Portal: Your Perfect Business Partner

Customers, the one and only boss for any business.

As an owner of a company you will have many responsibilities. But, interacting with customers is crucial. Simultaneously, it is difficult to handle complex situations which involve various roles, obstacles and different processes.

With the help of CRM technology, you can streamline your business operations and customer interaction. CRM software helps you organize your business operations as it stores and provides all necessary customer details on time.

But, when it comes to managing real time queries of customers, CRM needs a solution that can work seamlessly. During such time, WordPress client portal comes to our rescue. It fulfills the gap and easily integrates with your CRM.

So, what is a portal?

Let’s put it simply, it’s a connection between you and your customers. It is a role-based authorization. On the basis of this authorization your customers can have easy access to CRM’s data whenever they want and can reach out to you in just a few simple steps. This even makes it easy for your sales team to provide real time solutions.

Before we begin bombarding you with benefits of client portals, let’s understand challenges you will encounter if you are not using customer portals.

Ticket generation:

Generation of thousands of tickets is one of the most common issues companies face when they are in constant touch with customers.

For example, you own an eCommerce business and your customers have different types of questions which your FAQs can not answer. In such a scenario they reach out to your support staff.

This in turn keeps your support team on their toes round the clock and decreases productivity. In a longer time, such things might affect your business as well.

Spending more time on field, phones and emails:

Providing customer service is the most difficult yet important part of business. At same time it is also very time consuming. Your support team will have to answer thousands of requests over phones and calls to understand clients’ issues and provide solutions. A back and forth of emails is nightmarish to everyone who works in support.

Sometimes they also need to go on the field and get a clear picture on the problem. Your customers might also have to come to your office and all these things consume lots of time.

Security Threat:

Data is the oil of the 21st century and securing this data is very important. Nowadays data leak issues have become very common. So, when your organization is communicating with customers, exchanging data has become very easy. And such incidents do create a doubt in our mind with regards to data security.

Unavailability of curated data:

Sometimes if you want to see details of any particular customer then there are chances you might not get an updated information of your customers.

Just imagine, one of your customer wants to re-order some product. In such a scenario you will need to go through an ERP or CRM software and check if product availability, shipment and many other things.

These problems will help you understand the need of having portals and ways it can help you grow your business.

Now let’s look at the benefits of having portals:

Ease to customer:

Portals give your customers freedom to solve small issues on their own. You can provide information about your products using WordPress portals in the form of FAQs, knowledge base, etc.

Information which you have provided online will help your customers regardless of their location or time and avoids issues of raising support tickets.

Reduce operational costs:

With the help of portals you will be providing all the necessary information on it. As we saw in the above point this will help you decrease support tickets. In long run it will help you reduce burden from the operational team and will help your business grow.

Customer satisfaction:

This is the goal of each and every business. The core focus behind creating customer portals is customer satisfaction. All features that you develop are around an idea of focusing on solving customers’ queries.

The more ease you provide to your customers to solve their issues on their own, the more they will help you to promote your business. Hence, portals will help you nurture your customer relationship, grow your business and help your branding.

Final Words:

Having portals is always a go to solution for businesses to grow and stay connected with their customers in long run. As you know they help you bring more ease and streamline your operations. And which customer will not prefer to be with a business who keeps their customers’ satisfaction first?!

Benefits of Client Portals in Law Firm

Today there is not a single industry which is untouched by technology. New things are coming in tech to bring ease to different industries like tech, automobiles, banking sector, etc.

Nowadays what acts like a bridge in ecommerce and tech is Portal.

A number of companies use portals in some way or another to bring ease to their users or clients. The type of portals you use changes on the basis of the business model of the company.

Here, in this article we will look at the ways CRM customer portal is useful to law firms and why you as a law firm owner should be using it.

There are millions of cases which go on in different courts. Thousands of law firms and their lawyers stand in courts every day and fight for their clients. It is tough competition even among these law firms.

Just like that, there are many law firms even in your competition. In times of such tough competition you need to make sure that you stay ahead in the game. To do so you need to make sure that you are serving your clients properly not only in court but also after the court hours.

