Everything about Vendor Management System

Vendor management is a process that empowers an organization to take useful measures to control cost, reduce risks related to vendor acquisition, ensure timely services, derive values from the vendors, etc.

The vendor management portals include modules that let you research suitable vendors, source products, obtaining pricing and other information, check the quality of work, and many other tasks.

But how does a vendor management portal work? And more importantly, how can it benefit you?

It is an online web-based tool that acts as a single node to manage vendor-related activities in any organization or business. It even ensures improved efficiency and long term growth in a cost-effective manner.

Let’s understand the benefits of Vendor Management:

Better Selection:

Implementing proper vendor management can benefit your organization from a large selection of vendors resulting in better choices and costs. This also enables you to avoid unnecessary conflicts with your vendors.

Contract Management:

A multi-vendor scenario lacking a vendor management system might elevate the issues of managing contracts, documents, and any other vital information about your company.

But, if you implement a supplier self-service portal within your company then it benefits by providing you with a centralized view of the current status of all contracts. It even lets you visualize other important information in which you can enable your organization to make better decisions and save your valuable time.

Better Performance Management:

A vendor management portal provides an integrated view of vendors, their performance, and their products’ performance for your organization. Indirectly, it provides your organization with a clear understanding of what is working and what is not. This, in turn, means better efficiency and improved performance of your organization.

Improved Vendor Relationships:

It is difficult to manage multiple vendors at the same time. Some vendors might be fruitful to you while some might not be. But, managing relationships with your vendors is the key to successfully completing delivering value to your customers.

And the vendor management portal helps you do just that by keeping all the data in one place making it easier to access. Additionally, it even helps you take better decisions and simplifies your workflow.

Provide Better Value:

The ultimate goal of a vendor management system is to provide better value and better return of investment. Implementing this system will result in long term savings as well as improves earning over a long time since it enables you to manage your relationship with your vendors in a better way.

Now let’s see the other side of the coin and understand the challenges of not implementing a Vendor Management System.

There are multiple problems you might face if you don’t use vendor Management System properly:

Compliance Risk:

As a company, you cannot avoid risks fully. But, you can avoid them to a certain extent by putting up certain standards. By setting standards while hiring vendors will help you to get the right vendor. These standards will make your tasks to validate vendors easy and you can perform your process according to your company’s requirements.

Background Check:

As a company, you must be dealing with multiple vendors. Some might perform really well and give you better work output. While some of your vendors might not work properly and not fulfill the targets provided.

In the middle of all these, you also have to look after the quality of the work. In such scenarios, it is better to check the background of your vendors. The background check of your vendors provides you clarity of how your vendors are, what do they do and many such things. It also provides you better clarity on how your vendors will collaborate with you.

Lack of Visibility:

Having centralized data helps you in providing visibility and makes accessing this data easier and eliminates any lack of visibility you might have. This, in turn, helps you with better resource allocation and improves efficiency.

Vendor Data Storage:

As an organization grows, it is important to have a vendor data storage solution in your company. If you don’t use it then there are chances that storing and retrieving data might become difficult. So, if you are dealing with multiple vendors at the same time then you might need to have a proper vendor management system.

Payment Risks:

There are chances that different vendors might be using different payment terms or methods. In such situations, you need to ensure that the payment is on time. And to make this a reality, the vendor management system helps you a lot. By providing timely reminders about paying to your vendors.

Final Words:

As a large organization having a vendor management system makes your operations streamlined and helps your employees and vendors to perform better. Not only this, but it also enhances productivity and helps you serve quality work.

6 Ways to Make the Most out of WordPress Salesforce Integration

Salesforce is among the robust CRMs available in the market. It offers many tools for storing and organizing your company’s data as well as your customers’. And as a company, your goal might be to utilize this data optimally in order to serve the best to your customers.

There are multiple integrations available in the market but one of the best and widely useful is WordPress Salesforce integration. This integration helps you to utilize your data properly making it more valuable and as a result, you are able to provide better service to your customers.

