Salesforce Customer Portals Vs. Communities: What to Choose?

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

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

In this blog, we are going to discuss:

– Types of Salesforce portals and their functionalities

– Salesforce communities

– Difference between Salesforce Portals and Communities

– Which one to choose?

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

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

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

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

Three major types of Salesforce portals:

Self-service portal:

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

Customer portal:

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

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

Partner portal:

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

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

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

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

– Customer Community

– Customer Community Plus

– Partner Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customers & Communication: How to Handle Them During a Crisis

During the pandemic, a number of companies are struggling with how to pivot their business and how to stay afloat. The right question to ask, however, is how to help our communities.

As a business, your thinking should be less about selling your products or services and more about helping people out. At one point, if your clients and customers can’t pay you immediately but need your help, they will remember your company and you for looking out for them when they needed it. This will forge a long-lasting relationship between you and your customers.

Reaching out and asking questions about their needs will give you an understanding of how things are at their end and in the industry, as a whole. Even if the product they need is not yours, when you help them out, they will appreciate it.

Be open to listening. If you understand the education sector, for example, create solutions that are accessible and inexpensive. Your business may be about smart boards in the classroom, but with classes taking place online, work on your product in a way that teachers can use the concept of that product on their computers from their homes. You can even let schools borrow more smart boards to give to their teachers’ homes while distance learning lasts.

The key is to innovate and catch up to the changes that are happening at the speed of light. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and there is no greater necessity than right now.

And to invent in the right direction, you need to communicate, and communicate well with all your customers. All the good ideas lie in the problems they are facing currently.

So how to communicate with customers the right way during a crisis like the one we are in? And most importantly, how to communicate to retain the customers you have currently?

Let’s see!

Create openings for dialogues:

Nowadays there are so many platforms for you to reach out to your customers. Create question posts, polls, feedback forms, or just genuine posts asking your community how they are doing and what is something that might help them. Create a personalized campaign sharing some of your valuable resources for free to your customers making a way for them to connect with you about any kind of help they might require.

The more they feel like they can rely on you during such hard times, the longer they will stay with you. Be their source of support, security in these uncertain times.

Mostly, some of your hard-earned relationships with your loyal customers might’ve been shaken up by these uncertainties but you can easily prevent that by opening a raw and authentic dialogue between you and them.

Choose candor over charisma:

That sounds like a gimmick. But with marketing, we often forget that charisma isn’t everything. Sure it helps to seem so cool that people want to automatically know more about you. But it is temporary. Truth and authenticity will always work when people are anyway too occupied with their struggles. They don’t need you to be out of reach. They need you to make yourself available and on the same level as them.

That paragraph was an example of us not being charismatic.

Integrate a unified digital channel:

When your customer is trying to reach you and if they have to send you an email, or call you, it is not ideal. They should be able to get all the help they need via a singular communication channel. With a customer portal, this communication is cleaner and more organized.

Help them get answers before they ask for them and help them solve issues on their own with step by step instructions and guidance. Make sure that your portal has bifurcated issues in categories so they don’t need to dig around for topics. Give them access to their invoices, personal information, etc. within the portal so they don’t have to go look through their inbox. Eliminate the need for them to have to email you anything.

The point is to provide a digital-first experience which is easy to access for them and is scalable for you so that you are prepared for such big changes, crises, etc.

Use the portal to its maximum potential to truly make it simple for your customers to interact with you.

Unclutter internal communication:

You don’t want an episode of lost in translation happening at such a crucial stage. If you work in departmental silos, then it is time to unlearn some processes and adapt to the new normal; open communication.

What can happen with different departments in charge of small and different things, aspects of your offerings is miscommunication. If not that then definitely delays in addressing what might be some important requests or messages. A small delay or a small miscommunication can prove to be fatal for your organization because people are sensitive now more than ever.

So disintegrate your hierarchies and department silos and try and streamline the flow of internal communication and information. The key here would be identifying the right stakeholders who can handle pressure and are good with people.