Without any further ado let’s understand the benefits of CRM client portal for a law firm:

Open communication:

Lack of communication is usually a common complaint in all industries and quite a lot when it comes to law firms. Here, portals open the way of communication. They are mobile friendly and give facility to your clients to access their case’s documents, they can easily see at which phase their case is, look over the past notes or documents if and when needed.

In this competitive world it is very important to stay in constant touch with your clients with transparency and integrity.

Bring ease to customers:

There are times when your clients and your lawyers might be having tough situations. Your clients might be frustrated with them and vice-versa.

For example: your law firm’s client calls up your lawyer multiple times but due to some reasons they are not able to receive it. The angry client calls up at your law firm and after going through multiple channels of calls they are still not able to get their lawyer on call.

In such scenarios, there are chances of them getting extremely annoyed, you lose their trust and this may result in you losing your client. During such times portals come to your help. Instead of going through different mediums to access their documents your clients just need to login and easily access them anywhere and anytime.

Organize everything:

Being a law firm, you have to deal with thousands of cases every day. Sometimes it can be chaotic and difficult to manage clients and cases. Here, a portal can help you organize the data of your clients. It becomes easy to search for the documents and understand what they need.

From the client side also, a portal like this works as an excellent repository of legal documents, patents, trademarks etc. Keeping this data in the portals ensures security.

Overcome technical issues:

A portal works as an excellent communicator and mediator. You won’t be having issues with data loss during transmission. Many times, we do suffer from the problem of our important messages going into spam. And as a lawyer such kinds of mistakes are not acceptable as you would be dealing with the important documents every day.

But, with portals this won’t be an issue. You can easily be assured that your messages or important emails will not go into spam. Not only spam but being a lawyer, your documents will be larger in size. In such scenarios too, a portal will help you. There are no limits in size while sending large size documents to you clients. Additionally, there is no issue of even wondering if the client has got your documents or not because portals allow you to see when the client opens your messages.

Collaboration:

Many times, you might need to collaborate with other counselors and or witnesses. This task becomes easy with the help of portals as they allow to store all the documents at the central location and easily access things from there. Plus you can allow access to concerned parties and withdraw it when the work is done.

Final Words:

Being a law firm, having a client portal is all you need. It helps in making tasks easy for your lawyers, clients and also helps you in keeping up the reputation of your law firm.

How to Manage 360° Ticketing from Portals

As any support staff member knows, customers raise support tickets for various queries. Many times, those queries are repetitive. This is where efficient ticket management comes into the picture. There are a number of ways to handle it. But the easiest way to handle it is to have a smart ticket management feature built into the customer portal.

Let’s explore the feature that is built into PowerApps’ Customer Self-Service portal.

Here’s how to manage 360° ticketing from the PowerApps portal:

Steps:

Step 1: Your portal users can login using their portal user credentials in PowerApps Portal.

Step 2: From the Navigation Menu, they need to navigate to My Support. The Case list view will open from where they can see their cases.

Users will search for a problem solution before generating any case, if they don’t find one, they will add a new case, edit existing case or remove case.

Step 3: To create a new case, they can click on Open a New Case.

User will also get a solution as a suggestion while typing the case title.

Similarly, if you opt for a third party solution over the default portal, you can get a robust ticketing management solution.

Let’s look at the steps of how to manage the same in the Dynamics 365 WordPress customer portal:

Step 1: Your portal users can login with their portal user credentials in Customer Portal.

Step 2: They need to navigate to the case module where they will be able to see the list of records of that module. They can search a record from the list view, delete it or update it.

They can also filter the existing contacts based on account and contact selection. It will allow them to filter and get details of specific child contacts. These hierarchy settings will be based on the hierarchy that is set by admin on the Dynamics CRM side. So the parent roles will be able to see the cases of their child roles.

Step 3: Your users can add a new record to that module. To add a new record, they need to click on the Add Case button from the list view or from the navigation menu by clicking on the Add button.

– This Customer Portal provides Case Deflection. This feature will help portal users to get probable solutions before generating any case.

