What does great customer service mean to you?

It is supporting your customers in all the possible ways on time. For example, when they reach out with a question or problem, answering them instantly.

“Please hold while we transfer you. You are valuable to us.” This is not what they like to hear. No one wants to be put on hold for a long time. Studies show that 15% of customers hang up after waiting for 40 seconds.

So, it’s essential that you provide them with instant replies, which is challenging as customers prefer different channels for support. They may start their request via phone or call and then move on to other channels.

So, it’s essential that you provide them with instant replies, which is challenging as customers prefer different channels for support. They may start their request via phone or call and then move on to other channels.Hence, you should integrate a Dynamics 365 Case management solution that ensures a seamless experience for you and your customers despite the communication channel. It connects everyone in the organization and helps your support team with all the information required to solve a case, including activity history and best actions.

Before we begin with the benefits case management has for your business, let’s examine case management in detail.

What is Dynamics 365 Case Management?

A case management solution lets companies collect all the information related to the cases. It tracks each case (question/request/issue reported by customers and requires resolution) from intake of the incident to remediation process and final resolution.

Dynamics 365 case management solution pulls all the cases in the database, identifies causes, and helps route them to the appropriate agents who can solve the case. It allows agents to categorize and manage cases. Other members such as the support team can analyze KPIs, including response time and resolution time. The service team can maintain a knowledge base to compile common queries.

Case management is important as one single mistake can lead to discrepancies. Long waiting hours, delays in case resolution, miscommunication in case management can escalate the support cost and even impact customer satisfaction, costing you a customer.

Dynamics 365 case management optimizes the business processes with quick access to information.

How Case Management Helps your Business

Case management is a holistic way to manage work and processes that are not repeatable. It enables you to address business challenges and manage unpredictable information-centric processes. Consider these impacts on your business.

Understand Customers Better

When you have all the information related to your clients in one place, you can quickly add case descriptions, view the cases in the list, deadlines, notes along with contact information, communication preferences, etc. All this information helps you focus more on customers and provide a personalized experience. Plus, your support team can collect rich insights about your customers, which can help analyze and offer valuable insights to everyone in the organization.

Automate the Tasks

While dealing with pen and paper, the chances of error are more. Notes can be misplaced, and documentation can be filled incorrectly. Dynamics 365 case management ensures that all the data information is collected appropriately so that everyone knows what steps they need to follow.

It uses automation to remove repetitive tasks from your support team’s tasks and helps them focus on priority tasks. For example, instead of explaining to customers – how to install the product, they can share the user manual or redirect them to how-to guides.

For basic questions, customers can view the FAQs. Instead of asking the support team, they can raise tickets themselves. You can generate forms automatically based on the information and then send them for digital signature.

Expedite Resolutions

One of the advantages of a case management system is that you can resolve the cases from anywhere. A cloud-based system makes all the data available at any time. Besides, it helps assign the cases to the right agent based on skill sets and availability. Customers don’t have to wait to get answers to questions as the team can access and help them even directly from a mobile phone.

This way, businesses can be available round the clock and improve the average handling time.

Other capabilities of Dynamics 365 case management include:

• Effective workflow
• Reduced costs, risk of errors, and hassles
• Easy content search and organization
• Fast decision making with personalized dashboard
• Instant notifications and updates
• Higher real-time insights and visibility

The benefits of case management are limitless.

Now, the question is – how to find a solution that has all the capabilities of case management and is tailored according to your business?

Go for Dynamics 365 Portal!

Yes, a portal that covers all the services that your business needs.

Check out below and learn about the features of the Dynamics 365 Portal.

Core Features of Dynamics 365 Portal for Case Management

Dynamics CRM Portal comes with all the features required to deliver an exceptional user experience. Let’s look at the features and benefits of implementing it as case management.

Self-Service

Dynamics 365 portal allows you to reduce the volume of queries and cases with self-support. Your customers can raise tickets and track the status themselves without you. You can provide a knowledge base to resolve customer’s frequently asked questions. Portal can suggest related articles based on the keywords customers insert.

Simply put, with a knowledge base, you can answer the customer queries that they are yet to ask.

Single Point of View

Just like customers, your team has a single point of view. They don’t have to ask colleagues or track a document to resolve a case. They can access it from the portal with all the other information required for the case, such as contact details of the customers or documents for reference. They don’t need to switch between multiple software such as CRM and portal to access all the data from the portal.

Omnichannel Experience

The dynamics 365 portal enables you to meet your customers right where they are. It helps you communicate with customers and resolve their concerns in real-time, whether on the phone, message, call, or in-portal chat.

Customers can track their status and even continue the communication on their mobile phone after leaving the desktop.

Track Progress

Without a case management progress report, it’s challenging to know the success rate. Hence, the Dynamics portal helps you collect all the data about customer service requests and resolutions and track the progress via the case management module.

You can segregate the cases in different categories such as open, in progress, on hold, or closed. This will help you get an overview of the cases and whether the issues are being resolved on time.

You can measure the metrics, including average response time, overall resolution time, average case resolution time, and strategic decisions.

Role-Based Access

When all your data is safe, you have peace of mind. So, ensure that the portal provides you with role-based access. It lets your team and users access different entities based on their roles. Like, only the authorized people will have access to the high-priority cases.

It enhances security and helps manage cases by giving the right privileges and spam protection.

Get in touch

Smart Scheduling

The advantage of case management is that it helps assign tasks to the right person. Portal simplifies this with effective scheduling. It lets you assign tasks, cases and manage a team’s schedule from one place. You can view their tasks and even manage the appointments with a calendar.

Quick Support

With the Dynamics portal, you can create and manage community forums that help enhance the customer-to-customer and customer-to-service agent interactions. The interactions may be related to products/services and customers’ suggestions. For example, a customer having an issue can share it in the forum, and the one with the solution can help them out. With community, you can also be free of basic queries or repetitive cases. This way, your support team can focus on other priority cases.

In addition to these features, Dynamics 365 portal provides you with multi-language support so that you can help customers in the language they prefer. You can send emails and notifications to customers to keep them informed. Further, a centralized process reduces operational costs.