You would also need to keep your employees up to date with any major developments in your company because chances are they are as anxious as your customers are right now. If you hear any negative chatter around some things, then try and address them organization-wise as soon as possible.

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer, and take it from there. The pain points will be abundantly clear to you then and that is the first step to eliminating them.

Customer Self Service Portals: Must-have Features and Best Practices

Millennials and Gen Z are a crazy bunch. And this crazy bunch makes up for 62.5% of the total world population. 62.5%. That’s more than half of the world’s population. So it is okay to assume that 6 out of 10 of your customers are either millennials or Gen Z. And if your product’s target audience lies between 25-35 demographic, then you have 10 out of 10 millennials or Gen Z on your hands. After constantly fighting with ‘n’ number of competitors, you manage to acquire them as your customers only to lose them for a silly thing like not having a self-service option. And it is not that hard to get customer self service portals right.

And that’s what we are going to talk about in this blog.

– Customer portal features

– Customer portal best practices

But before we get into the features, let’s first try and understand the role of customer self service portals in an organization. Be it a small or medium-sized organization or an enterprise-level, a customer portal acts as a bridge between you and your customers. It gives them a chance to get to know you a little better. As an organization, you will have control over how you want to develop the relationship and to what extent you want it to grow. You can aim at short-term relationships as well as long-term partnerships based on the nature of your business. A customer self service portal fills that long-existing gap that now more than ever needs to be filled.

Apart from that, there are many ways a portal benefits your organization.

– Streamlines client communication by providing a unified interface to your teams as well as clients to communicate. No more messy email threads and calls.

– Proper customer data management as the customers themselves update their personal details from the customer portal.

– No redundant tickets as all the knowledge articles covering basic questions about your products and services will be shared with them through the customer portal.

– Simplifying your ticket generation, monitoring, resolving, and everything related to tickets by giving a proper platform to all the stakeholders.

– Builds your brand and makes sure you are seen in the positive light by all your customers.

To garner these benefits, you have to have the right features in place in your customer portal.

So what are those right features?

Let’s check them out.

Must-have Customer Portal Features

– Option suggestion: If your business is clothing or footwear, you can learn from your customer’s purchase history so that when they shop again, the portal can suggest sizing based on past purchases. This is especially helpful if you sell based on brands since they have consistent sizing.

– Cross selling: If you own an estore related to lifestyle products, cross selling is quite easy. You can sell other products, and accessories on it. If you sell electronics, you can cross sell cables or product accessories.

– Quick query reports: If there are similar queries coming in from customers for over a week, your support staff should be able to get that data in a report so they can address it better by publishing a new knowledge article.

– Data Visualization: Customer interaction can teach you a lot. And the portal can collect a lot of data that you can then study. With reports like how many people raised similar questions, the number of people who chose a particular color, etc. can give you deeper insights into your business.

– Feedback: A short feedback regarding the interaction can go a long way in helping you make changes to the portal and training your staff.

The customer portal features mentioned above are some of the advanced features but here’s a list of some basic portal features you can have if you are just starting out:

– Secure login

– Knowledge base

– Case deflection

– Proposal generation

– Interactive and informative dashboard

– Product catalog

– Real-time notifications

– Integrated calendar

Now, let’s get into the Customer portal best practices that all businesses must follow to get the best out of customer self service portals.

Customer Portal Best Practices

– UI Facilitating UX: The UI of a portal is crucial. It should be inviting, clutter free, and lead customers to the help they may need. While designing the UI of a portal, you should answer “how can I make this easier for a customer?”, rather than “how can I sell them my product?”.

– Categorization: A customer self service portal can have categorized areas of pain points a customer may have so that they can directly look for a solution in a specific place. For anything that cannot be categorized or is common, you can have FAQs and a miscellaneous section.

– Human Transition: Customer portals are great for categorizing various types of tickets, or interactions that customers come for. But for certain queries, a human interaction may be required. One of the best things you can do is have a human take over after a certain point in the interaction.

