5 Industries that Benefit from Web Portal Solutions

Portal is a website that provides single-point access to applications and information. It not only helps in selling or ensuring an online presence but with many other purposes. Different websites having different purposes are built with varying approaches. For example, if you need a web portal to help you sort customer queries, you have a support portal. If you want to allow your partners to manage their activities, you have a partner portal. Similarly, the extent and use vary from industry to industry. 

However, the best thing is you can approach a custom web portal development company and customize your portal as per your needs. 

An online portal can be convenient for different industries. 

Let us explore the industries that can benefit from web portal development services

  • Education

The education industry has a centralized database that holds information on the teaching staff, administrative staff, students, and everything else. A web portal could give them access to the information to carry out their jobs. 

For instance, teaching staff can 

  • Manage various classes
  • Mark students attendance 
  • Arrange the timetable
  • Upload important class
  • Upload marks and grades
  • Upload documents and details

Students can

  • Check attendance
  • Submit medical details
  • Check marks and grades
  • Keep up with notices

Admin staff can

  • Keep the fee records
  • Consolidate reports
  • Manage staff and students details
  • Have an overview of the school’s operations
  • NonProfit

Portals for nonprofits can help you streamline your organization’s activities, handle donations, manage volunteers and members, track their tasks and schedules, and provide a hassle-free experience so that you can focus on changing the world. 

A web portal development services will provide you with features like:

  • Donation Module
  • Automated Fund Transfer Module
  • On-Boarding Volunteers
  • Volunteers Timesheet Management
  • Knowledgebase
  • Live chat
  • Smart Dashboard

And help you interact, and scale at your own pace.

  • Medical 

A medical portal means doctors would have all the information about the patient. They would have details of patients’ history of diseases and treatments, allergies, and others. Administrative staff would know about the patients’ demographic details along with payments. Patients would be able to contact doctors and the team anytime they need support. They can access their individual files and see their progress. 

In addition to this, a medical portal could help streamline the transplant and transfusion process. As hospitals would have all the details of the patients, they can match the recipients’ blood group and match organs promptly.

  • Pharma

In the pharmaceutical industry, a portal could be a great way for pharmacists to track a patient’s history. A patient can request medicines according to the prescription, and pharmacists can fill them accordingly. Pharmacists can know about the patient’s drug intake and can regulate it. They can even avoid misuse of a particular drug. 

A portal will also connect the pharmacist with the patient’s doctor. So they can verify the prescription before approving a patient’s request. 

They can also keep track of patient’s allergies and avoid medicines that can cause reactions.   

  • Real-Estate

A real estate industry consists of many stakeholders such as admin, realtor, agent, member, etc. Up of that, agents and admin require streamlined communication and a 360-degree overview to close the deals.

Managing it manually can be tedious, time-consuming, and unorganized. A web portal, on the other hand, can simplify it. It can help you

  • Manage properties along with your stakeholders
  • List properties on the website
  • Enable buyers and sellers to manage their listings, selling, renting
  • Build transparency by showing details to everyone involved
  •  Generate leads for your properties

And more. 

A web portal development company can help you develop a real-estate portal with features like

  • Broker management
  • Property management
  • Seller management
  • User-centric features
  • Geo-location
  • Media

With a real-estate portal, you can automate your tasks and can serve customers in a better way.

Conclusion

Web portals are important for all B2B and B2C businesses. However, choosing the secure one is essential. So, make sure that your portal development company provides a secure gateway and doesn’t store anything on the server.

Corporate Web Portal Development: Importance, Objectives, Steps, and More

Until a few years back, companies would hire a big workforce to handle their business aspects. Be it finance, customer service, sales or any other department; most of the tasks and processes would be manual.

With technological advancement, the landscape of the corporate world has changed dramatically now. A corporate web portal is among those few path-breaking digital advancements.

If you are also a business owner looking to integrate a corporate portal, this post has it all that you need to know. Learn what a corporate web portal is in detail, its types, objectives, and more.

First things first, here is the detailed concept of a corporate portal.

What is a Corporate Web Portal?

Before understanding what a corporate web portal is, there is a need to understand what a web portal is in detail.

A web portal is a web-based gateway that provides authenticated access to an organization’s data to different parties. In other words, a web portal is a web application that you embed into your website to serve as a gateway to your organization’s data repositories.

A web portal can be of different types based on the portal users. There are three major types of a web portal as below.

  • B2B portal – It provides vendors, associates, etc. with access to the company’s relevant data. People typically refer to it as Extranet.
  • B2C portal – It provides end customers (or clients) with access to their relevant data. People typically refer to it as a client or customer portal.
  • Internal Portal – It provides the company’s personnel with access to various data fields. People typically refer to it as Intranet.

If you combine the functionalities of all these portals into one, you get what you can call a corporate web portal. You can also call this portal a hybrid of all the three major portal types that encompasses the functions and features of all of them.

Providing various parties in a business right from clients or customers to business partners, associates, or vendors to internal personnel with access to relevant data benefits a lot.

Now that you are familiar with the ABC’s of a corporate web portal, it’s time to discuss the business objectives and purposes it helps fulfil.

Business Objectives of a Corporate Web Portal

A corporate portal serves various key purposes of almost all businesses. It enables remote and authenticated access to crucial data to both business associates and customers as per their needs. It also helps eliminate the need to rely on physical mail, faxing, email, or call to access any information you urgently require.

Various types of B2B and B2C portals including a client portal, staff portal, sales portal, customer service portal, project management portal, partner portal, etc. are a part of a corporate web portal.

Let’s discuss in detail the benefits of a corporate portal you can avail of.

1. Easy Integration and Centralization – A corporate web portal helps integrate and bring all customers and corporate data on one platform. This integration of CRM data and customers together via a portal helps carry out administrative operations faster.

With all the crucial data in one place, you can get an eagle-eye view of your business aspects and manage them efficiently.

2. Consistency – Uniting back-end data across different portals remotely enables companies to store and depend on consistent data that you can share and collaborate upon.

3. Personalization – Providing personalized access to particular users helps you enhance the experiences of your internal staff as well as external customers or clients.

You can engineer your corporate web portal to personalize it according to the user. It helps all the parties involved have a unique view of the critical company data to make their work easier.

4. Security Benefit – As the owner or the chief admin of your company, you can fully control who can view what in your portal. You can decide on which parties to provide secure authenticated access to which data of your company. This secured access to different individual users or parties based on their roles or needs helps keep your company’s data secured.