If you’re looking for a feature-rich portal, CRMJetty is the solution. We provide ready to integrate Dynamics 365 Portal with case management and even offer customization according to clients’ requirements. Here’s why you should go for CRMJetty Dynamics 365 Portal:

Improve Case Management with CRMJetty Dynamics 365 Portal

CRMJetty Dynamics 365 Portal is scalable and suitable for industries such as real estate, legal, non-profits, education, finance, and more.

You can learn more about the industries through our case studies.

The remarkable features of this portal are:

• Drag and Drop Builder: You can personalize the portal by dragging and dropping the layouts, templates, and other entities. You don’t need to write even a single piece of code.
  
• Multi-language Support: You can translate the content into various languages for your customers.
  
• Role-based Access: You can assign roles to various users and grant access accordingly.
  
• Real-time Synchronization: You can control all the entities between CRM and portal without switching from one system to another.
  
• Smart Dashboard: You can segment your data with customizable, interactive dashboards and view the progress in real-time.

Knowledge base, community forums, mobile-friendliness are a few of the other highlights. We have 14+ years of experience in portal development and can help you build one exclusively for your business. For more details on portal development or about our services, get in touch with us by hitting the button below.

Get in touch

Source : https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/dynamics-365-case-management-manage-customer-queries/

Ms. Becky has a travel and hospitality business. She wanted to provide her customers with excellent service by introducing a self-service customer portal. But the results were not as expected. After analyzing, she realized that clarity on customer portal requirements is essential. But, unfortunately, she missed out on the customers’ needs and the essential features for custom portal development.

And that’s what we will talk about in this blog.

• Customer portal essential features
• Advanced features

Things Required for Customer Portal

You might have a customer login, but the results may be unmatched. Here’s the list of 10 customer portal requirements to meet your and your customers’ expectations.

1. One-Click Sign-In

The primary goal of a customer portal is to enhance customer service. Better service means quick access to updated information and seamless interaction with the business. So, having an online login option is not enough. You need to make sure that the customers can log in easily without wasting too much time. For instance, if it’s a new user, they don’t have to go through the entire registration form filling in the birth date, age, category, and other details manually.

It should be smooth and instant. Hence, add a social login feature to allow customers to register and login in via their Facebook or Google accounts. Also, integrate effective user management so that customers can upload and maintain their user account.

2. Easy Navigation

A customer portal should be unambiguous to use. For instance, students using an education portal should find courses and information they require quickly. If they had to contact the support team to view their attendance or the latest news, that’s cumbersome. Instead, they should find the latest events and data easily.

And so, the UI of the portal should be intuitive and clutter-free. It should lead users to the help they may need without requiring a manual on how to navigate. While designing UI, think about how you can make it easy for customers. Take inspiration from social media like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Users don’t need a manual to use those portals or search for the latest events.

3. Responsive Layout

Having a responsive customer portal means customers can access it from laptops during office hours or on a mobile phone at midnight.

You can’t predict how they will use the service. Most of them might prefer accessing the portal via mobile phones. And if you limit them to take appropriate actions through the computer, you lose their trust.

So, ensure that it’s responsive and the style is consistent.

4. Knowledge Base

Self-service is important for the generation that grew up in the digital era. They have high expectations of brands whether they are looking for information or a solution. Hence, you must provide them with excellent service with minimal human interactions. You need to give them clear instructions on using the portal, product/service, easy-to-handle user manuals, exhaustive collection of FAQs in a modern way.

As the content becomes the first step in the buying and solving process, it’s essential that you provide them with a searchable knowledge base. It should consist of documentation, FAQs, blogs and videos, news, manuals, user guides, and other types of content.

5. Ticket Submission

Raising tickets is how customers interact with the support team when they couldn’t solve the query themselves or find sufficient data in a knowledge base or online community forum.

With this feature, customers can:

• submit the tickets
• read the ticket history
• see the status
• track the ticket progress

Depending on the services you provide, customers may or may not be required to log in to raise a ticket. But, this feature should be included in customer portal requirements.

6. Customer Forum

Forums help businesses to build online communities where customers can interact and help one another by answering questions and sharing best practices. It can save your support team a lot of time. Customers can get help from the online community or other users facing similar issues.

Not only this, this community can work as your support team. It can open ideas for your business. You can learn what your customer thinks about your product and services or what more they expect.

7. Search Option

Placing a search icon on a customer portal helps customers find relevant information. They can quickly look for knowledge base articles, forums, and suggestion boards. It helps them find answers quickly without wasting time searching manually.

While adding the search option, ensure that the suggestions regarding the inquiry displays in real-time. So that the visitors can click on the relevant content and find appropriate content, if possible, add multiple search options that allow users to search in specific categories only.

These are the basic features to add to your customer portal requirements.

Other features include:

• Case deflection
• Proposal generation
• Interactive dashboard
• Product catalog
• Real-time notifications
• Integrated calendar

Learn More!

How CRMJetty Can Help You

CRMJetty has a decade of experience developing portals for various businesses. We know about the requirements that businesses have while developing a custom portal. Learning from that curve, here’s how we can help you:

Communication

Every business is unique. To ensure that, we engage with you to know all your requirements and what we can provide. Our team will keep you in the loop by sharing iterative updates. That means you will always know what’s going around and what you can expect. You can even ask for changes in the functionality during the development phase.

Customization

We know that readily available features are not always enough. Sometimes the customization is necessary. Hence, we provide a custom portal development too. Our development team will gather your requirements, analyze them, plan a roadmap, discuss it with you, and start developing. You can ask for any customization for a new to be developed portal or the existing one, even if it’s just a feature.

Take a look at our client US Housing Consultants’ case study. See how we customized the portal to meet their requirements.

Security

Security is paramount, especially if it’s related to customers. Hence, while developing, we undergo rigorous testing to ensure there are no loopholes and the system is secure. Besides, you can add our customer portal as an extension to your CRM or individual to keep the database on your server and retain security.

Workspace

We know how much branding matters, and so we provide white label solutions. You can ensure that your logo and brand stay at the front without any hidden watermark that says third-party tool.

There’s a lot more we can offer you. Such as advanced features explained below.