– Unsubscribe: if your customer doesn’t want to receive promotional emails, give them the option to unsubscribe in the customer portal itself. You can have this option in the profile section from where they are maintaining their personal details. And don’t hide the button. It will lose you the customer permanently.

CRMJetty has been in the portal business for over a decade now, and we have seen a number of things our customers have requested over time to build into their custom portals. It has been humbling to see the requests various businesses have when it comes to making a software that puts their customers at the center.

We take all that and build customer web portals and more. We are learning from our customers just like they are learning from theirs. If you need to make a custom customer portal, we will design a custom one, with a human touch. You can talk to us about it here.

How to Use SharePoint Add-on with our Dynamics Customer Portal

With our latest major release of Dynamics WordPress Customer Portal v3.1, we launched SharePoint Integration add-on that would allow our customers to keep all their documents in sync on all the platforms; Dynamics 365, Customer Portal, and SharePoint.

Pain Point: With our Dynamics CRM WordPress Portal, you could not store or manage the documents in an organized manner. You could just attach the documents to your “Notes” for a specific record.

And knowing how document management is one of the most critical works for a business, we developed our add-on to add value to our solution. When it comes to documents, admin and users want to collaborate to manage and store the documents associated with specific records; for example, quotes, proposals, attachments, etc.

With Dynamics 365, Microsoft has provided a variety of sub-products and Apps to facilitate most of the business requirements, SharePoint being one of them. By integrating SharePoint in Dynamics 365, it will allow to CRM users as well as Customer Portal users to manage and store the documents.

Once you install the “SharePoint Integration” plugin in Dynamics CRM, you can configure the accessibility to upload the documents (or any files), allow to create a folder, and delete option for the Portal users.

First, let’s take a look at prerequisites:

– You should log in as an Administrator in Dynamics CRM.

– You must have installed and enabled the CRMJetty WP Portal in Dynamics CRM.

– You must have configured the CRM Portal in your WordPress site.

– You must have integrated the SharePoint add-on in Dynamics CRM.

– You should be logged in to Office365-SharePoint.

– For this to work, you must install the “SharePoint Integration” plugin in your Dynamics CRM and in WordPress Admin as well.

– Follow the below steps to install SharePoint Integration:

Dynamics CRM side:

– On purchasing this add-on, you will get a zip file named ‘Portal SharePoint Integration’.

– Login to your CRM Account and navigate to the Settings → Solutions menu.

– Click on ‘Import’ to upload and install the Add-on.

– Import the “Portal SharePoint” Zip file and proceed to install SharePoint.

– Once you import the plug-in, it will be displayed in the solutions grid view.

WordPress side:

– To start with the installation, Log-in as Administrator into WordPress. Click on ‘Plugins’ and click on ‘Add New’ to install the package.

– To upload the plugin, click on the ‘Upload Plugin’ button.

– Now, click on the ‘Browse’ button and Browse the zip file. After uploading the package, click on the ‘Install Now’ button to install the package.

– Once you’ve installed the plugin successfully, activate the plugin.

Once you’ve configured SharePoint Integration in Dynamics CRM as well as WordPress, provide the users role-wise permission. You can also configure languages if you want to display the captions and messages in the local languages of your portal users.

Now, after all the configuration, your customers will get the Documents module in the WP Customer Portal (Frontend).

Your customer can manage the documents based on the permissions you have provided from the CRM backend.

There are many features provided for the customers to better utilize this add-on, like:

– Your customers can sort the list of documents, change the view by selecting Grid view or List view.

– Breadcrumbs navigation is provided information about the subfolder and its path.

Once your customers upload documents from the portal, the documents get synced and will be available in the CRM and in the SharePoint as well.

Because of the real-time two-way data sync functionality, the documents and the data are updated all the time and on all the platforms leaving no room for miscommunication.

Dynamics CRM SharePoint Integration – A Complete Guide

Microsoft has been ruling the tech world for decades and has changed the way we work with computers. Probably, we cannot imagine the technology industry without them. They are also well known for their multiple products and services, operating systems, cloud computing services, CRMs, and many other products.