Let’s look at useful ways to sync your WordPress and Salesforce data:

Easy User Management:

If you are managing your website on WordPress and capturing leads from there, then integrating your WordPress with your Salesforce CRM becomes crucial. This way you will be creating a cohesive database of your users.

To integrate Salesforce and WordPress, you can configure WordPress functions like site registration, etc. to create new leads in the Salesforce database. You can also configure other fields between two applications so your teams can have access to proper data sets.

It doesn’t matter if you are running a membership-based company or host-specific data on your website which is only visible to your customer, with this integration, you can keep your users’ account status synced dynamically.

Going a step further, you can also tag your leads as customers in Salesforce, and this customer tag update, in turn, gives your customers access to the “customer only” section of your website.

This will directly decrease your sales teams’ workload. This feature will help your sales team to serve your customers effectively and efficiently.

Generate New Leads:

Let’s say you want to convert WordPress form submissions into leads, and if your website is integrated with Salesforce then it will help you smoothen the whole process. With the WordPress filters and hooks, you can send your form data into Salesforce and then you can also track the performance of these forms in your CRM. All this, in turn, will help your inbound marketing team to perform better and convert your leads.

Track User Activity:

If you want to identify the most trafficked area of your website then you can set up “logged-in” user page tracking to get user page history into a custom Salesforce object.

If you are using this feature in your WordPress site, then remember that this level of detailed tracking requires a good amount of computing resources. It also depends on your web hosting provider. Or you can also invest in a Salesforce customer portal that works with WordPress making it a cost-effective option to track the user activity and understand their needs.

Create a Product Catalog or eCommerce Store:

There may be multiple ways for you to include your product database in your Salesforce CRM but there are only a few ways to keep data synchronized with external eCommerce stores. Still, there are some unique solutions available which work with as many Salesforce setups as you want. But what the point of concern here is that it won’t support any of the customizations done in your eCommerce store workflow. This will at the end make the data useless.

Therefore, a custom integration solution can include a product catalog; it even includes a full eCommerce solution that records stock quantities, sales, inventory updates, and other data in your Salesforce database. Having previous purchase data in Salesforce is very helpful when you are targeting customers for new products, promotions, or any other marketing campaigns.

Custom Object Integration:

You can create custom Salesforce objects according to your website. For example, if you want to build a website that tracks your rental cars and properties and stores their data in Salesforce then custom integration is the right solution for you. You can use this data to track car status, tenant rent, due dates, amounts, and payments directly from your Salesforce database. This even allows your customers to pay their bills directly through your WordPress website.

Tag Campaign IDs to WordPress Actions:

Want to link any core tailor-made WordPress actions with your Salesforce campaigns? Then linking WordPress actions with your Salesforce will enable you to track users who register on your WordPress site with a particular sales campaign. You can also add anyone who submits a specific form to a specific campaign by giving it a Salesforce campaign ID.

Additionally, you can even tag particular website activities that you want to track. For example, you can even add a WordPress action that keeps track of the number of blog posts your users are reading in a particular product or the service category.

If you are using any specific metric, you can associate them using a campaign ID that corresponds to each category. There are a number of custom actions you can create and track. In such scenarios, make sure you have specific and clear marketing or sales goals and can align in these actions as well.

Conclusion:

Salesforce and WordPress are among the most widely used CRM and CMS respectively. There are various ways you can use these two in the best possible way. But, the best outcome will be when you have integrated these two.

Self Service Portal For Two Big Financial Transactions

Back in March when the lockdown was beginning, the weather was also changing from spring to summer. And when the weather changes, I tend to get a sore throat. So of course, as someone who Googles everything, I Googled the symptoms of coronavirus and convinced myself that maybe I had it. Reader, I didn’t.

If you can convince yourself you have a much bigger health issue when you just have the common cold, it is needless to say, the scale of that comparison and panic varies from person to person and disease to disease.

And health is one aspect of life that we’d like insured, so when something actually happens, we are taken care of.

Other things that we like insured are our cars, houses, gadgets, and almost everything. Why? Because we buy really expensive things sometimes and expensive things also break. It just takes way more to fix an expensive thing as compared to something that cost less originally.