Advanced Features CRMJetty Customer Portal Offers

We know that to get the best results, we need to provide the best. So, here’s what we offer in addition to the above customer portal requirements list.

1. Option Suggestion

If your business is apparel or footwear, you can learn from their history about their likes and finetune their shopping the next time they purchase something. Based on their past purchases, a portal can even suggest a size – fit for them. This helps you understand your customers and make your products and services fit for them.

2. Data Visualization

Customer interaction helps you learn a lot about your customers. With a portal, you can gather a lot of data and study. Such as identifying how many people raised similar queries, the number of people looking for the same product – can give you an insight into your business.

3. Role-based Access

Just like in CRM, the users will have limited access to the portal based on their roles. It means the admin can govern who can access a specific data or module. If you don’t want customers to edit their invoices, well, they won’t.

4. Feedback

Encourage customers to share feedback about your products and services. Small feedback can help you make better improvements.

This was just an overview of the features. If you require, we can help you with other custom features like live chat, cross-selling, query reports, virtual assistant, and more.

Develop your Customer Portal

The development includes requirement gathering, iteration, development, QA and testing, and maintenance.

Source : https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/features-customer-portal/

Do you know effective procurement can enhance customer experience?

Look at it this way – unless you receive the goods on time, you can’t proceed further. If the supplies are not delivered on time, it will result in late deliveries, which will affect customer experience and sales. So, while focusing on customer relationships, you have to focus on supplier management too.

Supplier management maximizes the business performance by automating all the processes. It streamlines the entire supply chain activities.

Let’s understand what it means and how it works.

What is Supplier Management?

In simple terms, supplier management refers to all the processes and activities related to suppliers. It includes identification, performance evaluation, compliance, management, and contract negotiation.

Supplier management is the relationship between buyers and suppliers. Like CRM, it helps build a strong relationship with those who supply goods and services to your business. But there’s a difference. CRM helps you connect with all the customers. Here, you can invite global suppliers to be part of your network and then filter them based on your requirements.

An effective solution helps you understand your investment and the output. Here’s how:

• You invite the global suppliers to be a part of your network.
• Evaluation starts. Based on your requirements and their performance, you select the supplier/s.
• You welcome them onboard, discuss the contract, and track their performance.

Well, you could say that this is easy and can be manageable. But is it? You need a supplier management solution. Let’s find out why.

Reasons to Invest in Supplier Management

The role of suppliers and vendors is not limited to supplying goods and services. It’s about selecting the right partner, mitigating risks, and optimizing the entire process.

Today, all small and enterprise businesses are connected to international suppliers, which makes management complex.

So, to ensure that the relationships are well-maintained and nothing hampers the business process, having supplier management is essential. It helps manage the rapport in the long run.

You can get a better idea of what’s happening in the supply chain. Identify the areas that need improvement, make better decisions, avoid disruptions, reduce risks, and even save costs.

A study by Deloitte found that businesses that invest in supply chains deliver 70% better results. And 79% of them report significant revenue growth.

Here are the benefits of implementing supplier management best practices.

Managing Supplier Base Efficiently

The supplier base keeps increasing constantly. As the business expands, the number may double, triple, or grow 10X. In that case, you can’t keep sharing spreadsheets with all the suppliers or provide access to each and every one. It’s time-consuming and may lead to miscommunication. Managing the entire workflow becomes complicated. But if you have a supplier management solution, you’re already free of half of the tasks. You don’t need to check the invites, proposals or manage the process manually.

Reducing Operational Expenditure

Procurement expenditures can sky-rocket if left unattended – look at the United Nations. They spent a total of $18.8 billion on procurement in 2018.

Following supplier management best practices can help identify the cost-saving areas and scrutinize the output quality. For example, you can take advantage of fixed pricing modules and cut the risk. Comparing the proposals can give you a better idea of pricing and value. These factors will impact the business in the long run.

Improving Financial Efficiency and Accountability

Supplier management solution reduces the risks of fraudulent invoices and third-party involvements. It streamlines the process and provides an in-house invoice and proposals feature for purchase and billing. As payments are done from the portal, it eliminates security threats.

Centralized Communication

The most advantageous thing about supplier management is that it provides a dedicated platform for communication. Apart from managing proposals, contracts, and stuff, suppliers can communicate with you via in-app chats or so.

They can check if the delivery is done without calling or checking their emails for confirmation.

This internal communication saves you and your suppliers from wasting time on emails. Do you know that people spend an average of 15.5 hours weekly checking and sending emails?

I am sure you don’t want to spend 20 working weeks of the year on your emails.

Once you understand this and the reasons for using a supplier management solution, it will be easy to adopt supplier management best practices.

Supplier Management Best Practices

A structurally organized supplier chain can yield great results. Here are a few tips that you should follow to get the best results:

Encourage Self-Service

Nowadays, people like to solve problems themselves before contacting a support team. So, you can encourage your suppliers to solve their problems and learn more about your products by sharing data with them.

Using a knowledge base, they can read about the articles, FAQs, product information and watch training and video tutorials. This would give them a better understanding and help them come up with better proposals. Also, it would reduce the burden on your support team, considering you have a huge number of suppliers and customers to attend to.

Self-service will empower your suppliers and vendors. For that, it’s essential to keep the knowledge base up-to-date with fresh content.

Formulate Business Requirements

Managing a supply chain is not just about finding the cheapest deal. You need to make sure that deal is business-driven. It meets your business requirements, follows the company strategy, has fewer risks, and delivers quality.

To make this possible, you and your team must share the business goals. Only when they know the business requirements will they be able to eliminate the mistakes in selecting suppliers or negotiating deals. Aligned business goals help measure the performance and make sound decisions.

Prioritize your Selection

Once you’ve collected the supplier invites and data, it’s best to segment them based on specific criteria. It will help you prioritize the selection and relationships based on parameters. You can sort based on delivery time, previous history, compliance, quality of service, risk factors, etc.

Segmentation is necessary as it helps match with the suitable suppliers. A Kraljic Matrix is an effective way to deliver accurate segmentation. According to the matrix, you should map supply chains in two dimensions – risk and profitability.

Source: Forbes: Kraljic Matrix

Risk helps identify unexpected events, and profitability describes the impact of supply items on the outcome.