Two of the well-known products of Microsoft among enterprises are SharePoint and Dynamics 365. These two products not only make carrying out tasks easier for the companies but also helps them streamline their operations. And in this blog, we are going to talk about how to integrate SharePoint with Dynamics CRM and how enterprises can benefit by doing so.

First, let’s understand each of them in brief, and then we’ll discuss the steps for integrating them.

What is SharePoint?

According to Microsoft, “Organizations use SharePoint to create websites. One can organize, share, store, and even access information from any device. You can access SharePoint via various web browsers like Microsoft Edge, etc.”

In other words, SharePoint is a content/document management and collaboration tool developed by Microsoft. It is essentially useful for internal purposes and works as a content management system for organizations.

What is Dynamics 365?

Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based solution that combines customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) with the power of Artificial Intelligence. With the help of Dynamics 365, you can securely manage your customers’ data.

The biggest advantage of using it is that if as a company you are heavily dependent on Microsoft products like Office 365 then having Dynamics 365 means easy integration with other products.

Now, let’s go step by step on how you can integrate SharePoint with Dynamics 365 and what are the advantages of the same.

Pre-requisites:

Before, starting the integration check the following:

– Purchase the license or install SharePoint

– The user who is setting up the integration must have System Administrator rights for CRM and SharePoint.

– On the basis of your requirements, locate the exact SharePoint site, or create a new SharePoint site collection.

– Add the SharePoint website to the trusted site in Internet Explorer.

Now without any further ado, let’s start with the step by step process of integration:

Step 1: Open Dynamics 365, navigate to Settings → Advanced Settings. You will find this option only if you have System Administrator rights.

Step 2: Choose System and then click on Document Management.

Step 3: Then click on Configure Server-Based SharePoint. Upon clicking this, you will find option Define Deployment where you will get two options:

– Online

– On-premises

For this demonstration, we are going to choose Online. After selecting the option, now click onNext.

Step 4: Now you will come on Prepare Sites. Here, you need to add the URL to your SharePoint website and click Next. Once your website is successfully validated, you will see the next section i.e. Validate Sites. Here, you will see the Validation Succeeded. Now, click Finish.

Step 5: Now, go back to the Document Management Settings. Here, you will need to select the entities for which you want to enable SharePoint folders.

Step 6: Next up, you will see the pop-up screen. Here you need to select the entities which you want to store and click Next. Going further, you can create folders based on entities and also create subfolders for individual Accounts and Contacts.

Step 7: Once the libraries are set up, click on Finish.

Your integration of SharePoint and Dynamics CRM is set now. In your Dynamics CRM section, you will see the Documents section. Before you start using it, make sure that you have set the permissions properly.

Don’t stop with this integration, you can go one step further by integrating our Dynamics Portal solution with Dynamics CRM and SharePoint to streamline your business operations throughout.

About Us:

CRMJetty is a hub of innovative customer relationship solutions. Our tools ensure that you can render enhanced interactions at each stage of your customer lifecycle. So, if you are searching for a portal development company, we are here to help you in building the right customized portals. Something that your customers will love. We have served in this industry for a decade and have built many Dynamics Portal like customer portal, self-service portal, web development portals, etc. Get in touch with us to create customized portals and we’ll help you kick start your journey towards growing with portals.

Web Portal vs Website: The Nuances You Need to Know Before Investing

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.

Web Portal: A Solution Every Startup Should Have

Startup is the new way to do business across the globe. Governments are pushing and promoting young minds to start their own companies. From making special policies to organizing hackathons, funding to setting up incubation centers, organizing business meetups, government bodies are backing innovative ideas and businesses led by young entrepreneurs. In fact, big tech companies are also investing in small scale startup companies which help them to promote themselves better.

Helping startups is a must as they face lots of challenges in setting up their businesses. But, there is one forever issue which these companies face and i.e. to gain and retain customers. We all know customers are king. Happy and satisfied customers help you bring more customers and grow your business. Remember, getting customers is not just about contacting them; it’s about connecting with them.