5. Enhanced Customer Service – You can provide your customers and clients with secured access to the relevant information like purchase history, knowledge base, FAQs, from within a portal.

You can also let them generate tickets, track orders, or perform other customer-facing operations easily via your portal. This contributes to enhancing your experience and saves you overhead costs.

Also empowering your marketing managers will help you automate marketing campaigns with a corporate portal. All this helps you bring down the churn rate and boost your overall profitability and bottom line.

6. Reduced Load on Internal Staff – With a corporate web portal in place, the load on your customer service staff goes down. The automation of customer service workflows takes place which results in a drastic decline in internal communication requirements.

When your staff doesn’t have to handle redundant queries, they can focus more on solving bigger issues.

Also, the service hours that go into handling repetitive queries goes down. This significant reduction in manual handling of queries helps save the costs on time-intensive queries for basic operations.

Coming to the internal communication within your employees, it also improves a lot. Your company personnel can communicate, share, and update critical data directly on the portal for everyone to see. This reduces the need to arrange meetings and conferences to discuss small things every now and then. The efficiency, increases and benefits your company.

7. Enhanced Communication with Business Partners/Associates/Vendor

When your business associates, partners, or vendors view data relevant to them in the portal, it streamlines the communication with them.

For instance, a vendor portal makes viewing orders, documents, invoices, etc. easier for your vendors. Besides, it also makes viewing, managing, or updating your vendors’ details hassle-free for you. Similarly, a partner portal helps you engage your partners better by letting them view details like sales figures, project’s progress, or other things.

Steps to Build a Corporate Web Portal

1. Decide Who Will Build It – In-House or Outsourced Partners

Decide whether you want to build your corporate web portal by deploying your in-house engineers’ expertise or outsourcing portal development to trusted partners. For a start-up, outsourcing may be a better option as it helps you save time and costs on creating and maintaining the portal. This helps your internal staff focus more on the other critical roles.

2. Aim for Foolproof Security

Ensuring security of the portal is one of the critical aspects to consider. Robust security controls, secure coding methodologies, and various vulnerability and penetration tests can help you test the security of your portal before launch. You should also integrate authentication-based secure access mechanisms to retain security after launch also.

3. Decide How to Build It

There are two ways you can build your portal. The first typical way involves deploying an in-house or outsourced developer team to build your portal from the scratch. While this portal may give you an additional advantage of having full control over each functionality, there is a downside also.

It may be too cost-intensive for you to afford – especially when you’ve your business in its nascent stage. This is where a ready-to-integrate portal solution comes to rescue. Yes, there are several portal solutions by different portal companies that you can just buy, integrate with your CRM, and start off! You can also customize their features to cater to your specific business needs.

Looking for a ready-to-launch corporate web portal solution for your business? Our next-gen web portal can be your ideal fit to take care of your requirements. This portal can get your business off the ground instantly and easily. It is a ready-to-integrate and scalable solution that you can integrate and start off. If you want, we can customize it for you too.

So, let’s connect to get your portal ready!Explore More

4. Compliance with Data Laws

It is important that the portal you develop complies with data security standards – especially when you are building it from scratch. It’s because all the seasoned portal development companies typically follow standard data laws and regulations.

However, while building a corporate web portal; you may need to take extra care. This is because there may be loopholes in complying with security and data laws as you are new to this. Make it a point to keep privacy of all your parties intact and breach-proof. Don’t fail to comply with the local legislation of the country you are based in. As of now, 128 out of 194 countries have put in legislation to protect data and privacy as per the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

Get Your Corporate Web Portal Ready Now

A corporate portal is the key to optimized business operations, streamlined internal and external communication, and good profits. If you are all set to integrate a corporate portal, your search for the best portal development solution ends here.

We, at CRMJetty, can be your ideal portal development partner. We have our own web portal solution that’s got dedicated space, custom business logic, product/service integration, accounts and invoicing, and all the features that you seek for in your corporate web portal. Be your business B2B or B2C, stay assured you’ll get the best for both. You can manage all the parties – customers, partners, vendors, affiliates, and more.

Besides offering a launch-ready web portal, we also offer custom portal development services. There is a typical process that our company follows to get your feature-rich portal.

Our development team first collects your requirements. Our certified developers then analyze them first and determine if our launch-ready portal caters to them all. If there is a need to customize one or more functionalities to make it suit your requirements, they do it for you.

In case there is a large gap between your requirements and our portal’s features, we can help you build your unique portal from scratch too. We aim to make your portal development journey with us unforgettable and we promise that we shall!

So, let us help you build your best corporate web portal with synergy between you and us!Get in Touch

B2B Portal Development: All You Need to Know

Customer experience is a crucial aspect that you can not afford to take lightly. Customer service is also among the factors that constitute customer experience. In fact, 89% of customers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.

Although there are some differences in the processes and types of clients in the B2B sector, the clients are ultimately “customers” and customer experience matters for them too.

With a B2B portal, the process of providing a better customer experience becomes easier than the regular support system that you may provide via calls and emails. Ticket system, knowledge base, etc. are some of the most important aspects that can take your customer service experience to the next level. So, let’s understand what B2B portals can do for you B2B business in detail.

Benefits of B2B Portal Development

1. Cost-Effective Ownership – Highly Valuable for Startups and Small Businesses

One of the biggest reasons to consider B2B portal development is the cost. For small businesses and startups, budgeting is a crucial deciding factor for them in all their operations. A big MNC may be able to afford to hire a large pool of support agents to manage costumes’ queries, inventory, and more but a small startup may not. The reason is simple – they may not have thousands of dollars to spend on hiring a pool of support staff.

This is where a B2B portal can fill the gap. The cost of setting up a B2B portal is comparatively much less than that of hiring a support team. Even if on an hourly basis or outsourcing basis, a support staff may cost you more than a B2B portal.

Hence, picking B2B portal development over hiring a support staff is an ideal and budget-friendly choice. In fact, even big companies like DHgate, TradeWheel, Alibaba, etc. also provide a B2B portal.

2. Speedier Initial Setup

Everything like creating a catalog, handling queries, promoting every promotional sale manually will neither be feasible nor time-saving. If you hire staff, you may also need to train them to finish time-bound customer support tasks like consultation or client onboarding. You may also have to stay abreast of the daily progress by having them reporting to you every now and then.

Do you really want all this “mess” – that too when your business has just started? Of course NOT.