– When a portal user faces any queries or issues, they will be able to navigate to Add Case option.

– Once they create a new case from the portal, it will get reflected in Dynamics CRM.

Step 3: By clicking on the View button from the List View, your users can view the details of a case. They can edit that case or add notes for particular cases from the detail view.

The purpose of tickets is to solve certain problems that a user is facing. But it should also be easy to do for the support staff. With features like case deflection, they can handle the issues that are new or unique instead of spending all their time on queries that already have a ready made solution. Whether you go with the default option or a third party portal solution, make sure to get one with a robust ticket management feature.

How to Manage Configuration of Advanced Settings for Customer Portal

Not all third party portal solutions for Dynamics CRM are made the same. At the end of the day, their functionality and ease of use as well as features decide which one to use. CRMJetty’s Dynamics 365 WordPress Customer Portal has some particularly neat features. On top of that, it is simple to configure and use, for both the admin users and the end users. Let’s walk through the steps to configure advanced settings in their customer portal.

– Once the activation is successfully completed, navigate to the CRMJetty tile to access and setup various configuration for portal i.e. General Settings, Email Settings, Portal Layouts, Language Configuration and Roles.

– For unified interface, navigate to Dynamics 365 – Custom and from the bottom menu select CRMJetty.

Upgrade Data:

– To manage upgrades, we have upgraded a specific flow wherein if you have any older version of Customer Portal, then the Upgrade Data button will activate.

For upgrading data, navigate to ‘CRMJetty -> General Configuration and click on Upgrade Data button.

– By upgrading data, you can make your portal compatible with the latest version of the portal.

Setting General Accessibility for Portal Users:

– For general settings, navigate to CRMJetty from the menu.

– Mention the URL of your WordPress Account (i.e. Portal URL) which will be sent along with the credentials mail and click on the Save button.

– Use Dropdown Caching to set up values of lookup fields (Related to other modules). Values displayed in lookup fields will remain old until it surpasses the time set here.

– By enabling the Change Role of Hierarchy, you can change the role of hierarchy i.e. if the role of any contact is updated or removed, it will be applied to the whole child hierarchy.

– By enabling the Change Account of Hierarchy, you can change the account of hierarchy i.e. if an account of any contact is updated or removed, it will be applied to the whole child hierarchy. If it is unticked, and the account is updated then it will work as a separate entity from the hierarchy.

Setting Email Template:

– Admin can create any email template like Signup and Forgot Password template from CRM.

– From templates, the user gets the option to create New template and also select template type.

– Select email template type as Contact and create an email template filling the necessary details as per your requirement.

Note: Users can also assign default “Email templates” for various actions performed.

– For assigning the default email template navigate to CRMJetty -> Email Settings.

– Select appropriate email template and Save email settings.

Assign User Role:

– To manage the user roles, navigate to Settings -> Security -> Users.

– Now select the users whose roles are to be managed and click on Manage Roles. This will open up a pop up to select roles.

– To access CRMJetty product entities assign CRMJetty Customer Portal role to selected users.

Note: System Administrator will also be able to access CRMJetty Product Entities.

CRMJetty’s customer portal is thus one of the easiest one to navigate in the market. The portal market is huge, but you have to find one that fits your workflow, your customers and your staff.

Retail Portal: The Point of Sale Software

This article is for business owners who have brick and mortar shops. You have already taken a big step opening a physical shop in a time where the ecommerce environment is dominant. You understand the value of face-to-face interaction with your customers. This helps you maintain a much more personal relationship with them.

The place where you interact with your customers the most is your point-of-sale station.

You can choose the hardware that is most convenient for you. It can be based on the number of devices/machines you need and where you want to place them. You can choose between a tablet and a computer/laptop. This hardware then defines certain aspects of how the software will function/or the interaction agent of the software: mouse or touch.

Now let’s look into a software that can help you better your POS station interaction: a retail portal that is a customer portal solution. Not only does it enhance your customer relationship, but such a portal can also provide greater visibility in multiple aspects like employee productivity, vendor management, customer communication, product sales, and whatnot.