There are many ways of getting customers but having a web portal is the new way for upscaling, enhancing, and growing your business.

Let’s understand how a web portal can help you as a startup company for gaining and retaining customers even during the pandemic.

What is a web portal?

According to Liferay, “A portal is a web-based platform that collects information from different sources into a single user interface and presents users with the most relevant information for their context. Over time, simple web portals have evolved into portal platforms that support digital customer experience initiatives.”

And here’s how it helps a startup likes yours grow:

Simplified Management

This is one of the major issues most of the startups are facing. Many of them don’t know the key of management. But, with the help of a single portal, you can manage your company, employees, and customers all in one place. Web portals can also work as an internal employee portal. Here, your employees can collaborate with each other and streamline internal operations. Not only this but with the help of a web portal it becomes easy for your customers to reach out to you. This not only reduces a lot of miscommunication and management mishaps but also simplifies internal processes.

Flexible and User-friendly

Digital is the new normal. From purchasing hairpins to big electronic items or even paying for everything is now online. Today more than half of the population of the world is dependent on the internet. In such a rat race, having a good, user friendly, and easy to navigate UI/UX is necessary. If your customers are facing difficulty in navigating through your web portal or even your website then it is likely that they will drop the idea of doing business with you.

Bad UI/UX is one of the major issues why your customers don’t come back to your website. In this scenario, developing a custom web portal is the key. You can have complete control over these things and create a portal that lives up to your customers’ expectations helping you create a brand name.

Secure Channel

Security is an essential part of any online product today. Having a secure portal means your clients’ data is safe and they trust you with it. Your clients will also have individual login credentials using which they can log in their accounts and have access to their documents only. It works as a secure channel for your clients to communicate with you.

Custom Solution

There are thousands of web portals available in the market and looking at the different options with myriad features might confuse you. This is why a customized portal is the way to go. There are lots of web portal development companies out there that can help you to create a portal of your choice according to your business logic.

Having a custom portal means it can have the features and functionalities of your choice, you can also develop a custom theme based on your website’s design language. Additionally, having a custom portal also gives you an opportunity to integrate features based on your clients’ feedback as well.

In short, having a custom web portal is a win-win situation for you as well as your customers.

Single Sign-in Option

Once the web portal integrates with your website then it becomes very easy for your customers to sign in to your portal. They can easily access the technical documents, generate tickets for their issues, access user manuals, understand your company’s products, services, and many such things. Additionally, integrating web portals helps even your support team member in solving your customers’ issues efficiently.

Creating a Brand

If your company requires a strong social media presence then you can integrate the same in your web portal which makes it easier for you to interact with your customers. And get new customers as well. Not only communicating but you can also come to know their issues directly through social media platforms. We all know how powerful social media is. Big tech companies have dedicated support pages that help their customers to easily solve the issues round the clock.

Providing round the clock support on a platform of your customers’ choice will not only help you in getting new customers but will also build up the reputation of your company.

Being an entrepreneur has its own difficulties but with the help of the technology and correct tools you can surely make your name in the market. Business is all about taking risks, sometimes there are profits, sometimes there are losses. But keeping up with the market trends is the key to success.

Every Freelancer Needs A Web Portal: Here’s Why

In December 2019 the unknown and unseen virus hit us. In early January WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic and we all went into our homes by March. This resulted in loss for many companies and many of them had to lay off their employees.

It made many people hunt for new jobs be it full time or part time and some even turned to freelancing. Becoming a freelancer is not only helping them but it is also helping companies to run their businesses easily.

But freelancing has its own difficulties. It’s very difficult to manage household chores as well as produce quality work for your clients.

Once your work starts speaking and you start getting more clients then it becomes difficult to manage clients as well as work in the middle of a crisis. Let’s understand how easy it becomes to manage your tasks and streamline your operations using a web portal:

Streamlining operations:

Web portals make it easy for you to maintain the workflow for each of your clients. Your clients can easily provide you work or update you on current work directly from the web portal. Additionally, it becomes easy for both of you to stay updated with changes from anywhere at any time.