Similarly, an equally complicated financial matter is getting a loan for anything. And just like with insurance, getting a loan to purchase anything has become the trend. Right now, while personal finances have taken a hit, more people are likely to take loans for various things like education, house, etc.

Insurance policies and loan dealings are confusing. One better than the other, each with some caveat that you never find out about until it’s too late. It can be messy.

And if you are in the insurance and loan business, that will definitely not go well with the people now. More and more businesses are learning the value of being transparent with their clients and customers, and earning an honest buck instead of fraudulent practices.

And of course, being transparent with your customers is simpler than ever before now. You can just give them access to certain modules of the business that concern them. How? Using a portal.

You can give them access to your CRM in a way that benefits them. How will this work? The below points apply to both insurance policies and loans. Let’s take a look:

Choosing a policy:

First and foremost, your client has to choose a policy that works for them. Unless they have all the information regarding all that you offer, they cannot make an informed decision about it. Give them access to your policy plans, and if you update any of your policies, make sure to notify them of the updates. Be clear in your language in the policy so there is nothing ambiguous that they are agreeing to.

Comparison:

The easiest way to make a purchase decision regarding most things, product or service, is to compare it with close matches. As an insurance provider or mediator, your job is to provide a platform that helps them compare the different plans. Once a person compares, it becomes easy for them to see which plan provides them the best coverage.

Policy benefits:

Putting your hard earned money into a future you cannot see, is difficult. So if you are providing benefits on purchase of the policy, or a yearly benefit after that, be clear in getting that message across. Now, these gifts would differ based on the plan that a client has picked, so the portal is a great way to manage the dynamic offers you have.

Calculator:

No one is going to buy insurance of any kind without knowing exactly how much they will have to pay and the benefits they will get in return. Add a neat calculator where the client can feed in variables. When they try out variations, they can decide which plan is in their budget and works for them.

Knowing the interest one would have to pay on a loan is just as important and the client will appreciate being able to calculate it.

Support Backing the Businesses:

Any business needs financial support, especially in a pandemic. So around the globe are looking for the places where they can get a short-term mortgage loan to back their business to sustain in this situation and come out strongly. Hence, the portal interface will provide them a place to find and choose from different loan options and easily apply for it online with minimal steps. A win-win for lenders and borrowers using portals!

Exception list:

With each plan, make sure to give a detailed exception list for situations that the plan will not cover. This makes it easier for the client to know how to navigate the plan and therefore pick one that matches their needs the most.

Overall, financial transactions like insurance and loan have a number of small details to take care of. And with increase in the demand right now, you might just be short staffed. Good thing a self service portal can help your clients serve themselves. And clients often prefer that over too many insistent calls from people trying to sell them misery via insurance coverage. And it is hardly possible to have your agents take meetings with clients right now. It is not going to be possible to do so at scale, in the near future as well.

About us:

CRMJetty makes custom portals. And we can make one for you fast enough that your business can take advantage of it right now when the demand is high. Contact us to discuss this in more detail and we can get together a portal that best suits your business offerings.

5 MUST haves in your Knowledge Management Portal

Knowledge Portals are tricky to get right. If they do not solve customers’ queries, they are not worth investing in.

The basic purpose of any Knowledge Portal should always be to:

– Enable users to find the information they REALLY need

– Provide updated and fresh information

While we live in a digital world, it is important that your knowledge portal carries the basic features for a great user experience. Because there will be new trends, but the essential features would always remain the same.

Delete Outdated Content

A Knowledge Portal means the bank of the organization’s documents. And when we hear that, we all imagine – a bunch of unorganized stuff.

Even if there is an in-built search engine in place, it will sort the data by relevance, and not as per the quality. That means if your customer is looking for a particular report, and the search engine finds 4 different copies, how they will be able to distinguish which one is the latest?

Hence, it is important that the content in your database is updated from time to time and curated.

Simply, delete the outdated content.

So, does your knowledge portal enable you to do that?

You can also enable users to comment, tag, and rate content, flag outdated, and erroneous information. Based on the feedback, content admin can hide or delete “bad data”. Also, the ratings will help users to identify relevant content easier.