In addition to the retail portal software, the POS system will have certain hardware modules to connect with like payment tools and a bill-printing device. But the foundation of this retail portal is your Dynamics CRM and your inventory management.

So let’s look at what all you can manage with a retail portal and how it can grow your business substantially:

– Payment Integration

– Customer Directory (for repeat customers)

– Employee Management

– Informative Dashboard

– Invoice Management

– Vendor Management

1. Payment Options

Payments are no longer limited to magstripe or EMV chip cards. Near-Field Communication or NFC technology in phones and smartwatches has enabled us to carry around virtual cards and money in our regular devices. Therefore, your POS system will require connections with NFC enabled payment terminals.

Hardware aside, the retail portal software will be able to create invoices and have your accounting specifics integrated. It will be able to accept payments via multiple payment gateways. Another useful function that it can have is coupons and promotions. You can apply a coupon code for discounts on the bills during discount campaigns.

2. Customer Directory

With a CRM customer portal in the form of a retail portal, you can run a membership program for your customers. Members can get special benefits like priority supply and first access to sales, point collection credit and longer exchange and return periods. With a customer directory, you can also note down their frequent purchases, and product specifications. You can notify them once a product they want is back in stock. And the use cases are countless.

If you don’t want to have a membership program, you can use a customer directory for your walk-in customers as well. This can help you build future email campaigns and ad campaigns that can help you understand your customers and their needs. Targeted marketing begins when you know whom to target.

3. Employee Management

The retail portal can have an integrated employee management system. This way it can only unlock for employees. These systems can work as employee check-in, check out systems too. Another thing that you can track is, which employee was on duty when each item was sold. This makes it easier to check employee performance.

You can also assign role-based access to this portal to your employees. Everyone can have access to invoice generation, catalog management, inventory view access and modification rights to the customer directory. Whereas managerial employees can have rights to approve leaves, arrange shifts for other employees and create sales reports.

4. Informative Dashboard

Since each employee has their own account, they can also have a personal dashboard for quick information. This dashboard will have details like their shift schedule, leaves, working hours, break hours, etc. Along with this, it will also have access to the customer directory and the inventory.

The inventory module on the dashboard lets them quickly check if a product is running low or if a perishable product is nearing its expiration date. The dashboard also has details like the products they have sold, the discount coupons they have offered and the invoices they have made.

5. Invoice Management

With such an advanced system, it will be convenient to do away with paper invoices too. You can use the customer directory to email/SMS invoices directly to them and save a copy in their accounts on your CRM. Since this is a CRM customer portal, you can also give customers their own credentials, so they can see their purchase history and invoices.

While creating an invoice, the retail portal can show complementary items to the one that a customer is buying. This can help the employee at the desk to upsell or cross-sell items.

6. Vendor Management

The retail portal can also act as a great tool for vendor management. When you see a dip in the stock of a certain product, you can simply send an alert to the vendor to restock your inventory. With the POS system being your connection with the purchases, you can also send sales reports to your vendors to share how their products are doing in the market. Such real-time and periodical feedback can help vendors make better decisions in terms of which store needs what amount of products and if they need to make any changes in their products.

Point-of-sale customer portal solutions go beyond writing up a bill now. It can aid you to build a better relationship with your customer and can make your busiest day easier to handle. Your employees will not call in sick for no reason and your customers will come back.

Elevate your store point-of-sale system from just a screen to your favorite employee with the integration of a retail version Dynamics 365 portal.

Education Portal: The Logistics of Learning and Teaching Made Easy

Formal education teaches many things. It is essential that those things provide quality value to our lives. The logistical side of formal education is messy, to say the least. Good teaching faculty is difficult to come by and therefore schools are often understaffed. Students are not always given much choice about certain classes or class hours. Apart from this, they have no intimation of their attendance level and this often impacts their graduation. The institutionalization of formal education becomes too negatively hierarchical rather than focusing on what is important, which is the growth of young minds.