Availability:

Being a freelancer is a tough job, managing work, personal life and of course clients. Major difficulties come when your clients don’t know when they should reach out to you. This results in you being on your phone the whole day and doing back and forth with your emails.

This is when a web portal brings ease to you. Upon integrating with your website you can add your working hours in it. This makes it easy for clients to reach out to you as they will know your working time. Additionally, this will not make you stay on your phone the whole day and you can maintain some personal time and space.

Custom Portal:

If you are not happy with a pre made portal then you can always reach out to companies like us to help you develop a customized web portal. With the help of custom portals you can have clear business logic and add on the features of your choice. While building a custom portal you can make sure that it suits your website’s theme, functionalities, and is easy for your clients to navigate. You can also ask companies to make a custom payment gateway directly in the portal. This makes it easy for your clients to transfer payments once your work is complete.

Security:

Security is an essential part of any product today. Having a secure portal means your clients’ data is safe and they trust you with it. Your clients will also have individual login credentials using which they can log in their accounts only and have access to their documents. It will work as a secure channel for your client to communicate with you.

Final Words:

I can understand being a freelancer and working day and night to fulfill your necessities in this time of crisis is difficult. But web portals are where you can streamline that process easily. We at CRMJetty are working to make web portals available for everyone’s unique use case.. You can contact us here for getting world-class custom web portals. Get a portal now and make yourself as well as your clients happy.

Media Portal: Behind the Scenes

Media plays a powerful role in the 21st century. The rise and evolution of how it works, what it says, the narratives it chooses and abandons are a topic of discussion within and outside of the media industry.

Earlier, what used to be largely two separate groups, that of media and news, is now much more complicated and intertwined. One of the common ways to address this middle ground has been news media.

This is not to say that this complication is bad or negative. Just, occasionally messy.

Managing one of these, is of course, messier than it looks to the consumer. Let’s look at how certain tools can help you manage a media conglomerate.

Monetizing the platform

First, if you’re going to have a free model for consumers, you will need to monetize your business with ads. Or you will have a subscription model. Or you will have a mix of both. The thing to focus on is your ad platform. You have to have ads that are relevant to the topics and categories you generate news around. The best example here would be that of The Verge. They talk mostly about tech, science, and space, and the ads shown on their platform are relevant to their readers which not only adds value but also keeps their readers’ experience unhindered.

Content Creation

Now that is just covering the basics of the platform you choose. Your content creation platform should be built to work in partnership with the ad platform you choose, smartly.

Next up, comes the content you actually publish. There are certain guidelines and rules regarding the content you have to publish. There are soft guidelines like making a note of the updates in the content if you make changes, and hard guidelines like not publishing plagiarised content. The way you talk about things on your platform will depend on the things you talk about as well. Be bold, and be careful. You are in a very public space.

As a company, this business leads to heavy investment in the tools you provide to your staff, your writers, editors, curators, freelancers, reporters, guest contributors, and designers.

Now, of course, this software or portal works on login credentials for each role I mentioned above. Since these roles are different, the access that each of them require also differs based on the tasks they need to perform.

– A writer needs to only access their own portfolio of articles, whereas an editor should have access to all the work for all the writers or the writers assigned to them.

– Similarly, freelancers should only be able to submit articles, designers should be able to add media to articles or in the library, etc.

And if your media house is big on collaboration, you can always have a feature where a particular writer/editor can add more writers, freelancers, editors, guest contributors, or designers to their articles providing special limited access when permitted to create holistic articles with verified information from the subject matter experts.

An information and media platform is not limited to news or opinion editorials. It also includes video, podcasts, or all of these things.

If your media house handles podcasts independently of your written stories, but shares them on the same website as stories, then your portal needs a special way to handle audio files as well. You will need to treat that post like a normal story that you write a brief about and then embed the audio file in it.