Ideally, your first goal is to get your business off the ground fast and without any hassle. And a B2B portal development can do it for you. This is because it enables you to automate every manual task and kickstart your business instantly. Right from creating a catalog, integrating your new system or functionality with your existing software, changing product listings, running a promotional sale, etc.; it makes everything a matter of minutes.

This way, B2B portal development proves to be a great time-saver for your business – especially in its initial phase.

3. Real-Time Analytics – Speedy Insights

Tracking everything manually right from queries to complaints or sales can be a tough job. Not with a B2B portal though. With a centralized view of every business aspect, you can analyze your business requirements in real time.

You can view the customers’ demographics, common queries or grievances, etc. with a B2B portal. You can also get insights into your clients’ requirements and customize your products (or services) accordingly with a B2B portal.

You can manage your inventory efficiently by finding out which products are in high demand and which aren’t. Accordingly, you can decide on reordering certain products and holding a sale on the others.

You can also update your FAQs or content according to your most common questions or queries by your customers. This helps you align your brand with customers’ expectations and get better results in the long run.

4. Enhanced Security

Security is a crucial aspect to consider for both small and big businesses alike. If you are the admin, you can’t allow anyone to access anything from your CRM. Instead, to upkeep security of your CRM database security, you should enable different portal users to view only what their defined roles allow them to.

With a B2B portal, you can define user-roles and grant access to different CRM entities based on their user roles. You can document the roles and implement them well right within a B2B portal and keep your security tight.

Looking for the best B2B portal development services for your B2B organization? Our customer portal can be your best portal to start with. This portal can get your business off the ground fast and easily. It is a ready-to-integrate and scalable solution that you can integrate and start off. If you want, we can customize it for you too.

So, let’s connect to discuss your portal requirements to proceed!Request Quote

5. Boost in the Overall Speed of Business Processes

As we discussed above, initial setup becomes much faster with a B2B portal than without it. Even if you may still dare to manually manage business processes at the start, you can’t continue it forever. Simply because the processes and operations grow more and complex as the size of the business grows.

With too much on plate to manage manually, you may not keep up with retaining efficiency. As a result, it may lead to a sluggishness in your business operations and of course hamper your business productivity.

Consider a real-life scenario. You set up your business and within one year, your customers increase in count to become 10000. Great. But what’s next? The number of daily queries and tickets that you have to handle now is 1000 on an average.

You had started with a support team of around 5 agents in the beginning but what would you do now? Would you keep making them overwork and wear out or hire more support agents to expand your team?

In either way, you might end up losing more than you invested and expected in return. Here’s how.

If you make your small support team over-work and incentivize them, they’re still likely to make more errors. Afterall, they are humans and not machines! With this rise in human errors, your customer satisfaction rate may drop and deprive you of some high-value customers over time.

If you hire more support agents, you may succeed in keeping the customer satisfaction rate intact but at a huge cost. A team of say 30 agents will force you to shell out a much bigger amount as salary than a team of just 5. Simple Maths! This will lead to a drop in your ROI and profitability margins which you won’t want.

6. Convenient Service, More Efficiency

With a reduction in the redundant tasks through B2B portal development, your support team gets more time to focus on the big picture. They can focus more on big issues and queries instead of answering redundant questions and handling repetitive tasks manually. This helps manage customers better and handle tasks more efficiently.

Besides, when customers get what they want without much hassle, they welcome it. Thus, with B2B portal development; you can also enrich your customer experience with easy and speedy self-service.

Features to Consider During B2B Portal Development

There are a number of ready-to-integrate B2B portal development solutions available in the market. While they may fit some organizations, they may not fit others. This is where a custom B2B portal comes into the picture. A custom portal caters to your exact business needs and helps you optimize your business operations.

However, there are a few common features that you may consider while developing a custom portal or picking a ready-to-integrate portal.

1. Easily Navigable Product Catalog & Services Display

The portal should make it easy to display your products and services to your current and new customers. It should be available and running 24×7 for customers to check out the available products and services with easy navigation.

2. Hassle-Free Communication

Your portal should facilitate an easy communication between your customers and your organization. There should be varied ways to connect including chat bots, tickets, etc.

3. Multiple Payment Gateways

There should be the freedom to make payments directly from within the portal when they log in. Further, there should be a choice between multiple payment options to pick from.

4. Better Insights

If you don’t analyze your user data, you can better your products or services. The portal you pick should give an exhaustive view of users’ data like preferences, demands, common queries, etc. This information will help you upsell your products as well as tailor them according to the changing customers’ demand.

5. Security

Whether you create a B2B web portal development as an extension of your CRM or keep it independent of your CRM, it should be secure. The database should remain on your servers to ensure the security is intact.

If you are looking to enhance security with B2B portal development, our customer portal can help you out. If you want, you can also customize it to fit your business needs.Know More

CRMJetty – Avail of the Best B2B Portal Development Services

Now that you know how B2B portal development can give wings to your B2B business, it’s time to get one ready. If you are looking for a B2B web portal solution, you are at the right place. We, at CRMJetty, provide a ready-to-integrate customer portal solution that you can integrate and start off.

Our developer team can also customize the portal to fit your business needs better. Even if you have completely different portal requirements, we’ve got you covered. Our developer team can render B2B web portal development services to get you a portal from ground up exclusively for your organization.

Let’s join hands to build the best B2B portal for your business!Request Demo

Salesforce Donor Management: All You Need to Know

Nonprofits hold great value for small regions and communities as well as the country as a whole. They support the local government bodies in addressing different local issues. At times, they are among the first to come to the rescue in emergencies.

As a nonprofit organization grows in size, challenges may start to surface. One of the significant challenges that can plague a large-sized nonprofit organization is donor management.

Nevertheless, there is a way to tackle this challenge – donor management software. To help nonprofits manage donors efficiently, Salesforce provides its own Salesforce Donor Management software.

Before moving ahead, it’s essential to understand the concept of donor management in detail. If you also run a nonprofit organization with many donors, this post is for you.

In this post, you’ll learn about donor management and its importance. You’ll also learn what all Salesforce Donor Management comprises and how a donor management software helps a nonprofit organization manage donors better.

What is Donor Management?

Donor Management, as the name indicates, is the process of managing your nonprofit’s donors. It is essentially a process of tracking your donors’ details, interactions with them, and utilizing the information suitably.

The better you utilize your donors’ information, the higher are the chances of good relations with them. In the long run, proper donor management not only helps retain donors but also adds more.