Once you’ve got the segmentation right, you can ensure that the supplier meets your business goals. The next step – move ahead and collaborate with them.

Keep Communication Intact

While collaborating with suppliers, ensure that they have understood your requirements. It will help them offer proposals that provide maximum value. Involve them in the decision-making process, consider their inputs and build a strong relationship with them. This strategy will help you make the supply chain efficient.

Implement a Solution

Bring in technology-driven solutions to automate the process and minimize communication gaps. For example, a supplier portal can speed up the entire sales channel. It can help you manage suppliers, redistributors, vendors, and brokers.

From invites to sharing data, adding comments, managing contracts, and tracking progress, you and your suppliers can make the most out of it.

Monitor the Performance

Evaluate and assess the performance regularly so that your suppliers can deliver quality and on time. A transparent evaluation system can help you provide suppliers with timely feedback and prompt them to improve services.

Monitoring the performance will keep your suppliers aligned to the business goals, and compliance, and policies.

Evaluate and Mitigate Supplier Risks

Even after monitoring the performance, there may be some risks involved. So, to ensure that risks don’t disrupt your entire process, identify the risks at an early stage. Check the suppliers, goods, services. Implement security protocols to shield you from disruptions. Train your team on how to act in these kinds of scenarios and make sound decisions.

Develop a risk assessment program that would assess suppliers and monitor the progress throughout.

Why is a Supplier Portal the Best Solution?

By implementing the best practices, you can optimize the supply chain. But, there are some supplier management challenges that you need to overcome. For example, you may have to add the entries manually for all the suppliers. Besides, you and the assigned team will be responsible for managing orders, invoices, and the entire supply chain.

But, with a portal, you and your team can be free of these tasks. Instead of managing your suppliers’ data, you can let them manage it. You can focus on priority tasks like tracking supplier performance and ensuring the goals align with your business objectives.

How We Can Help You

We can help you with a ready-to-integrate supplier portal that streamlines the entire supplier management process.

CRMJetty Supplier Portal provides various features such as comparison of suppliers, invoices and payments, role-based access, and more. You can even request a customization or get your portal built from scratch.

So, don’t wait. Bring in the portal today!Contact Us

Get expert advice on supplier portal development. Schedule a meeting with us to learn more.

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

Do you know effective procurement can enhance customer experience?

Look at it this way – unless you receive the goods on time, you can’t proceed further. If the supplies are not delivered on time, it will result in late deliveries, which will affect customer experience and sales. So, while focusing on customer relationships, you have to focus on supplier management too.

Supplier management maximizes the business performance by automating all the processes. It streamlines the entire supply chain activities.

Let’s understand what it means and how it works.

What is Supplier Management?

In simple terms, supplier management refers to all the processes and activities related to suppliers. It includes identification, performance evaluation, compliance, management, and contract negotiation.

Supplier management is the relationship between buyers and suppliers. Like CRM, it helps build a strong relationship with those who supply goods and services to your business. But there’s a difference. CRM helps you connect with all the customers. Here, you can invite global suppliers to be part of your network and then filter them based on your requirements.

An effective solution helps you understand your investment and the output. Here’s how:

• You invite the global suppliers to be a part of your network.
• Evaluation starts. Based on your requirements and their performance, you select the supplier/s.
• You welcome them onboard, discuss the contract, and track their performance.

Well, you could say that this is easy and can be manageable. But is it? You need a supplier management solution. Let’s find out why.

Reasons to Invest in Supplier Management

The role of suppliers and vendors is not limited to supplying goods and services. It’s about selecting the right partner, mitigating risks, and optimizing the entire process.

Today, all small and enterprise businesses are connected to international suppliers, which makes management complex.

So, to ensure that the relationships are well-maintained and nothing hampers the business process, having supplier management is essential. It helps manage the rapport in the long run.

You can get a better idea of what’s happening in the supply chain. Identify the areas that need improvement, make better decisions, avoid disruptions, reduce risks, and even save costs.

A study by Deloitte found that businesses that invest in supply chains deliver 70% better results. And 79% of them report significant revenue growth.

Here are the benefits of implementing supplier management best practices.

Managing Supplier Base Efficiently

The supplier base keeps increasing constantly. As the business expands, the number may double, triple, or grow 10X. In that case, you can’t keep sharing spreadsheets with all the suppliers or provide access to each and every one. It’s time-consuming and may lead to miscommunication. Managing the entire workflow becomes complicated. But if you have a supplier management solution, you’re already free of half of the tasks. You don’t need to check the invites, proposals or manage the process manually.

Reducing Operational Expenditure

Procurement expenditures can sky-rocket if left unattended – look at the United Nations. They spent a total of $18.8 billion on procurement in 2018.

Following supplier management best practices can help identify the cost-saving areas and scrutinize the output quality. For example, you can take advantage of fixed pricing modules and cut the risk. Comparing the proposals can give you a better idea of pricing and value. These factors will impact the business in the long run.

Improving Financial Efficiency and Accountability

Supplier management solution reduces the risks of fraudulent invoices and third-party involvements. It streamlines the process and provides an in-house invoice and proposals feature for purchase and billing. As payments are done from the portal, it eliminates security threats.

Centralized Communication

The most advantageous thing about supplier management is that it provides a dedicated platform for communication. Apart from managing proposals, contracts, and stuff, suppliers can communicate with you via in-app chats or so.

They can check if the delivery is done without calling or checking their emails for confirmation.

This internal communication saves you and your suppliers from wasting time on emails. Do you know that people spend an average of 15.5 hours weekly checking and sending emails?

I am sure you don’t want to spend 20 working weeks of the year on your emails.

Once you understand this and the reasons for using a supplier management solution, it will be easy to adopt supplier management best practices.

Supplier Management Best Practices

A structurally organized supplier chain can yield great results. Here are a few tips that you should follow to get the best results:

Encourage Self-Service

Nowadays, people like to solve problems themselves before contacting a support team. So, you can encourage your suppliers to solve their problems and learn more about your products by sharing data with them.

Using a knowledge base, they can read about the articles, FAQs, product information and watch training and video tutorials. This would give them a better understanding and help them come up with better proposals. Also, it would reduce the burden on your support team, considering you have a huge number of suppliers and customers to attend to.