Is your “Find” feature good enough?

When thinking about helping users, it is important to understand that “find” is much more than just search. As Seth notes, “A knowledge management portal with the correct information architecture allows users to both search and browse.”

Do your customers have access to all the information they require? It is important that your portal provides a 360-degree view of the information. Otherwise, users will have to visit other references. It should be capable enough to provide easy access to people, expertise, communities, collaborative content, structured data, and rich media such as images and video.

In addition, a properly configured knowledge portal should enable you to “push” information directly to users’ desktops, mobile devices via email, RSS, or any other medium. It enables users to spend zero time in seeking information, and have it delivered directly to them in real-time.

Now it is your turn to find out how your knowledge portal provides information to users. Does it provide access to all the information your users need? Does it enable multiple forms of information discovery that help them find the right information at the right time?

Mobile Access

At times of crisis like COVID-19, remote work and BYOD adoption are picking up the pace. Hence, your users require a quick, easy, way to access information from any device they’re using. Also, the solution should be integrated allowing knowledge access without switching apps.

Customer Communities and Sharing

If no one is reading your material, then it won’t be effective as anticipated. Hence, your knowledge sharing solution should let you send information to external users. This way, you can successfully drive prospects in the funnel and track which content is working, and which is not.

Also once a lead converts, it is still important to build customer loyalty. A KMS with a “community of learning” for customers can quickly establish your name as an industry leader and customers would keep coming back.

Reporting and Analytics

Tangible results are important for a business’s impact. Unfortunately, many organizations do not focus on the value being created with the Knowledge portal and focus on other metrics to measure success.

It is important for you to know which data enables employees to become more productive? Are your team members actively collaborating and sharing knowledge with each other? Are the answers actually helping them?

Robust analytics can help you identify such insights making the elimination of outdated data easier.

Now you know!

Investing in a knowledge management portal is like buying a new house. You need to double-check and make sure to have all the important aspects in place before making the purchase. And now you know which ones can be your success formula.

Education Portal: Bring the Campus Home

Just like I’m writing this article from home, there are a huge number of students who have to study from home. Studying and teaching even inside a school infrastructure can be challenging. Previously, we have written about how the logistics of teaching and learning can be overcome with an education portal. But now the challenges we face are even more challenging.

Schools used to rely on class participation, infrastructural facilities like lab, projectors, library, etc. There used to be a structure to a typical school or college day that would go about. COVID-19 has pronounced school as public places, therefore shutting them down and sending kids home.

The greatest thing about learning at a school is that everyone gets equal facilities. The computers are all the same, the lunch hours are the same, the library is accessible by all, and there is internet access. Moving this entire system home is of course difficult.

The first challenge will come in the form of internet access, and the second in the form of a computer. Even if we assume and these are available, we have to assume they might not be consistent. So what are the changes you can make as an educational institution to make it possible for your students to keep learning and your faculty to keep teaching?

Get a portal.

If you have a portal, modify it to do more than what it is doing right now. It is no longer limited to marking attendance and getting homework assignments. This will mean getting the best of the best.

Let’s do a deep dive into what the portal can do for your institution during this pandemic:

Video classes:

Classes have to be online. But not all classes can take place at a single time for everyone because your students may be in different time zones. So professors also have to have an interface where they can easily record classes, live or otherwise, which can then be stored. The class interface should also have a chat option where students can ask questions and teachers can answer them. This will bring everyone’s experience a little closer to what they used to have in the classrooms.

Assignment interface:

All assignments are now online. That means it will require an interface that makes it easy for students and professors to interact with or collaborate on assignments. Simply uploading a bunch of questions on a document and getting answers to those is not going to be enough.

So this interface needs to be more interactive. It should allow more formats, like multiple choice questions, longer essays, pop quizzes that are only available for certain hours to ensure participation, etc.

Office hours:

A number of professors have dedicated office hours. This is where they have one on one interaction with students. Here they discuss their assignments, clear doubts that the students have, and guide them in all their academics.