Same applies to how you handle video stories. However, if your platform is a streaming platform for video, then things shift slightly. Here, video is your central content.

If you have a review team for gadgets, cars, any kind of product or service, this portal can also be a tool to manage that neatly. It can keep track of which review unit you have, when it arrived, when it was sent back, if it arrived faulty or was damaged later. While your review of the service or product will be public, the company that it belongs to should also get the basic facts of your experience. This becomes a good way to keep track of product iterations for your writers, and if a product breaks down multiple times.

Another thing that a media house can use to engage with the audience is polls. You can put up relevant polls regarding trending topics and get the results directly in the backend, and be easily usable inside articles if required.

Content Analyzing

Once the news is out, the natural second step is to try and decipher the behavior of your readers along with finding your voice. If you have started your news media platform with an objective in mind, then you already know your voice as well as your audience. But if your subject matter expertise is widespread, then you will have to spend a good amount of time analyzing your traffic and seeing if your content is being downloaded into your audience the way you want it to, and if it is sparking the right conversations around the topics that matter.

For this, your media portal can help you monitor as well as analyze.

Monitoring:

For creating great user-centric content, you need a 360-degree view of your competitors, your readers, as well as the topics you publish content on. And your portal dashboard should give you that. This can come handy to the editors, strategists, as well as to the senior writers. The dashboard should fetch media data and chatter around your news media from sources like social media, broadcast channels, online sources, etc. This allows you to:

– Monitor your brand reputation: If anything goes south, you can deploy your social media or crisis management or PR brigade to handle the situation. News is sensitive and can spark either revolutionary conversations and movements or violent public outbreaks or public menace. And you don’t want your articles to cause the latter. Something like this can stick to your reputation until the end of your existence.

– Get industry news: Now if you are reporting news and creating media for a particular niche, you can’t afford to lose the happenings in your industry. So, it becomes imperative that you monitor every news in your industry to stay ahead of your competitors. This is crucial in stories that are developing so that you don’t end up missing out on important updates.

– Insights of topics: Similar to monitoring a particular industry, you can also monitor a topic. This can be beneficial for writers who specialize in a subject matter. This way they can monitor topics and write keeping in mind the chatter of the town.

– Analyze your competitors: Monitoring what your competitors are doing can help you to craft strategies that can push you ahead of them. So, you can add the sites of your competitors to the media portal and monitor the frequency they publish, readers’ responses, social shares, etc. This way you will be able to understand the gap and the nature of it, which will allow you to fill it easily and in less time.

Analyzing:

Now this needs to go a step above and beyond getting basic viewership insights. In addition to knowing where your users are coming from, this dashboard/backend should be able to tell you where they are posting and sharing your content. If you know the kind of conversations that it sparks on social media, your social media team can actively participate and add to the dialogue. Also, make sure that your analytical dashboard is configurable so that you can overview your organization’s performance in a single glance.

Here’s what all you can do with an analytical dashboard:

– Campaign tracking: News media houses are there to ask the right questions as well as create awareness. And to do that, it is necessary to run campaigns, do a series of articles, and provide as much information as you can on that particular matter. Not only that but you also need to analyze the performance of these campaigns in order to know the impact you left on readers. So, this dashboard can provide you with insights like viewership, social shares, mentions, comments, tweets, reddits, or any conversations happening around your campaign.

– Identify influencers: Influencers have become a big part of every company’s marketing strategies, and it should be yours too. If your article caught the eye of an activist or an influencer, then they can actually help you to grow your viewership; that is if they are on the same side of matter as you are. They can negatively promote your article too. So make sure to keep a close eye on influencers, activists, etc. with an analytical dashboard.

– Streamline brand communication: It is the most important thing for a news media company. You don’t want to look like a hypocrite on important matters. So for a united front, you should monitor all the channels your articles are being shared and with what message. And this analytical dashboard should be able to do just that.

