portal is customer-centric. It facilitates user experience and demands. The features are built from the customers’ point of view. Take the knowledge base, for example. It provides your customers information about bookings and other information related to it. They can even solve their queries themselves. If I want to know more about the ‘work from home package’, well, I don’t have to contact the customer support. Articles and FAQs related to the topic would be enough.
Almost every business now knows and uses customer portals to improve their customer service. But that doesn’t guarantee customer satisfaction.
Your portal is the face of your customer service. 50 percent of customers will switch to another brand after one bad experience. So, you must offer a positive experience with an appealing, intuitive, and feature-rich customer portal design.
If you had a physical retail store, you would ensure that customers get the best experience possible. The sections are designed systematically, and the support people are well-versed with all the products in the store.
You would make it possible that they don’t leave without purchasing or with a bad experience. Think about your customer portal the same way. Ensure it serves customers the way it’s supposed to.
Let’s look at the 4 customer portal design best practices that will surely help you in 2022.
1. Build with Purpose
Start by thinking about your customers’ requirements and what service they need – communication, document sharing, profile management, etc. Think about the features your portal should consider in order to help them with self-service. Along with customers, also think about your support team and how the portal will simplify their work. If you can’t, think about the questions that your customers often ask – if it’s about performance, you need to provide them reports on the dashboard. You can provide a knowledge base and ticket management if it’s about ticket generation. For your support team, think about their challenges – repetitive queries – add FAQs and case deflection.
Remember that your portal is effective only when customers and staff use it. If it serves a purpose, both your customers and staff will benefit from it.
Tip: If the purpose is instant solution/help, add features like advanced search and knowledge base to help customers help themselves.
Challenges to tackle during customer portal design
Too much data clutter
Complicated browsing
Customer relationships
Optimized portal
2. Focus on UI
First impressions are the most important part of the customer journey. If the store looks appealing, they are likely to stay and browse. Hence, start with the look and feel, i.e., the visuals and graphics, and then proceed towards functional design and how the portal works.
Last year many companies such as Slack, Twitter, Shopify, UpWork, and Facebook embraced the permanent work-from-home culture. Remote work forced by the pandemic has proven that employees can work productively from home as much as they can from the office. But the real challenge was – implementing remote work. Miscommunications, inefficient operational management, misinterpretation, delays in delivery, security concerns, etc. disrupted the entire business flow.
Many tools emerged to handle this. Businesses started using Zoom and Google Meet for meetings, tracking tools to manage employees’ work. The biggest benefit of these tools and remote culture shift was increased accountability. Employees took care of their activities themselves. And now, when the digital transformation has become the holy grail, it’s essential that you provide them with that level of comfort – whether they’re working from home or office.
Let’s figure out how to improve their experience with employee portal development.
1. What is an Employee Portal?
In general, all the companies today are associated with IT solutions. Perhaps you might have come across solutions like ‘employee portal software’, ‘intranet portal’, ‘self-service portal’. You can say that they are pretty much the same. Their message at the core is the same
‘A digital workspace that provides employees with a wealth of information and tools to speed up their work and communicate with others effectively.’
An employee portal serves as a single point-of-access to personalized content, communication services, and operation management. It offers data access, transactions, security, chats, videos, conference calls, and more.
2. What are the Benefits of Employee Portal
Employee portal helps businesses succeed by improving employee experience, productivity, and retaining staff. A 2017 Forbes article shows that happy employees help organizations thrive in all aspects – sales, customer satisfaction, and business expansion.
Every time someone talks about customer experience, the first and foremost suggestion that businesses receive is – deliver what customers want. But each customer may have unique requirements. A few may ask for convenience in shopping while others may prefer quality products. There are different ways to enhance your customers’ shopping experience. And yet, the most effective way is to offer self-service. You can achieve that with eCommerce portal development.
This article covers everything about it – definition, features, benefits, tips, and more. So, dig in!