As academic professionals, one should treat education as a constant exchange. We believe that this exchange should be seamless. Technology comes into play here. There is a neat solution that large educational institutions or smaller schools can use. It is a custom web portal. Web portal solutions are for everyone. You have to get a custom portal development company to design one for you. Before you do that, let’s dive deeper and look at all the possibilities of using an education portal.

First, the basics: You must already maintain a database of all your students, admin staff and teaching faculty. If you manage this database in a CRM, these components can be interconnected. The right people can have the right access. The level of access will depend on whether they are a member of the administrative staff, teaching faculty or a student. Let’s break it down, to see what each level of access would enable what functions:

Admin level:

If you are an admin staff member, the education portal can streamline and aid your work to a great degree. As the principal of a school/college, you can see all the operations of your school.

Here’s how:

With your data and resources being managed online, redundant paper-work gets eliminated.
Personnel management streamlines with faculties managing their schedules, classes, and grading work using Education portal.
You get an overview of the institute’s financial status with the fees & receipt management system.

Now, it may not be essential to monitor each student for you, but you’d easily be able to have an overview of the highest scoring students, or ones who are in the running for school-wide various competitions, or the topics of higher-level papers they are writing. You would also be able to look at how the teaching staff is doing in course completion, or in conducting extra-curricular activities; how they are doing their own research work or handling grading.

General Admin members can easily handle records of students and teaching faculty. They can assign classrooms for lectures, help students sign up for courses, ready a consolidated grade report for each student, arrange examination schedules, etc.

Admin Level benefits of Education Portal:

Once an education portal is set up, it drastically cuts down on redundant tasks.

Lecture rooms won’t be double-booked.

Professors would not have a conflicting timetable, and neither would students.
They can also manage the fee details of each student so that the portal alerts the students and their parents when the fee is due.

Teaching Faculty:

A teacher’s responsibilities are not limited to merely teaching four classes a week. It is much more than that. A teacher can accomplish their tasks with relatively more ease with the help of an education web portal.

Here’s how:

As a teacher, you can have all your classes at hand.

At the beginning of a semester/year, when students have to register for courses, you would be able to see as students sign up for your course. Once that is decided, you can feed in details of each course and breakdown of each class. This way a course plan is set and you can keep a track of it throughout the semester.

You can easily set assignments for students, grade them, mark daily attendance, accept medical leave requests from students and even request leaves for yourselves that the admin staff can approve.

As a teacher, you can also keep a track of each of your student’s progress based on class tests, exams, and attendance records.

If you need to take any extra session, you can add sessions to the portal which will notify your students that they have an extra class. The portal will automatically let you book a slot only when none of your students have another class.

You can see the calculation of students’ attendance percentage in your class, their grade percentage, etc. once the metrics are set. Then each faculty member can send in the grade report for their course so that the admin staff can create consolidated reports for each student that would have all of their courses and extracurricular.

Student level:

Almost all the modules that are available to students are with ‘view only’ access. Basically, this portal provides them with an overview of how they are doing during a particular academic year.

Here’s what they’ll be able to view/do:

All the courses they are taking, and their timetable.

All the grades; this helps in case they are lagging behind in one test. They can improve their overall graph, by working for the next tests.

Students can use this portal to submit medical leave requests along with a medical certificate. The respective faculty member can approve it for their class and grant them the required attendance.

They would be able to see their overall attendance, as well as a breakdown of each class.
Students can submit their paper for rechecking when they get grades for any course. If the professor rechecks it, they can change the grade and the student can see the replaced grade. The change would reflect in the final overall/average grade too.
After each semester, when the student’s entire grade is ready, they can see it and even print it. It would automatically include the school’s logo and important details like the affiliated board.

A school or college is a very complicated structure with plenty of variables. It shapes the lives of students and the careers of anyone who is interested in the way education functions, from professors to admin staff. Running a school is no mean feat. With more than hundreds of students taking a variation of over 20 courses each, it can be challenging to manage, especially along with managing what professor teaches what course and which student needs to get extra credits to graduate.

An education portal aims to streamline that complex workflow. Since a school would require an enterprise-level solution so that it can expand when it needs to, you can use a Dynamics 365 Portal solution that helps you address your pain points and helps you in your operations.