So the education portal needs to have an interface specially designed for this. The professor can feed in their office hours, and the students can see those hours, and request an appointment. The meeting can then be over a video call or a phone call, which can be logged in to the portal.

Exams:

Since in person exams cannot be held, there needs to be a digital interface for it. This includes pop quizzes, open book exams, and more. Certain measures can be put into it like time limits for each question, only one attempt, etc. can help ensure a smoother anti cheating exam while maintaining the workflow of the school at the same time.

The education portal’s strengths while in use on campus are different than in remote use. While on campus, if there was a flaw, it would be less disadvantageous than if it happened while everyone is accessing it remotely.

As far as the administration of the school is concerned, the portal handles all the things remotely like it did on campus, minus things like classroom allocation, etc.

Professors and admin staff should also have a special interface built in that allows them to have meetings, to keep things running smoothly.

Apart from that, this education portal needs to be lightweight since everyone will not have the kind of internet access that a school does.

At CRMJetty, our team can cater to academic institutions’ needs. You can browse our previous blog, and even read the whitepaper. Your custom online education portal will thrive in our hands.

Benefits of Investing in Dynamics CRM Customer Portal

In today’s time creating, supporting, and deploying customer portal integrated with your Dynamics 365 instance is very easy.

In Dynamics 365 portal, your customers get an online platform to communicate and collaborate with your business. Depending on your customers, you can design the portal and add functionalities accordingly.

Dynamics 365 portal provides functionalities like ticket generation, search knowledge guides, suggest new ideas, and many more.

Dynamics 365 portal provides you the ease from procuring the hardware, certificates to install, web server to provision, etc. In just a few clicks you can set up everything and start with your portal.

So, let’s understand the advantage of having a Dynamics CRM customer portal:

Customer Engagement:

Engaging customers, in turn, helps you retain your existing customers; these customers, in turn, become your advocates and spread the word for you. In fact, they will help you to get new customers as well.

Having a customer portal will act as a cherry on the cake. This will help you to encourage your customers and your potential clients to discuss to learn about your products in depth.

Remember encouraging your customers online is the current trend. Put up questions related to your products, encourage them to answer these questions, and be part of the conversation around your brand.

Don’t engage them only on your community portals, but also engage them on social media platforms. This is what today most of the big companies like Zomato, Swiggy, Netflix are doing.

Coming back to portals, you can even use them as a platform to publish your articles, blogs, or posting questions about your products.

Helping your Customers:

Having customers is important but helping and assisting their needs is the key to making them stay. Using Dynamics CRM customer portal, your clients can easily log in and cater to their needs. Further, this self-service portal will help them to find answers to their questions, know the status of their issues, and many such things.

These self-service portals will help you to decrease the generation of support tickets, customer calls, and many more. And all this helps your support staff to work more efficiently.

Additionally, Dynamics CRM customer portal suggests your customer knowledge base articles on the basis of the keywords they enter, even before clicking on the submit button. Just like Google search engine. This reduces the redundant ticket generation and helps your customers on the spot.

Engaging your partners:

Dynamics also has a partner portal. If you are thinking to engage your partners like distributors, resellers, suppliers, etc. then partner portal is the perfect solution. You can use partner portals to capture sales channel data from your partners.

It gives your external partners a platform to create, manage, and collaborate with your in-house staff. You can gather real-time metrics from your partners and provide your agents with better data you want.

They help to empower your partners to make better and faster decisions. Additionally, you can even enable yourself to collect curated data which can help you in the future to plan strategically.

Engaging your employees:

Employee portals work the same as an intranet for your internal staff. This will provide one platform to your staff where they can curate and share their knowledge.

You can provide groups with target access to CRM features without providing them the front end. This is helpful to your staff and makes it easy for them to interact with the CRM data when and where the need arises. Similar to customer service portals, employee portals are useful to submit and resolve internal issues.

Customer portal framework:

This is one of the most customizable and extensible portal frameworks. It provides you a kick start for minimizing overhead cost that associates with the infrastructure and helps in platform development.

With the help of the framework, you can create multiple portals like agent portal, franchise portal, investments in service technicians, professional portal and various other types.