To manage donors better, you’ll need to gather some raw data, including:

  • Donors’ contact details
  • Gifts and contributions
  • Interactions with your donors
  • Donors’ preferences
  • Events donors attended
  • Your notes about individual donors, etc.

How Salesforce Donor Management Works

Salesforce Donor Management basically comprises managing your donors and establishing strong relations with them.

There are various processes involved in Salesforce donor management that together ensure a streamlined donor management as below.

Online Fundraising

Online fundraising is a crucial part of Salesforce donor management and requires a robust digital fundraising platform for nonprofits. It is because an online platform makes it easy for donors to donate on the go. You can include donation pages and payment services to make your donor management easy and seamless.

Centralized Donation Management

It includes connecting multiple donation channels on a single fundraising platform in Salesforce Donor Management. The centralized management eliminates the need to track income and donations from different channels individually. You can easily capture your income, allocate it to your programs, and track them through your accounting systems.

Moreover, it enables you to connect with more donors, boost repeat donations, and manage large volume gift entries. That too at a very nominal price and in less time!

Combination of Direct Mail with Digital

Salesforce donor management also includes making your direct mail fundraising strategy stronger. You should integrate deduplication of records, address standardization, and auto-updates of addresses.

You should also enhance donor acquisition and conversion with personalized communications with effective Salesforce donor management.

Acceleration of Big Donations

Salesforce Donor Management also involves crafting a cohesive and robust gift strategy. For that, you should enable your team to tackle the potential donors at every stage, from cultivating them to enduring stewardship. Provide the support for integration to tools like calendar, email, and mobile apps. All these integrations help the team attract more donations in less time.

Boost in Data Transparency

Sometimes, there may be a mismatch in the data of your finance team and fundraising team. This is because both the teams track and report gifts and pledges in somewhat different ways. Thus, there are chances that there are issues in the reconciliation of data at times.

With a robust Salesforce Donor Management strategy and software, you should prepare donation data for your finance team and help reconcile revenue. Meet all the financial reporting requirements and enable a transparent collaboration between your fundraising and finance teams.

Enhanced Visibility and Agility

Use insightful reports, centralized dashboards, analytics, and AI to analyze revenue productively. Finding out the opportunities and areas of improvement is also a part of Salesforce Donor Management.

Direct your fundraising teams to plan an action after gathering all valuable insights and analyzing them. They can share stories with compelling data to prove that your cause is worthy of the investment.

Benefits of Salesforce Donor Management Software

Before enumerating the benefits of this software, consider a hypothetical scenario first.

You are a nonprofit organization’s executive director. The organization is making good progress. And three new employees joined your organization last month. Certainly, it is exciting for you to see the team growing.

While everything is seemingly good on the outside, things are getting hectic inside. With more employees joining, new projects starting, and donations pouring in incessantly, tracking everything is getting harder. The level beyond which you can’t manage your nonprofit’s operations manually has already been reached. In the end, you find yourself sitting in a corner at your desk – helpless, frustrated, and clueless.

Maybe, it’s that point in time when you integrated a digital fundraising solution. This is where a donor management system comes to your rescue. Be it names, emails, tasks, deadlines, gifts, or anything else, such software, tracks it all.

Before you pick a donor management software, ensure that it has the following components.

  • It should be able to track detailed contact info and interactions with your team members.
  • It should enable monitoring of individual campaign metrics. You should be able to track donor-specific info like donation sources, gift sizes, donation amounts, etc.
  • It should let you segment information and align it with your organization’s overall strategy and individual campaign strategies.

We can discuss your perfect donor management software!Get in Touch

Now, let’s walk you through a few use cases to explain how Salesforce Donor Management software can help your nonprofit organization:

1. Helps Manage Potential Donors

Event management is a very important aspect for nonprofit professionals. Let’s say you host a large event with a huge number of attendees. Seeing such a large gathering excites you and makes you hopeful. You take down their names and contact numbers to follow-up on them for donation requests. Everything ends well, and you return to the office the next day only to find out your hopes are shattered. The sheet of names and contacts is lost! Won’t it be painful?

Now, reconsider the same scenario in a slightly different manner.

You host an event, take down the attendees’ names and contact info. This time, you don’t rely on only a single sheet of paper. Rather, you upload that attendance sheet to your donor management software. Once you upload it there, you can sit back relaxed because you won’t lose it now. The next day you come to the office, you can start leveraging the attendees’ info and raise Salesforce nonprofit donations

Noticed the difference? With Salesforce Donor Management software, you can stay assured that you will not lose or misplace anything anytime.

2. Enables Fundraising Intelligence

Fundraising Intelligence means the processes and systems that provide nonprofits with insights into current donors. Fundraising Intelligence helps know more about the affinity, capacity, interest level of current and prospective donors. You can store it into a prospect’s or donor’s score.

Salesforce Donor Management software empowers you to:

  • Prioritize prospects based on ratings and scores for affinity, capacity, and interest to donate.
  • Cross-reference a contact with their worth and past philanthropic records.
  • Segment thousands of records in one go based on scores with the feature of batch scoring.
  • Streamline your communication with prospects and donors with a complete understanding of their profiles.

See, you are already there. You can now see how Salesforce Donor Management software makes fundraising smarter.

3. Helps Prepare a Better Fundraising Strategy

With all your past, current, and prospective donors’ data in one location, you can get an easy and comprehensive view. The centralized collection of data helps you segment both your potential and current donors to leverage them strategically.

For example, a donor Emily attended your small fundraising music concert last night. She also bought three tickets for her friends. Suppose each ticket costs $100. This means that she spent $400 for just one show. It indicates that she is financially strong and capable. And generous, of course. The next time you organize a music concert like this, Emily should be among the few who you invite first!

Want a donor portal to match up to Salesforce Donor Management software for your nonprofit?Let’s Talk

Build a Next-Gen Donor Management Portal with CRMJetty

Salesforce Donor Management software is a paid component of Salesforce NonProfit Success Pack (NSPS). If you go to the pricing page of Salesforce NSPS, you can see the pricings. Even if you go for the Salesforce Cloud Enterprise Edition + NSPS, it will cost you $36 per user per month. This means you’ll need to pay $4320 per year if you want 10 users to access your portal. That’s a pretty hefty amount.

Our Salesforce portal costs you only $3999 every year. This payment will give you the ability to give CRM access to unlimited users. Our portal also supports the configuration of any number of standard and custom objects in your store backend. Thus, you can save more and grow fast.

If you have a legacy portal and want customizations, our developer team can do that for you. We can also help you build a portal from scratch if your requirements are unique.