– Properly handle negative reviews: In the world of hyperconnectivity, missing even a bad comment, review, about you or your content can lead to a huge negative impact. To not let this happen, an analytical dashboard should help you monitor mentions, comments, shares, etc. in real-time so you can counteract in the best way possible and as soon as possible.

Generating news, finding a voice that is original, unbiased, and informative, in this world of hyper connectivity is not an easy task. But with the right tools like a fully specced up media portal with the above mentioned features will help you find your space in this internet universe that we’ve created.

About us

CRMJetty is a web portal development company and we can make a custom portal for your requirements. If you want a retail portal with an ecommerce option, we can make it possible for you. Contact us here to further explore this option for you.

Consumer Goods Portal For Selling in Post COVID World

Consumer goods have a huge range of products. From clothing, household appliances, to perishable goods like food, everything falls under this category. Ordering all of these things online is not exactly new. Ecommerce is not at all new. From online stores that at one point delivered goods at slow intervals, can now deliver within the hour (provided the service is offered in your city.

When social distancing, and lockdowns across cities and countries were not a thing, there was never any shortage of stores that we could shop from. Department stores like Target, Walmart, grocery stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, were often frequented. It was only obvious to go to another store if what you wanted was not available there. And this is not even counting the smaller, more local stores for a number of things.

Now, however, things have changed. Over the last couple of months, going out to buy groceries, clothes, or electronics has been difficult. Out of these three categories, the last thing that people may have found a need of, is new clothes. Everyone needs food every day, and since everyone is trying to work from home, we also need electronic supplies, like external monitors, webcams, etc. Apart from that, as cooking at home is the safest way to eat, we are also buying more kitchen appliances like a mixer, which we might not have bought before.

As a local store, the best way to maintain your customers right now is by providing an ecommerce platform and no-contact deliveries.

Let’s dive into the benefits of having an online web portal solution for this:

No special equipment (for the customer):

If your customer has to download one more app, that can cause some friction to get them on board, but a web portal is available with a browser, no need for an app. This way, your local customers can shop from your store over a bigger department store, because after all, you provide equal service while keeping it simpler for them to shop. It gives you an edge.

Database creation:

When customers sign on to this portal for the first time, they get added to your database, or CRM. Now you can use these details to offer them discount coupons, communicate e-bills, and also offer special subscriptions on regular products. Overall, you can use this database for future marketing campaigns.

Payment options:

When you get a custom web portal development company to make a portal for you, you can choose the payment options that you want to integrate. Keep more payment options so that your customers can choose whatever they are comfortable with.

Vendor management:

When your vendors are managed directly from this portal, there are a lot of operations that you can manage from one place. When a product inventory dips under a certain number, you can notify your vendor to replenish your stock immediately. You can also give access to certain purchase statistics and product feedback to the vendors so it can help them refine their products.

Alerts and notifications:

You can notify your customers for upcoming offers, in case of low stock and abandoned carts and even order processing updates.

Online support:

When your customers need you, they will be able to contact you. More importantly, you will be able to help them without having to suddenly hire a special staff for it.

Most importantly, if you already use an inhouse retail portal, then this will reduce your effort significantly. You can turn it into an ecommerce store with very little effort. You already have your catalog prepared, your inventory, and vendor information in place. You just have to take it online, and provide sign up links to your customers.

COVID-19 is not changing the shopping experience just because huge parts of the world have closed down. While the world may slowly open up, certain patterns of living are permanent now. More and more companies will continue to work from home, if not entirely, at least some of it. Large gatherings in places like shopping malls will decrease. The most convenient time to shop for groceries is on the way back from work, but if work is home, those outings are going to decrease. People will still need groceries. They will need to replace the headphones they broke.

But it is not going to be as casual as just stopping on the way. People are more likely to turn to stores that offer online shopping and home deliveries. When it comes to home deliveries, you can offer them with time slots. Customers can choose when they can take the delivery. That way you also save on back and forths of a missed delivery.

Everyone has to adapt for the world that has changed and is still changing. A web portal solution is how you can adapt to it.