Final words:

Dynamics 365 portal helps you to stay ahead in the game in this competitive market place. It helps you to use Dynamics 365 to the full potential and manage your clients effectively.

Helping NGOs Help People During COVID-19

COVID-19 has disrupted the economy, and our lives. Some of us are privileged enough to have jobs, especially those of us who can work from home. We have salaries coming in regularly. We have homes to live in and work from. With a few clicks, we can even get groceries, medicines, and meals delivered to our doorstep. All that while following social distancing protocols.

This privilege does not extend to everyone. A number of industries, big and small, are having to lay off or furlough employees. Similarly, because of the lockdown, social distancing, and shelter-in-place, a number of businesses have had to close down, like restaurants, laundromats, movie theaters, malls, small shops. These business owners have no other source of income. Even amongst these, there are disparities.

In such a situation, how can we help at the local or global level? You can support them by donating funds. You can also donate to nonprofit organizations that you support.

If you are a nonprofit organization, you need to streamline your operations now more than ever. Some of the things that you may be doing are accepting donations, volunteers, gifts, etc.

In order to make operations easier and provide the help where it’s needed the most, you need to use a custom portal. Let’s look at what this portal can do for you:

Cause campaigns and crowdfunding campaigns:

As a non-profit organization, you can create a Cause in Salesforce or a page in WordPress and that link or page can be added to the portal, and volunteers assigned to the cause will have access to the portal for their activity updates and donors can also come to the portal to donate.

You can manage the various brands/people you have tied up with via this portal. The volunteers who are working on these campaigns will be able to update the records from the portal. Another way that this can work is that you may have tied up with a brand (let’s call it XYZ for now). When someone buys the assigned products from XYZ, those proceeds will go to your NGO, and then you can add them to your fight against COVID-19. In this case, while the funds will reflect in the campaign analytics, the donor data may not.

Similarly, when it comes to crowdfunding campaigns, you can create it in salesforce. From there you display it on your website. Any actions performed on it, like someone making a donation, will be registered in the portal.

Volunteer Management

One of the ways that people are helping right now is by volunteering. However, simply having volunteers does not solve the problem. You need to manage who does what work based on their skills and your requirements. Potential volunteers can apply via portal, and put in their skillset as well as their available timings. This creates a useful database for you. Now you can accept their applications, and allot them work based on predefined areas. Since they have put in their hours and days, it will be easier for you to schedule work for them without any overlaps. This means that if someone has volunteered as an at-home nurse, you are less likely to assign them grocery delivery. This way the right resources will go for the right causes. The portal not only makes this task easier, but also eliminates potential errors and automates some of the workflow.

Gifts management

Salesforce has a module called Gifts, wherein, if enabled on the website/Portal, people can make contributions from there. The details of that contribution are then stored securely in the CRM. You can manage these gifts and perform actions on them like assigning amounts to specific areas like medical equipment, volunteer reimbursement, medicines, etc.

Social Media marketing

Nonprofit organizations can also take advantage of social media marketing. By putting links of sign ups and landing pages, you can get the attention of people and bring them to your cause. It can help spread the word about your organization and your cause, effectively, and widely.

Salesforce has a special version of their CRM for nonprofits called NPSP, and we can build a custom portal for it if you need one for your organization. Contact us here for even more details on how this can positively impact your operations.

How to Maintain Business Continuity During this COVID-19 Pandemic Using Portal

Everyone’s attention right now is focused on COVID-19. You are worried about how to serve your customers and they are worried about how to get services. In this situation, you have to ensure that your customers get the support they need. Of course, there are challenges that you will face, all unique to your business. Your priority should be to maintain frictionless customer experience. Some of the things you will have to take care of for this is tuning your customer journey and the ways you provide support.

Businesses in the current situation are proactively working on discovering ways to help their customers help themselves, with online and mobile self-service interfaces for everything from raising tickets and tracking, monitoring sensitive financial information, making online payments or getting immediate data for their health.