Self-service will empower your suppliers and vendors. For that, it’s essential to keep the knowledge base up-to-date with fresh content.

Formulate Business Requirements

Managing a supply chain is not just about finding the cheapest deal. You need to make sure that deal is business-driven. It meets your business requirements, follows the company strategy, has fewer risks, and delivers quality.

To make this possible, you and your team must share the business goals. Only when they know the business requirements will they be able to eliminate the mistakes in selecting suppliers or negotiating deals. Aligned business goals help measure the performance and make sound decisions.

Prioritize your Selection

Once you’ve collected the supplier invites and data, it’s best to segment them based on specific criteria. It will help you prioritize the selection and relationships based on parameters. You can sort based on delivery time, previous history, compliance, quality of service, risk factors, etc.

Segmentation is necessary as it helps match with the suitable suppliers. A Kraljic Matrix is an effective way to deliver accurate segmentation. According to the matrix, you should map supply chains in two dimensions – risk and profitability.

Source: Forbes: Kraljic Matrix

Risk helps identify unexpected events, and profitability describes the impact of supply items on the outcome.

Once you’ve got the segmentation right, you can ensure that the supplier meets your business goals. The next step – move ahead and collaborate with them.

Keep Communication Intact

While collaborating with suppliers, ensure that they have understood your requirements. It will help them offer proposals that provide maximum value. Involve them in the decision-making process, consider their inputs and build a strong relationship with them. This strategy will help you make the supply chain efficient.

Implement a Solution

Bring in technology-driven solutions to automate the process and minimize communication gaps. For example, a supplier portal can speed up the entire sales channel. It can help you manage suppliers, redistributors, vendors, and brokers.

From invites to sharing data, adding comments, managing contracts, and tracking progress, you and your suppliers can make the most out of it.

Monitor the Performance

Evaluate and assess the performance regularly so that your suppliers can deliver quality and on time. A transparent evaluation system can help you provide suppliers with timely feedback and prompt them to improve services.

Monitoring the performance will keep your suppliers aligned to the business goals, and compliance, and policies.

Evaluate and Mitigate Supplier Risks

Even after monitoring the performance, there may be some risks involved. So, to ensure that risks don’t disrupt your entire process, identify the risks at an early stage. Check the suppliers, goods, services. Implement security protocols to shield you from disruptions. Train your team on how to act in these kinds of scenarios and make sound decisions.

Develop a risk assessment program that would assess suppliers and monitor the progress throughout.

Why is a Supplier Portal the Best Solution?

By implementing the best practices, you can optimize the supply chain. But, there are some supplier management challenges that you need to overcome. For example, you may have to add the entries manually for all the suppliers. Besides, you and the assigned team will be responsible for managing orders, invoices, and the entire supply chain.

But, with a portal, you and your team can be free of these tasks. Instead of managing your suppliers’ data, you can let them manage it. You can focus on priority tasks like tracking supplier performance and ensuring the goals align with your business objectives.

How We Can Help You

We can help you with a ready-to-integrate supplier portal that streamlines the entire supplier management process.

CRMJetty Supplier Portal provides various features such as comparison of suppliers, invoices and payments, role-based access, and more. You can even request a customization or get your portal built from scratch.

So, don’t wait. Bring in the portal today!Contact Us

Get expert advice on supplier portal development. Schedule a meeting with us to learn more.

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

Do you know effective procurement can enhance customer experience?

Look at it this way – unless you receive the goods on time, you can’t proceed further. If the supplies are not delivered on time, it will result in late deliveries, which will affect customer experience and sales. So, while focusing on customer relationships, you have to focus on supplier management too.

Supplier management maximizes the business performance by automating all the processes. It streamlines the entire supply chain activities.

Let’s understand what it means and how it works.

What is Supplier Management?

In simple terms, supplier management refers to all the processes and activities related to suppliers. It includes identification, performance evaluation, compliance, management, and contract negotiation.

Supplier management is the relationship between buyers and suppliers. Like CRM, it helps build a strong relationship with those who supply goods and services to your business. But there’s a difference. CRM helps you connect with all the customers. Here, you can invite global suppliers to be part of your network and then filter them based on your requirements.

An effective solution helps you understand your investment and the output. Here’s how:

• You invite the global suppliers to be a part of your network.
• Evaluation starts. Based on your requirements and their performance, you select the supplier/s.
• You welcome them onboard, discuss the contract, and track their performance.

Well, you could say that this is easy and can be manageable. But is it? You need a supplier management solution. Let’s find out why.

Reasons to Invest in Supplier Management

The role of suppliers and vendors is not limited to supplying goods and services. It’s about selecting the right partner, mitigating risks, and optimizing the entire process.

Today, all small and enterprise businesses are connected to international suppliers, which makes management complex.

So, to ensure that the relationships are well-maintained and nothing hampers the business process, having supplier management is essential. It helps manage the rapport in the long run.

You can get a better idea of what’s happening in the supply chain. Identify the areas that need improvement, make better decisions, avoid disruptions, reduce risks, and even save costs.

A study by Deloitte found that businesses that invest in supply chains deliver 70% better results. And 79% of them report significant revenue growth.

Here are the benefits of implementing supplier management best practices.

Managing Supplier Base Efficiently

The supplier base keeps increasing constantly. As the business expands, the number may double, triple, or grow 10X. In that case, you can’t keep sharing spreadsheets with all the suppliers or provide access to each and every one. It’s time-consuming and may lead to miscommunication. Managing the entire workflow becomes complicated. But if you have a supplier management solution, you’re already free of half of the tasks. You don’t need to check the invites, proposals or manage the process manually.

Reducing Operational Expenditure

Procurement expenditures can sky-rocket if left unattended – look at the United Nations. They spent a total of $18.8 billion on procurement in 2018.

Following supplier management best practices can help identify the cost-saving areas and scrutinize the output quality. For example, you can take advantage of fixed pricing modules and cut the risk. Comparing the proposals can give you a better idea of pricing and value. These factors will impact the business in the long run.