So, let’s join hands to make the best donor management software for your nonprofit!Hire Us

Your Guide to Building a Dynamics 365 Portal and Enhancing It

When was the last time you called a customer support agent for a trivial issue with your mobile or laptop? Or when did you call a customer support agent to cancel or track an order you placed on any e-store? I bet it must have been a long time back! Thanks to the revolutionary concept of self-service, there were dramatic changes in traditional customer support. The number of organizations providing the option of self-service is increasing day by day.

Rising to the occasion, Dynamics 365 also launched Dynamics 365 Portal or Power Apps Portals two years ago. Power Apps are external-facing websites that enable access to CRM data for various users outside the organization.

Earlier, a Dynamics 365 portal was separate and came as a licensed add-on to Dynamics 365 apps, or the licenses would include a default portal add-on. After October 1, 2019, a Dynamics 365 portal no longer comes as a separate licensed add-on. Instead, it is licensed based on usage and extends a particular functionality of a Dynamics 365 app.

The caching mechanism of Power App portals is different from that of the add-on-based licensed Dynamics 365 portal. There is also a difference in the provision method between usage-based PowerApp portals and add-on-based Dynamics 365 portal licenses.

In short, PowerApps portals are the next generation of Dynamics 365 portal’s licensed add-ons.

If you are looking for a cost-effective way to integrate one or more capacity-based portals with your Dynamics 365, PortalXpand can help you out. It is a highly customizable and scalable Dynamics 365 portal solution that you can use to manage portals for vendors, partners, customers, and other entities right from a single dashboard.Explore PortalXpand

Types of Dynamics 365 Portals

1. Customer Self-Service Portal

A customer self-service portal, as the name suggests, helps customers serve themselves without any manual support. You can include knowledge articles to help them find answers to their queries. There are also other options like live chat, FAQs, online community forums, how-to guides, videos, user manuals, etc., that you can offer. Besides, you can also enable customers to comment, review, and provide their feedback to help you analyze their satisfaction.

2. Employee self-service Portal

An employee self-service portal can help an organization provide employees with a place to share knowledge, manage tasks, and interact with each other within the CRM. They should be able to use it to view answers to FAQs, submit feedback, and develop their community.

HR for Dynamics is a self-service portal for employees that helps simplify tasks – especially for HR and managers. Using this portal, employees can manage their interaction with the HR department regarding leaves, activities, reimbursements, etc. They can also update their info like bank details or contact details easily from within the portal.

Managers can perform their managerial tasks more efficiently with this portal. They can access the team’s summary, leave details, deadlines of projects, certification details, etc., in real-time. This quick access of information helps in accurate and timely analysis of the team’s performance.

3. Community Portal

A community portal is basically like a virtual community. A community portal of any organization or company invites people to collaborate, discuss, write blogs and articles, poll and review products, etc. This type of portal encourages users to promote the brand as they also feel that they have a say in the brand and are indirect contributors to the brand’s popularity.

4. Partner Portal

A partner portal lends a helping hand to your partners to manage their work better. It provides access to various components like orders, invoices, payment, history, and other organizational entities relevant to them.

Easy access to this information helps partners get insights into leads, deals, opportunities, and more. Accordingly, they figure out a strategy to enhance their operations and eliminate any bottlenecks or issues with proper feedback. Partners can also manage their relevant details like contract or contact details and update them easily. Multiple partners can collaborate on a single opportunity to get good sales and experience with a partner portal.

5. Field Service and Project Service Automation Portal

A field service portal gives a 360-degree view of entities like assets, invoices, work orders, and agreements. When customers purchase the Field Service, Project Service Automation, or an Enterprise plan, it is available. The Project Service Automation portal provides partners with project information like quotes, bookable resources, invoices, etc.

Consider Portal Customization – To Smarten Your Portal

A legacy portal that you used for your organization may need customization to make it relevant. CRMJetty can provide customization for any Dynamics 365 portal type to suit your business requirements.

We typically help our clients customize their portals in one of the following ways:

  • Technology/Platform Upgrades If you want to upgrade to any technology or platform for your portal, our developer team can get it done for you.
  • Repair and Maintenance If you use an ancient solution and it gives problems often enough, we offer bug-fixing services to help protect your data from bugs, zero-days, and more.
  • Technology Migration If you are looking to migrate to new or modern technology, we have got you covered. For instance, you can get help moving your solution with a non-CMS backend to a modern and CMS-backed platform.
  • Re-development of Your Current Solution If you want changes in your current solution’s architecture to remove development roadblocks, we can provide you with the best possible solution as per your requirements.

Avail of the best customization services now!Contact Us

Integrate PortalXpand – Your Ultimate Solution to Create a Next-Gen Portal

If you want to create a next-gen portal or upgrade your existing portal with the latest features, here are a few functionalities of PortalXpand that can interest you.

  • Enhanced Security – PortalXpand lets you provide access to different entities in your Dynamics 365 portal to different users based on their roles. You can create different user groups first, define their roles, and then provide them with access to entities based on their roles. It will help you secure your CRM data better.
  • 360-Degree Entity Management – With PortalXpand Dynamics CRM Portal, you can control the entities in both CRM and your portal. It also allows you to use all the default CRM entities and configure additional custom entities to suit your business needs in Dynamics CRM.
  • Custom Dashboard – You can also customize your dashboard to make it easy-to-navigate with PortalXpand. It lets you set and configure multiple widgets like Recent Activity, Counter Block, etc., for one or more entities you want.

Integrate Knowledge Base – Your Easiest Way to Launch a self-service Portal

One of the key elements you should include in your self-service portal is Knowledge Base. By providing access to a knowledge base in your Dynamics 365 portal, you can stay in constant touch with your customers.

An exhaustive library of documents, white papers, and tools to explain everything about your products and services helps serve your customers more efficiently. It also helps you shift from passive customer service to proactive customer service. Instead of having customers call you every time, you can proactively address most of their concerns and queries with your knowledge base.

Consider SharePoint – A Valuable Add-On for Your Portal

There are different add-ons that you can integrate with your portal to streamline your business operations more. One of the best add-ons you can consider is SharePoint. With our portal solution, you can integrate SharePoint in your Dynamics 365 easily.

With this integration, both you (as the admin) and portal users can manage and store the documents like quotes, proposals, etc., associated with specific records. After installing the SharePoint integration plugin in Dynamics 365, users can create folders, documents, files and delete records.