1. What is an Ecommerce Portal
An ecommerce portal, also known as B2B/B2C self-service portal, is an online platform that facilitates buying and selling of products/services with online transactions. It allows businesses to interact with customers and suppliers effectively. eCommerce portal development allows businesses to have one interface shared across the entire business community.
The best examples of eCommerce portals would be Amazon, Flipkart, and other marketplaces that provide customers with a separate space to manage their orders, details, transactions, and more.
Talking about its working, it’s more like an eCommerce website where customers can shop and pay. Businesses can display products, manage orders, customers, suppliers from the backend.
Overall, it streamlines the buying process.
2. Benefits of Ecommerce Portal Development
It helps marketers turn leads into sales. To prove it right, here’s the result of the March 2020 survey. 10 and 11 percent of distributors and manufacturers generated 80-100 percent of their revenue through eCommerce portals.
What’s the difference between an average customer and an engaged customer?
An average customer will buy and leave. An engaged customer will come back and also recommend you to others. So what do you think is worth the effort?
This article is for you if you are into the second option, i.e., customer engagement, and looking for some inspiration to improve customer experience.
Here, we will learn about various strategies and how the customer engagement portal helps you implement those.
What is Customer Engagement and Why is it Important?
Customer engagement is interacting with customers through various channels and supporting them at various stages in their journey. Keeping customers engaged through the buying process helps build customer loyalty and collect valuable information about them.
Customer engagement is more of an emotional connection. It starts with the initial purchase but goes beyond customer support and a seasonal sales campaign. It involves everything customers experience while interacting with your business – speed, convenience, employee friendliness, customer support, etc.
Investing in customer engagement brings in many benefits such as better ROI, happy customers, reduced churn, more sales, and a strong brand presence.
How to Engage Customers
You can use different channels like social media, emails, and push notifications. Offer additional services like shipping and customer support. Here are some ways to engage with your customers effectively:
Create Content Strategy and Share Useful Content
Content has the power to make or break your customer. Hence, create and post content that is valuable to your customers. For that, create a customer-centric marketing strategy. Start by defining a buyer’s persona. Next, use that data to anticipate customers’ needs, interests, behavior, and more. It will help you define the kind of content you should create for customers. It can be video tutorials, webinars, animated videos, how-to guides, blogs, and other educational information.
Create various content formats for multiple channels. Lay down content guidelines, posting frequency, content distribution, and measurement metrics.
Custom portal development provides that one advantage or a super tool that humans rarely get in the real world. A personalized space where they can be the sole owner of their activities. They can immediately access resources and control how and what they share and with whom. Additionally, they can communicate with others and build strong relations. In short, that one window space makes them the king of their world.
A portal for businesses performs different key roles in sales growth, customer query management, data publication, and multiple services. Though the ways it helps customers/users/businesses differ based on the features and business logic, the primary purpose remains to improve customer service and streamline business operations.
In this article, we will learn its role in different business logic and CRM functionalities.
That being said, do you think services and operations are the only reasons businesses go for custom portal development?
Let’s find out.
Why Custom Portal Development
It improves communication, decision-making capabilities, and user satisfaction. Most importantly, it resolves the typical set of challenges that businesses face. Let’s see what those challenges are and how custom portal development helps.
Business Challenges
Customer-service staff, account managers, marketers, salespeople, and even you spend most of your time accessing and updating information. That’s the primary task of every business. Hence, it’s essential to have a business system that provides faster access to accurate information.
It may take up a lot of time if you don’t, distracting you and everyone involved from priority tasks. If you have a customer-centric business, it applies to customers too.
These concerns define the benefits of custom portal development – when users can access data instantly, they can accomplish their tasks on time and increase revenue. It also improves their efficiency and productivity. Without a proper system to handle business logic, businesses face a waste of time and resources along with customer dissatisfaction.
Here are the common business challenges that the portal solves.
Constant switching between applications
Often employees have to switch between different applications and CRM to access information or perform an action. It’s especially true for customer support teams who switch between platforms to offer instant answers to customer queries.
CRMJetty 