Improving Financial Efficiency and Accountability

Supplier management solution reduces the risks of fraudulent invoices and third-party involvements. It streamlines the process and provides an in-house invoice and proposals feature for purchase and billing. As payments are done from the portal, it eliminates security threats.

Centralized Communication

The most advantageous thing about supplier management is that it provides a dedicated platform for communication. Apart from managing proposals, contracts, and stuff, suppliers can communicate with you via in-app chats or so.

They can check if the delivery is done without calling or checking their emails for confirmation.

This internal communication saves you and your suppliers from wasting time on emails. Do you know that people spend an average of 15.5 hours weekly checking and sending emails?

I am sure you don’t want to spend 20 working weeks of the year on your emails.

Once you understand this and the reasons for using a supplier management solution, it will be easy to adopt supplier management best practices.

Supplier Management Best Practices

A structurally organized supplier chain can yield great results. Here are a few tips that you should follow to get the best results:

Encourage Self-Service

Nowadays, people like to solve problems themselves before contacting a support team. So, you can encourage your suppliers to solve their problems and learn more about your products by sharing data with them.

Using a knowledge base, they can read about the articles, FAQs, product information and watch training and video tutorials. This would give them a better understanding and help them come up with better proposals. Also, it would reduce the burden on your support team, considering you have a huge number of suppliers and customers to attend to.

Self-service will empower your suppliers and vendors. For that, it’s essential to keep the knowledge base up-to-date with fresh content.

Formulate Business Requirements

Managing a supply chain is not just about finding the cheapest deal. You need to make sure that deal is business-driven. It meets your business requirements, follows the company strategy, has fewer risks, and delivers quality.

To make this possible, you and your team must share the business goals. Only when they know the business requirements will they be able to eliminate the mistakes in selecting suppliers or negotiating deals. Aligned business goals help measure the performance and make sound decisions.

Prioritize your Selection

Once you’ve collected the supplier invites and data, it’s best to segment them based on specific criteria. It will help you prioritize the selection and relationships based on parameters. You can sort based on delivery time, previous history, compliance, quality of service, risk factors, etc.

Segmentation is necessary as it helps match with the suitable suppliers. A Kraljic Matrix is an effective way to deliver accurate segmentation. According to the matrix, you should map supply chains in two dimensions – risk and profitability.

Source: Forbes: Kraljic Matrix

Risk helps identify unexpected events, and profitability describes the impact of supply items on the outcome.

Once you’ve got the segmentation right, you can ensure that the supplier meets your business goals. The next step – move ahead and collaborate with them.

Keep Communication Intact

While collaborating with suppliers, ensure that they have understood your requirements. It will help them offer proposals that provide maximum value. Involve them in the decision-making process, consider their inputs and build a strong relationship with them. This strategy will help you make the supply chain efficient.

Implement a Solution

Bring in technology-driven solutions to automate the process and minimize communication gaps. For example, a supplier portal can speed up the entire sales channel. It can help you manage suppliers, redistributors, vendors, and brokers.

From invites to sharing data, adding comments, managing contracts, and tracking progress, you and your suppliers can make the most out of it.

Monitor the Performance

Evaluate and assess the performance regularly so that your suppliers can deliver quality and on time. A transparent evaluation system can help you provide suppliers with timely feedback and prompt them to improve services.

Monitoring the performance will keep your suppliers aligned to the business goals, and compliance, and policies.

Evaluate and Mitigate Supplier Risks

Even after monitoring the performance, there may be some risks involved. So, to ensure that risks don’t disrupt your entire process, identify the risks at an early stage. Check the suppliers, goods, services. Implement security protocols to shield you from disruptions. Train your team on how to act in these kinds of scenarios and make sound decisions.

Develop a risk assessment program that would assess suppliers and monitor the progress throughout.

Why is a Supplier Portal the Best Solution?

By implementing the best practices, you can optimize the supply chain. But, there are some supplier management challenges that you need to overcome. For example, you may have to add the entries manually for all the suppliers. Besides, you and the assigned team will be responsible for managing orders, invoices, and the entire supply chain.

But, with a portal, you and your team can be free of these tasks. Instead of managing your suppliers’ data, you can let them manage it. You can focus on priority tasks like tracking supplier performance and ensuring the goals align with your business objectives.

How We Can Help You

We can help you with a ready-to-integrate supplier portal that streamlines the entire supplier management process.

CRMJetty Supplier Portal provides various features such as comparison of suppliers, invoices and payments, role-based access, and more. You can even request a customization or get your portal built from scratch.

So, don’t wait. Bring in the portal today!

Contact Us

Get expert advice on supplier portal development. Schedule a meeting with us to learn more.

Source :

https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/supplier-management-best-practices-2021/

B2B organizations typically rely on vendors and channel partners to keep their operations running smoothly and expanding their outreach. That is why the management of partners and vendors is important, as issues in their management can impact a business.

There are different ways you can ensure that you are managing your vendors, partners, and customers efficiently. One of the ways is using a portal to manage them all. A portal brings all your vendors/suppliers, partners, channels, etc., together in one place.

Salesforce also provides its own social media platform that helps B2B organizations manage vendors, partners, customers, and more. If you are also thinking about managing your vendors/suppliers and partners efficiently, here’s the post for you.

In this post, you’ll first learn about Salesforce’s Community Cloud and then Salesforce Vendor Portal. So, let’s begin.

What is Salesforce Community Cloud?

Salesforce Community Cloud is an online social platform by Salesforce. It enables organizations to connect customers, vendors, partners, and employees with each other. It also lets them share the data and records they need to complete the work. Users can also visit the community to find answers to questions and ask for help from another member.

In short, Community Cloud enables you to streamline your critical business processes and expand them internally in your organization and externally to customers, partners, vendors, and more.

Salesforce Vendor Portal

A Salesforce vendor portal helps you accelerate your sales channels by letting you connect with resellers, distributors, vendors, and partners directly.

Here are its features that help you manage your resellers, redistributors, brokers, or vendors seamlessly.

Data Sharing

Salesforce Vendor Portal helps you connect your vendors to product experts and share the relevant CRM information to the vendors in a secure way. They can track sales assets, product information, and even training and certification courses. This helps your internal and external sales teams collaborate in real-time on sales records, monitor customers’ journey, track revenue, and reduce friction.