Recently, customers have become extremely demanding. They want answers right in front, as they raise an issue or want to get in touch with you and if the wait is long, they will leave. Everyone is anxious and it is only natural that they want answers and services. Especially since the services they are looking for right now are essential.

Customers prefer interacting with CRM portals more these days. As the interface for self-service has huge penetration in multiple sectors, there is a high probability of business opportunities and maintaining business continuity for staying in the current market.

Portals benefit businesses in various ways when it comes to customer interaction, like:

Digitize critical workflows to improve speed, accuracy, and efficiency:

Move your support operations to a fully digital model. For example, if you are in the computer business, right now, your support staff is very busy. But not everyone can work. So how do you operate in such a high demand with fewer staff? You can upload tutorials for common issues that customers face, launch AR manuals that show an exploded view of the computer, making it easier to fix, or connect a cable to, etc.

This way customers will find it easier to make certain fixes themselves, leaving your staff to focus on bigger issues.

Optimize customer channel management:

By automating channels for customer requirements, you can save a lot of time and resources. Repetitive questions can automatically be answered, they can be directed to video feeds for certain queries, etc. If your business has multiple products or services, you can also streamline their questions by first bifurcating them in respective channels.

24/7 digital platform accessibility:

The biggest advantage of a customer portal is, of course, its accessibility regardless of time. Even in a pandemic, when people may not be able to work, a business with a robust portal in place will be able to serve their customers almost effortlessly and around the clock.

This situation has really highlighted the importance of leveraging technology to its optimum capacity. It has also highlighted that self service portals come in handy no matter what the situation is. By using a custom portal that can work with the nuances of your business, will make all the difference.

“Choosing the right solution at right time” and having a customer-centric self-service solution for your customers will ultimately help your business to stay unaffected in this pandemic situation and sustain the momentum of growth in the future.

How to Retain your Customers During COVID -19 Outbreak

Social distancing. Our current reality to stay safe.

However, for businesses, it is the exact opposite. They are concerned about its long-lasting impact that is probably going to be bigger than anticipated.

Currently when you have very few chances of acquiring new business, unless you offer essential products, keeping your existing customers engaged with your business can be your shield.

Here is how you can retain your customers from a distance:

Communication is the key

Although it may sound a bit cliché, it is critical.

Keep your customers updated about your business. Whether you are shut temporarily, adjusting working hours, or the steps you are taking for a safer workplace.
Customers are visiting social media the most. Hence, make sure you’ve updated yours with the latest updates.
If you are operating, it is important to assure them that you and your team are taking proper safety measures. Hence your website should have the necessary information.
While they are sitting at home, there will be temptations for shopping. Offer them to Wishlist products if you have an e-Commerce store. If you are accepting orders then it is important to be transparent about the shipping dates.

Expand the self-service capacities

A couple of days back, I was trying to connect with an airline company, to check the status of my pre-booked flights. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any answer. However, they were able to solve my query through emails.

Now the point here is that the customer service teams are overwhelmed by the customers reaching them out for help. And it is impossible to answer each and every customer. That might also mess up with your customers’ experience. Hence, to provide ease, you can empower your customers with self-service apps equipped with knowledge articles. Along with that, you can also improve communication on your digital channels including live chat, emails, etc. This will help you give a personalized experience and they will be able to solve queries on their own.

Investing in a customer portal will help you empower your customers to solve the majority of their problems on their own. Plus, you can invest your capital into your business continuity plan and make it future-ready.

Make it easy for them

Just like us, everyone’s stress levels might be up with very little patience. Hence, when they are accessing your applications, make sure they do not have to authenticate multiple times or change passwords frequently. This may sound like a small thing, but it will help your customers immediately and you in the long-run.

Assure them that your business values are still the same

Yoga8, a yoga studio in Waco, Texas, announced the online courses to interact and meet their customers and employees. Employees of Hans Wittler’s Automotive Service in Albuquerque, N.M., are picking up vehicles for repair from customers’ homes. Now that is the type of value you need to provide to your customers to really assure them that no matter what, you will be always there. Your company’s values are still the same.