Build a Dynamics CRM Portal Now – With CRMJetty By Your Side

If you seek to build a Dynamics 365 Portal for your organization, CRMJetty can be your right team for that. We can discuss your business requirements, analyze them, and provide you with a ready-to-integrate portal solution if it’s an exact fit. Our developer team can also gauge the scale of customization our ready-made portal solution would require to fit your business requirements.

Once the developers test the feasibility, they start the required customizations after your consent. We also ensure that you keep getting updates on the progress on a regular basis. Once the final product is ready, our QA team comes into action and tests it for limitations and glitches. Once your product is ready and glitch-free, we hand it over to you. We can also provide you with support for a limited period to help you understand portal features and get familiar with it.

All set to kickstart your portal development journey? Your alpha team is just a click away!Contact Us

Customer Self-Service Portal: The Future of Customer Support

There was a time when people had no option but to call customer service for every query or issue. They had to put up with those long wait-times on the customer service line during peak hours. Further, the hours to call a customer service number were generally fixed. 

Well, customers have become smarter over the past few years. They no longer want full dependency on manual customer support. Instead, they seek information and figure out solutions to their problems by themselves first before seeking help. And the advent of the customer self-service portal has proved to be a game-changer in traditional customer support services. To cater to the demands of digitally native customers, most of the B2B and B2C companies have adopted a customer service portal. 

A survey says that 79% of those surveyed expect organizations to provide a customer self-service portal and tools. 

Before we proceed, it is important to understand the meaning of a customer self-service portal. A customer self-service portal is a website or application using which customers can search for answers to their questions and queries, place orders, generate complaint tickets, and more without human interference. 

A customer self-service portal primarily includes the following components: 

  • FAQs
  • Online Community
  • Ticketing Service
  • How-to-Guide and Video
  • Knowledge Base Articles
  • User Manuals
  • Help Documentation
  • Search functionality
  • Chatbots

How a Customer self-service Portal Benefits

There are some stats relevant to a customer self-service portal that may interest you:

  • Approximately 70% of customers find it irritating to have their call transferred from department to department.
  • 69% of customers try to solve their problems on their own first.

These stats highlight the growing importance of a customer self-service portal in current times. 

Let’s have a look at the general benefits of a customer self-service portal for your business. 

  1. Reduces Customer Support Expenses

With a suitable self-service portal in place, you no longer need a pool of customer support agents. The customer service portal can help you automate the customer service-related work and save on hiring and training agents. In the long run, providing customer support with a self-service portal can increase investment return. 

  • Enhances Productivity

A customer self-service portal contributes to the enhancement of productivity of customer service agents. There are times when the support agents have to answer redundant questions and queries. With the right self-service portal, they will no longer need to focus on small and redundant queries. 

This way, they will save their time and utilize it to answer more complex questions and queries. It also will help them improve the customers’ experience of customer service.  

  • Improves Overall Sales

If you manage to improve the customer service experience, it can also help boost sales. The better your customer service is, the more likely they are to return to your store. Over some time, your repeat customers’ base will broaden, increasing the total sales. They can also recommend your company to others and bring you more sales with good word-of-mouth.

  • 24/7 Customer Support

There is a limit to the number of hours a customer support agent can work. Even for a customer service that runs day in and day out, customer agents can work only in limited shifts. They are humans and are prone to exhaustion and lethargy. 

Instead, if you use a customer self-service portal, you can provide seamless support around the clock. The customer can log in to the portal and solve a minor problem themselves.

  • Enhances Content Delivery

A customer self-service portal can help you deliver the right and in-demand content. You can analyze the most common problems and issues customers face. After a proper analysis of all of them, you can curate the content on your portal accordingly. 

You can also keep revising your content on the portal and update FAQs, documentation, manuals, etc. In addition to providing content in the form of text, you can also create informative videos and visuals. These videos can take customers’ experience up a notch as they are illustrative and more attention-grabbing. 

  • Boosts Website Traffic

At times, businesses keep thinking about various ways to increase their website traffic at affordable prices. A customer self-service portal helps you indirectly achieve a boost in website traffic also. 

Publishing good knowledge base articles on your customer self-service portal can compel customers more. They may take more interest in your brand and think of checking out the content on your website too. And this can lead to an increase in website traffic and brand awareness.

  • Levels up Social Media Visibility and Outreach

By redirecting customers on the portal to your different social media accounts, you can also increase your interactions on these accounts. Through more interactions on social media accounts, your business can establish strong customer relationships. This, in turn, strengthens your social media presence and outreach. 

  • More Cost-Effective than Other Customer Service Types

The approximate cost per contact, according to research by Forrester and Oracle, is:

  • $12 for call center technical support
  • $6 for call center CSR
  • $5 for web chat
  • $2.5 for an email response
  • $0.5 only for self-service

It indicates that a customer self-service portal can help a company save up to 11$ per call. Hence, a customer service portal is not only valuable but also highly cost-effective. 

Want a feature-rich customer self-service portal for your organization? 

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How to Make a Customer self-service Portal Better?

A customer self-service portal is much beyond publishing answers to a few questions on your website. There are different ways you need to follow to better your self-service portal. 

  • Define Clear Goals

There should be a clear goal in your mind before you set up a self-service portal. You should be clear about what you are looking to accomplish with the portal beforehand. Is it reducing your ticket volume? Is it saving your overall customer support? Or anything else? This clarity will help you align your portal and content in line with your goal and achieve it faster. 

  • Make Your Portal Easily Accessible

Access to your portal should be easy for your customers. There should be some resources like knowledge base articles or FAQs that they can access without log-in. In case they want to track the progress of their ticket or generate a ticket, make them log in first. This is because having to log in to access every small thing or resource can deter them. 

  • Organize Your Portal Well

Yes, the appearance of your portal matters. There should be a proper organization of articles in categories and sub-categories in the portal. They all should be easily navigable right from the portal’s main page to ensure their quick access. 

Samsung is an excellent example to learn how to categorize your portal well. 

  • Provide a Search Bar

Besides a proper categorization of articles and resources, there should also be a search bar. You can make that search bar even more helpful by including the auto-suggest feature. When the customer types two or three characters, the suggested search results should show up. 

This search bar equipped with an auto-suggest feature helps skip the hassle of browsing several resources. The customer can reach the article(s) they need more quickly and easily. 

Microsoft Support provides a Search Bar with the auto-suggest feature. 

  • Keep the Language Simple

The support articles, FAQs, or user manuals you publish should be clear and straightforward. There shouldn’t be an excess of technical jargon or sales pitch in them. This is because the portal’s primary aim is not to sell but to inform and help the customers. 