Dashboard and Reports

Salesforce Vendor Portal helps you track and rank your vendors and partners. You can share custom dashboards and reports with your vendors and partners. You can also ensure that your vendors/partners are aligning their efforts with your goals and objectives.

Easy Tracking of Vendors’ Progress

The Salesforce Vendor Portal helps you share contacts, leads and records with your partners and vendors. You can also centralize pricing, inventory, and more to make vendor management easier. You can also track different vendors’ progress centrally and build strategies to increase sales if required.

Pricing of Salesforce Vendor Portal

Now that you know the features of the vendor portal and how they help let’s understand the pricing structure.

A Salesforce Vendor Portal costs you €10 per login and €25 per member. Here, members refer to frequent users, and logins refer to infrequent users of the vendor portal.

The features you get in this vendor portal are digital experience management, centralized vendors’ management, online registrations, campaigns, analytics, and more.

CRMJetty’s Vendor Portal Solution – Your One-Stop Solution to Vendors’ Needs

There are different third-party Salesforce vendor portal solutions that you can also use to integrate into your organization. They give you the flexibility to give access to relevant CRM information to multiple vendors at a much nominal price.

If you are looking for such a vendor portal solution, CRMJetty is there to help you. Our vendor portal is a next-gen ready-to-integrate portal for those looking for smooth vendor management.

It has various features that can give you the best flexibility and resources to make your vendor management better and productive.

• Easy Online RegistrationsWith our Salesforce Vendor Portal solution, you can enable your vendors and suppliers to register themselves online easily to become a part of your network.
  
• Proposal InvitesOur vendor portal also lets the interested vendors and suppliers submit their proposals and requests online to collaborate with you. You can ensure your vendors’ and suppliers’ confidentiality and give your team more time to focus on more important tasks other than registrations.
  
• Comparison of Vendors and SuppliersThere is no need to manually record the performance of vendors and evaluate them on that basis every time while renewing the contracts. You can simply assess the proposals and performance based on the previous history in the portal and take decisions accordingly. You can also rank different proposals and requests based on various criteria, including compliance scores, available inventory, delivery time, etc.
  
• Invoicing & PaymentsOur vendor portal offers the option to generate purchase orders and invoices and download them directly from within the portal. This helps you save the hassle of manually sending invoices to different vendors or sending them online via email or messages. Further, it reduces the work of vendors as they can simply place the purchase orders online, view and edit them, and view their history. They no longer need to call, email, or text you to place an order. They can log in to the portal and create and place orders in real-time without any fuss.
  
• Secure CRM AccessIf required, you can allow your suppliers and vendors to access specific modules securely. You can give them access to only the information they need from your CRM via individual log-in. This helps you optimize operations by sharing the relevant data with the right people and keeps your security intact.

Final Words

Salesforce Community Cloud is a great social platform by Salesforce that can help you connect your suppliers, partners, vendors, and customers. If you are looking for a more cost-effective way to manage vendors, a third-party vendor portal solution provider like CRMJetty can also be a great option.

CRMJetty offers you a launch-ready vendor portal solution for your organization. You can also request customization of features to fit your business logic. In case you want, we can also build a vendor portal from scratch for your business.

So, don’t wait any longer and get yourself a best-in-class Salesforce vendor portal right away.

Source : https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/all-you-need-know-salesforce-vendor-portal/

Picture this. You are a big organization’s owner with a large customer base and numerous sales channels. What would be your first approach to manage them? You obviously wouldn’t want to start your day by swamping yourself with compiling scattered sales data. Neither would you want to open those exhausting big spreadsheets to analyze individual sales reps’ data to track progress or call or email them.

Instead, you would want to see all your data in one location in a well-arranged manner to facilitate the management. This is exactly where a web sales portal comes into the picture. Several organizations use a web sales portal to manage their different sales operations, channels, leads, and customers. A sales management portal helps them streamline their sales operations and makes it easy for them to track sales progress.

Before further details of how a web sales portal works and how it helps overcome various sales challenges, it’s essential to understand what a sales portal exactly is.

In simple terms, a sales portal is a centralized digital repository that stores information about customers, leads, sales figures, etc. It also provides sales executives with the tools and assets they need to close more deals. A good sales portal also harbors content that can engage prospects and bring them down towards the bottom of your sales funnel. Typically, the types of content you find in a web sales portal are pitch decks, webinars, video testimonials, PDF case studies, FAQs, eBooks, whitepapers, etc.

Over time, the concept of a web sales portal has changed, and it is no longer a log of sales figures, leads, and customers. Rather, it has grown into a smart, dynamic, and collaborative content ecosystem. It helps an organization help customers at different levels of their buyer’s journey, track, target, and re-target them.

All in all, a web sales portal is the need of the hour. Every organization looking to revamp its sales management must integrate a feature-rich sales portal to enhance efficiency and revenue.

Sales Challenges and How a Sales Portal Can Surmount Them

1. Managing Multiple Sales Executives’ Data

Challenge – As the owner or a sales manager of a company, you have a lot to do. You can easily manage a few sales reps spread across different territories in the initial phase of your business. However, it may grow tough as your business grows. When your territories expand, more sales reps join your organization, customers and sales go high in number, things can turn tricky.

Traditional methods like maintaining big registers or semi-traditional methods like using bulky spreadsheets no longer suffice. Issues like errors in entries, more time and effort to compile and analyze sales data, poor visibility, etc., slow down the process. This may lead to a decrease in the overall efficiency of your sales operations.

Solution with a Sales Portal

This is where a web sales portal comes in handy. It centralizes all your sales reps’ data in one location and gives you a bird’s eye view of it all. You no longer need to wade through those big registers or spreadsheets to view individual sales reps’ data. You don’t even need to ask your sales reps about their daily progress at the end of the day.

A sales portal does it all for you. By providing each sales rep with their secure account, you can enable them to enter and fetch sales figures. All you need to do is analyze the data your reps enter, build further strategies accordingly, and guide your reps to follow them.