Be prepared

It is important to establish a timeline to evaluate the results from the changes made in your business. This is the time to show that you can do more and go beyond limits when it comes to serving your customers despite government limitations.

The temporary improvements that solve customers’ queries today, may also become permanent improvements for your business model. The key here is to take ownership of the situation quickly in order to get the best from the situation.

Create timely and relevant content

It is important to provide educational and helpful content relevant to your readers. Sharing useful tips for your industry will make sure that you care about your audience.

For example, if you are running a retail shop, you could provide tips to manage finance during such times. The key here is to be creative with content around your industry.

It is about giving back to the community

With the customer-centric attitude, awareness of people’s needs, you can navigate from this crisis and strengthen your relationships with your customers and they will stay with you in the future as well.

The Significance of Customer Self Service in the Digital Age

Customers aren’t the bedrock of your business.

But “Happy Customers” are.

They stay longer with you and bring profitable opportunities.

Your marketing should focus majorly on delighting your customers. It attracts new customers who keep buying your products/services again, and most importantly they spread the word through referrals and social media.

Looking at these marketing statistics, the major expectation of customers from any business is getting a quicker response to their queries and questions.

Hence, fast response rate remains at the helm for curated customer experience.

More about customer self-service

But being able to answer all the queries may seem like a daunting task at times. That’s why formulating a one-stop destination that solves all the queries and problems of the customers is important. It can be in the form of a knowledge-base, FAQs, online discussion forums, or a self-service customer portal.

In fact, 70% of customers now expect a self-service application from a business.

Customers’ expectations

Zendesk published an infographic highlighting the results from a global consumer survey focusing on self-service options. Here are some of them:

75% of survey respondents said self service is a convenient way to address customer service issues
67% of respondents said they preferred self service over speaking to a company representative
91% of respondents said they would use an online knowledge-base if it were available and tailored to their needs

The takeaway?

Customers want frictionless experience in finding their answers.

When you empower customers with the tools and resources to solve issues on their own, they feel liberated. Hosting a Suite CRM customer portal will include key assets you want to provide.

For example,

FAQs: This is the collection of obvious questions and queries to your product or service. They are available in an easily digestible format.

Knowledge-base: A database of useful information, usually part of your CRM that you can present through the portal.

Interactive Voice Recognition Assistant: Customers interact with an automated voice system tailored to answer their queries.

How Self Service provides cost savings?

When a business makes it difficult to find answers, or contact an agent, users may feel unwanted. Whereas, the always-on, 24/7 nature of self-service will enable users to receive support anytime and not just during company’s working hours. This reduces the need for a 24/7 support center.

When you provide the resources, it portrays that you are willing to help by going the extra mile. You should empower your users and not just collect their capital and forget about them. Providing self-service customer support eliminates the need for hiring new agents. And your existing ones can focus on more important tasks. This results in a substantial number of agents requiring training as well. Hence, it adds up to your savings indirectly. A study by Forrester Research and Oracle, says that customer support options can reduce the cost of interaction as much as $11 per call.

Self Service Doesn’t Mean Getting Settled

Assuming that your self-service options can set you free from that role is not the right way to look at this solution. Because outdated self-service support can also ruin your brand reputation.

Keep Up with the Change

When your products or services evolve and grow, your self-service options also need to have that updated information. Whenever your product or solution gets an update, be sure to make the changes in your self-service database as well. Otherwise, the information will grow stale and useless after a certain time.

Moderate your Community Forums

Via community forums, customers can come together and discuss things and solve issues. This platform can be useful for users who have very specific or obscure issues, that they were not able to solve by knowledgebase or FAQs. When you moderate forums, make sure that you remove inappropriate or unrelated submissions, recognize common issues and update databases with the fresh information.

The Bottom Line

Providing an omnichannel and connected experience is important as their expectations are getting higher. The most important aspect is that the customers want the support but they want it without any hurdles.

When you adopt self-service tools like SuiteCRM customer portal make sure you are enabling your customers to solve their issues that too without any efforts. Today, when customer experience is a critical aspect to get your business widespread in the market, it is important to empower your customers with information and resources they will be needing on a daily basis.