  • Link to Relevant Support Resources

It is not feasible to cover everything in response to a question in a portal. There are times when the customer needs additional information for which they may need a separate article. So, ensure to put links to related articles at the end of the page.  

One of the best examples that provide inter-linking is Google Help. Liking to relevant articles helps navigate the information they need more swiftly. 

  • Keep It Fully Responsive 

You can’t afford to ignore full responsiveness across all screen sizes and operating systems in this smart age. Pay special attention to making your customer self-service portal mobile-friendly. Test your portal across different devices and browsers before launching it.  

  • Enable Community Forums

Keeping the content that your team writes in the resources is your priority. However, enabling customer-driven community forums where customers can collaborate and discuss issues can also benefit. 

For example, Apple hosts a big support community where you can discuss all the iPhone issues and software recommendations. This helps customers share their experiences and help each other. 

  • Encourage Customers to Use Your Portal

After you’ve launched your portal, it’s time you made your customers aware of that. Unless they know that you have a portal, how would they use it? So, make it a priority to announce your portal launch across different channels. 

Share the news on your site, email, social media accounts, etc. Feature your portal prominently on your company’s website on your “Support” and “Contact” pages. 

  • Keep Your Support Team on Stand-By

No matter how well-designed your customer self-service portal is, you can’t replace human support every time. There are some complex issues that customers can’t self-resolve and need a support agent to intervene. Therefore, see to it that your customer can reach your support team instantly whenever they need your help. 

  • Update Your Content and Include Videos

It isn’t about just creating content and forgetting it. Nope! You have to keep it updated as your products, services, and customers’ preferences. Sometimes, answering via written content isn’t practical and easy. This is where videos and screenshots come in handy.

Hence, consider including videos to explain complex queries and questions. A good example is Nokia that has videos on different topics on its portal.

  1. Include Onboarding Process

Support resources can help customers already familiar with your products and services, but not first-time customers. Include content for customers at all stages in the sales cycle to help with onboarding and above.

Build your customer self-service portal right now.

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Build a Customer Service Portal Now – Be Future-Ready

Self-service is becoming desirable day after day with the present-day tech-savvy customers. According to Gartner’s research, a billion service tickets are forecast to get auto-generated by customer-owned bots by 2030.

In short, a customer self-service portal is going to shape the future of customer service and take it to the next level. If you are looking to build a self-service portal for your business, stop your search right away!

CRMJetty can help you build the best self-service portal for your business. With 14 years of portal development experience, we guarantee all the services you need to launch a customer self-service portal. We have a proper chain of steps that we follow for any portal development project.

We first gather all your self-service portal requirements. Our developer team then analyzes them and determines whether a few customizations in our ready-to-integrate portal solution can serve the purpose. If it is possible, we seek your green signal to proceed with the required customization. During the whole process, we continuously keep you posted with iterative updates. Once it is ready, our QA team takes charge and tests it for limitations and issues to determine if it is market-ready. In the end, we hand over the final custom self-service portal to you and also provide a limited support window to help you get familiar with the portal. 

In some cases, if customization in our portal isn’t feasible to cater to your business needs, we also can help you build the portal from scratch. With a proven track record of 1200+ completed projects, we assure you of the best-in-class portal development services.

Let’s get your next-gen portal ready together!

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Dynamics 365 Customer Portal: A Must-Have for Businesses

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

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

It helps identify client issues and deliver exceptional service.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Meets User Experience

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

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

  • Provides Immediate Solution

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

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

  • Helps Build Community

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

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

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

In a Nutshell

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

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

Should You Choose a Salesforce Customer Portal or a Partner Portal

What thought/brand crosses your mind when you think about CRM and portals? 

For us, it’s always Salesforce. Not because they are in the industry for long and are widely popular. But they understand customers’ pain points and needs. They also understand the business requirements and what solution can help them achieve profits. Salesforce knows the market. They launch products that would enhance customers and clients’ interaction. They bring in products that complement their CRM. Mostly, those products are portals and communities. 

If you know about Salesforce or have used it, you might know about Salesforce Customer Portal and the other types. You might be aware of their functionalities like that of a Salesforce Client Portal. 

However, sometimes they can raise a question like which one to choose? 

Should you go with a customer based or a partner one? 

Hence, in this article, we’ll discuss two types of Salesforce Portal, i.e., Customer and Partner. We’ll also help you choose one that’s right for your organization. 

Salesforce Customer Portal

Salesforce Client Portal is an interface that helps your customers/clients solve their issues about your products/services. 

As an organization, you can create a custom solution for your customers with features like ticket generation, knowledge base, and so on. You can include sections, information, modules based on your requirements.

If you go for this solution, you can provide your customers – omnichannel support, easy integration, and an online forum. Besides, you can provide 24/7 support without any extra resources. Also, it can eliminate the drawback of having customers in multiple time zones. 

Salesforce Partner Portal

Partner portal allows your partners outside the organization to log in to Salesforce. It helps companies create indirect sales. Here, the partners have limited access to the interface and can only view the modules they have access to. 

With the help of PRM, companies can create, manage, and handle sales. They can invite partners to manage, track, and analyze campaigns, sales, and more. 

The benefits of using a partner portal include efficiency in the sales funnel, increased ROI, and data retrieval from anywhere, anytime. It means partners can access the data and insights while on the go. They can share documents, reports, and so on. 

Salesforce Client Portal V/s Partner Portal

Let us see what makes one better over the other. 

  • Purpose

A customer portal aims to solve queries and issues without interacting or asking for a representative’s help. Partner’ shows partners with leads and sales opportunities. 

  • Audience

A customer portal is for end-users whereas partners one are for salespeople or third-parties. 

  • Access and Cost

A customer solution is easy to access. They may or may not have advanced features as their basic purpose is to solve queries. Partner solution has access to core CRM features. Besides, it requires additional features to plan sales campaigns. And so it is expensive. 

  • Role-based Access

In a partner solution, you can provide your partners with role-based access. For example, they can access sales reports but not invoice reports. This is not the case with the Salesforce customer portal

  • Knowledge 

Salesforce customer solution has a huge knowledge repository to help customers solve their queries. The partner one may or may not have such a huge knowledge base. 

What You Should Choose? 

A solution that meets your company’s requirements. There’s a thin line between these two solutions. However, both have their own set of uniqueness and peculiarities. 