It also saves you and your sales reps the hassle of connecting over a phone or exchanging text messages to know sales progress. You don’t need to collect and compile sales data your reps send via text messages, emails, WhatsApp, or any other medium. You can simply log in to the web sales portal and view a centralized collection of all the data your different sales reps enter. You can also filter data by sales reps’ names, date range, location, etc., to view what you want.

2. Tracking Leads and Customers across Different Channels

Challenge – A customer places an order on your website. Another customer orders something from a marketplace where you’ve listed your products. Yet another customer calls you to book an order and makes payment online. Isn’t it starting to sound too much to handle separately? Now you can easily imagine how difficult and time-consuming it would be to continue this process for 1000 orders a day. Would you want to go ahead with this approach of tracking orders or leads, or other events across separate channels? You wouldn’t.

Solution with a Sales Portal

A web sales portal is for these situations only. With an increasing number of daily leads and customers across different channels, individual channel-wise tracking becomes cumbersome. It brings the incoming orders, leads’ contact forms, inquiries, or any other detail under one roof.

You can simply log in and get an exhaustive view of all the orders, leads, and inquiries across multiple channels right from within your portal. This helps make their tracking easier and reduces the chances of errors like duplicate, wrong, or missing entries. This also helps boost the overall efficiency of your sales processes.

3. Sharing Information Internally

Challenge – There is a need to share documents among different departments and within the same department at various stages. Sharing information helps get what a department or an employee wants to view or use for some operation.

For instance, if a sales rep wants to give a demo to a new lead, they might need to contact the owner or sales manager to share the demo. This may take time if the owner is busy and leads to missing out on instant closing of deals if the demo goes well. What may happen afterward is that potential prospects or leads may get better deals somewhere else sometimes. This results in the loss of instant sales opportunities just due to lack of instant sharing of the demo which can directly impact your bottom line.

Solution with a Sales Portal

Any sales rep can log in to the portal and access demo videos of products to show to the new leads. This helps prevent any probable delays in exchanging product demos or other explanatory material and loss of leads.

Are you also looking to overcome any such sales challenge? Our web sales portal can help you streamline your sales management. It is a ready-to-integrate portal that you can customize as per your requirements as well.

Explore More

4. Manage Lead Data and Follow-Ups

Challenge – If you don’t have an efficient method to manage leads, you are sure to lose out on some heavyweight customers. The challenge arises when you don’t have a centralized system to track these leads and follow-up on them to engage and convert them. Without a proper follow-up and management system, these leads can’t reach the bottom of the sales funnel.

Solution

A sales portal helps overcome the challenge of lead management by giving you a complete view of all the leads across different channels compiled together. Details of all the leads and prospects that fill in contact forms, request your product demo, or subscribe to your newsletter, etc., are accessible on the go. This reduces your time to view and analyze the progress of your leads. It also helps you think of follow-up strategies to re-engage cold leads and boost sales.

5. Manage Multiple Business Partners

Challenge – When you have multiple sales partners as your stakeholders, the management can get tough. You can sometimes fail to get clear visibility of the progress of the sales of each channel partner over a long period. This may eventually lead to a stage where continuing business with the sales partner is no longer an economically viable option. These kinds of dissociations with partners or incidences of poor performance and visibility can hamper your business.

Solution

A web sales portal helps you reduce the issues of tracking and analyzing individual channel partners’ performance. All your sales partners can simply feed their daily progress into your portal via secure log-in.

They need not call, email, or fax you the sales progress report every week or month. It also helps you get real-time access to their progress and analyze it through sales figures and other performance parameters. It can also help you catch any discrepancies, signs of poor performance, or other issues before they escalate. Accordingly, you can think of a plan to bring everything back on track to prevent further loss.

CRMJetty – Your Best Sales Web Portal Development Companion

Now that you have a clear understanding of how a web sales portal can help you bring efficiency to your sales processes, it is high time you also integrated one. CRMJetty can be the right development partner for your sales portal. We provide a ready-to-integrate customizable portal for your sales management. It is a feature-rich sales management portal that comes with high scalability and freedom of customization. You can customize its features or request customization to fit your business logic.

Apart from offering ready-to-integrate sales portal software solutions, we also offer custom development services. If you need it, our certified portal development team can build a sales portal from scratch purely for your business. For that, our developers gather requirements, analyze them, discuss them with you, and create a development roadmap. Once they start developing it, they also make sure that you stay abreast of the development progress through iterative updates. Once they finish it, our QA team tests it to find out if it is ready to enter the market. After our QA team gives the final nod, the portal becomes all yours.

You can also get our developers’ support in understanding the features and getting familiar with the portal for a limited time. Our marketing team can also guide you to promote your portal to get more customers to use it.

We are ready to collaborate with you to build an all-powerful web sales portal, are you? If yes, let’s get in touch and work magic together.

Request Quote

Source : https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/web-sales-portal-way-modernize-sales-management/

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.

Get in touch today

Source : https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/web-portal-vs-website-nuances-you-need-to-know-before-investing/

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

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

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

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

What Is a Dynamics 365 Self-Service Portal?

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

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

What Is Dynamics 365 Customer Self-Service Portal?

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

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

Knowledge Articles

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

Forums

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

Support Cases

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

What Is a Dynamics Employee Self-Service Portal?

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

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

Knowledge Articles

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

Forums

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

Support Cases

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

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

How Does a Dynamics 365 Self-Service Portal Benefit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CRMJetty – Your Right Portal Development Partner to Build Your Portal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Case Management?

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

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

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

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

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

So, let’s start.

1. Encourage Self-Service to Avoid Overload

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

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

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

2. Set the Priority of Cases – Rightly

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

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

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

3. Always Track Salesforce Case Management Progress

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

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

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

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

4. Utilize Case Information to Grade Urgency

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

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

5. Prevent Junk Emails

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

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

6. Streamline IT Service Request Validation

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

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

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

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

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

7. Avoid Lengthy Email Conversations

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

8. Segment Your Cases Well

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

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

9. Stay Proactive to Avoid Unwanted Escalation of Cases

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

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

10. Create a Proper Support Workflow

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

11. Follow the Data and Track KPIs

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

12. Empower Your Support Staff

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

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

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

CRMJetty – Your Smart Salesforce Customer Portal Development Partner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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