If you want a solution to solve your customers’ problems, manage their activities, then go for a customer one. But if you want a solution to manage your partners, then go for a partner one.

That’s all for now. 

If you still need guidance in choosing one, talk to a portal development team. They will guide you in the right direction. 

Also, you can leave a comment here. We will try to help you in every way possible. 

How Web Portal Solutions Bridge Gap between You and Your Customers

After all, it’s the customers that make up your business. It’s necessary that you fulfill their demands, provide exceptional service, and solve their problems. 

If they like your service and products, there are high chances of them returning back to you. If they don’t, you might lose a customer. 

So, the question is, how can you provide them with a better service and quality products?

Web Portal Solutions! 

A web portal can act as their self-support and your digital support team. It can help you provide your customers with the best services and support without a human support team.

Let us see how. 

  • Increase Customer Retention

With a web portal, you can create support tickets, live chats, and schedule appointments with customers. Customers can learn about their order and ticket status. They can chat with the support team directly from the portal and clear their doubts or queries. Along with this, FAQs, documents, and how-to guides can help customers solve basic queries. 

Web portal development will streamline your operations. It will free your support team of unnecessary tasks and help retain customers. In short, your support team can work efficiently, and provide better customer service.

  • Security

Data security is the most crucial factor. This is also the reason behind customers’ hesitation to share data with businesses. Customers avoid sharing data with businesses. To curb it, many businesses use highly encrypted solutions to ensure customers of safe and secure data. 

Web portal solutions, for example, use the latest security standards. They come up with two-way encryption so that no one can retrieve the data. Additionally, they use market standards for purchases and payments to keep data secure.

  • Custom Features

A custom portal development can help you customize your solution according to your requirements. You can add features like payment, invoices, quotations, accounting, and more. 

Web portals can help your customers to pay directly from the portal. Vendors can generate invoices and pay their remaining amount.

Along with it, you can assign role-based access so that no one without authority can access or manipulate the data. In addition to all these, web portals can help you conduct customer surveys. You can ask them for their problems in retrieving data or the features they would like to have in the portal. Similarly, you can do so for your employees, partners, and others. 

  • Branding

Visibility is a sure-shot way to build a brand. You can do so with a custom web portal. With an intuitive logo, theme, UI/UX, consistent look and feel, web portals can help you with brand building. 

They not only provide a smooth experience and attractive designs but help build your reputation. 

Customer engagement is also another way for brand building. So along with consistency, they provide features like forums, discussion groups, and a knowledge base for engagement. 

  • CRM Integration

No one likes handling multiple solutions—a CRM, a separate portal, and so on. 

Therefore, web portal development companies provide you with custom web portal solutions to integrate with your CRM. 

A custom solution has all the features and syncs well with your CRM. It makes sure that there’s a single login point so that no one needs to go through multiple logins. Besides, any changes in the CRM reflects in the portal and vice versa. It means that you don’t need to worry about rework or rechecking.

Wrapping Up

Web portal solutions can be your true companion in attracting and retaining customers. They can help you serve customers in a better way. A custom web portal will ensure that your customers don’t have a bad experience.

5 Types of Dynamics 365 Portals

Portals have become an indispensable part of the business. They allow employees, members, and customers to achieve their tasks and interact with the business. They also help everyone to be self-sufficient and stay up-to-date with the latest news and updates. And that, too, without external support.

But do you know there are different companies and types of portals to choose from? For instance, you can select a Dynamics 365 Portal or a Salesforce Customer Portal. 

Next, depending on the audience, you can choose a particular type. For example, you can select a Dynamics 365 customer portal for customers. You can then decide the services you want to provide. Some of those include support for issues, search knowledgeable databases, collaborate with teams and communities, or learn more about products and services. 

If we talk about Dynamics 365, it has five main types of portals. You can choose one based on your use case. 

Here’s a breakdown of the different types of the Dynamics 365 portal.  

  • Customer Self-Service Portal

It’s also known as a Dynamics CRM Customer Portal. It enables your customers to manage information independently. They can generate tickets and get answers to their queries without reaching you. If they need help, they can chat with the support staff directly from the portal. They can access the knowledge base to learn about the product or other information.

Along with this, the portal provides customers with 24-7 self-support. It includes forums where customers can discuss and solve one another queries. Customers can also build a strong community in problem-solving.

The other features of the Dynamics 365 Customer Portal include polls, ratings, and comments. Businesses can use it to get feedback. With it, they can help customers with reliable solutions.

  • Employee Self-Service Portal

This portal acts as an internal space for employees to manage their tasks, share knowledge, or interact with CRM. They can use it to give feedback, access answers to FAQs, or develop a community of their own. 

If you want to equip your employees with a portal, you can go for HR for Dynamics. It is a self-service portal that simplifies employees’ tasks, HRs and managers especially. 

Employees can use it to manage their activities with the HR department. For example, leave applications, activities, travel expenses, etc. Apart from this, they can update their personal information, including contact and account details. 

Managers can get their team’s details right on the screen. They can know about their leaves, salary, deadlines, tasks, attendance, and everything else. 

  • Community Portal

These kinds of portals are like a virtual community. Everyone can gather, discuss, and share their opinions here. The highlights of this portal are blogs and articles, discussion invites, polls, ratings, and a space for comments.  

This type of portal is best for brand building. It encourages users to promote organizations by being unofficial ambassadors and marketers. 

  • Partner Portal

A partner portal helps you provide your partners a space to access various business components. These components can be invoices, orders, payment history, or something else. They can get insights into lead generation, deals tracking and can use it to provide proper feedback. They can also update the details and access their contract details.  

Partners can use a multi-partner collaboration feature to work with a number of partners. They can get all the sales information at one time. 

You can also use partner lifecycle management for recruitment. 

Overall, it would maximize deal protection and give vendors visibility in the customer pipeline. 

  • Field Service and Project Service Automation Portal

A field service portal gives detailed information about the assets, invoices, work orders, and agreements. It is available with Field Service, Project Service Automation, or an Enterprise plan. 

Project Service Automation Portal provides partner project information such as bookable resources, quotes, and invoices.

Summing Up

These are the important types of Dynamics 365 portals. No matter what your industry is, you can always benefit from a portal. But the glitch is that you first need to identify your business requirements. You need to decide whether you want a Dynamics CRM customer portal or a Partner Portal. Then the issues you want it to tackle. Like, if you want to build a brand, a community portal would be best, and so on. 

If you’re still unsure, talk to an experienced portal development company. They can help you solve that dilemma.