A portal development company can configure this Dynamics 365 portal tailored to specific needs. This will help you streamline your school or college operations.

How to Configure Field Level Access Control With Studio Builder for External Users

Not everything in a CRM is a part of a portal. The portal users need not get access to all of it. For this, you need to establish field level access control to manage the nuances of this access.

Let’s talk a look at how to do that with the Dynamics CRM Power Apps portal:

Dynamics CRM Power Apps portal does not provide an option for field level access control. It has to be managed by creating a new entity form and adding the fields that you want in CRM. Then the relationship between portal side and CRM side entity forms has to be managed via mapping.

Note: When you use any CRM entity form in the web page, all fields & sub grids which are included in the CRM entity form will be displayed on the portal side.

Steps to create Web Page & add form into web page:

Step 1: Go to PowerApps -> Click on Apps.

Step 2: Select more commands (…) for the portal and click on Edit. It will open the Power Apps Portal Studio to edit the content and components of the portal.

Step 3: Click on New Page -> Blank layout.

Step 4: Select Components from the toolbelt on the left side of the screen, double click on Form to add form on the web page.

Step 5: From the form component, fill up Form Name, select Entity, select Form Layout. Form Layout is the same as Dynamics CRM Entity Forms.

You can customize forms in Dynamics CRM & it will reflect on the portal side.

Dynamics CRM Customer Portal Field Level Access Control:

An easier way to enable field level access on the user side would be via a quick drag and drop function. This eliminates confusion, and there is a clarity about the layout. It can also be reused since there is only the task of

dragging away fields.

Set Portal Layout steps:

Customer portal provides the feature to manage Dynamics CRM module’s accessibility & field accessibility for their WordPress portal users. You can decide which module’s access should be provided to which customer by creating a role and assigning modules or fields to that role.

To let your customers avail Dynamics CRM modules from your WordPress portal, it is mandatory to set Portal Layouts for each accessible module. Customer Portal plug-in provides facility to set Portal Layouts for Dynamics CRM modules.

Step 1: To create a role in CRM, Click on Sales -> CRMJetty tile.

For Unified Interface from bottom left click on Sales -> CRMJetty

Step 2: To set Portal layouts, click on the Portal Layouts option. This will open up the Portal Layout Setting page.

Step 3: Select a role from the Select Roles dropdown menu and select your desired Module for layout setting.

Step 4: Set layouts for Edit view, Detail view, and List view. Drag and drop fields from the left column to the right. After populating the layout, click on the Save button to save the layout.

Step 5: You can also set a Detail view layout for the reference module. A check box will appear on selecting a module that has a reference module associated with it. Check the box to set Detail view layout for reference modules.

And just like that, you can manage the whole flow in three simple steps. Depending on the complexity you prefer, you can opt for the default option, or the third party portal.

How to Assign Role Based Access for Dynamics 365 Contact Entity

As an enterprise organization, you have a number of people who have access to your CRM. But that doesn’t mean all of them have to have equal access. For this you need to use a portal with role based access.

With this, you can set entity access permission for different sets of user groups so that each group gets the entity that they need, without you having to share the data with everyone. If you are using Dynamics’ PowerApps portal, here are the step-by-step instructions to enable the role based access for the Contact entity:

Power Apps portal Role Based Accessibility for Dynamics 365 contact entity
Steps to create web roles:

Step 1: Open PowerApps, then from Apps open Dynamics 365 Portal management app.

Step 1: In Dynamics 365 Go to Sales -> Portal

Step 2: Go to Portal -> Web Roles -> Click on New

Step 3: Enter a Name & fill up other details. Then click on Save.

Steps to assign roles to portal users:

Step 1: Open PowerApps, then from Apps open Dynamics 365 Portal management app.

Step 1: In Dynamics 365, go to Sales -> Portal

Step 2: Go to Portal -> Contact, open the user account for which you want to assign a role.

Step 3: Click on Related -> Web Roles

Step 4: Click on Add Existing Web Role, select roles which you want to assign to portal users then click on Add.

The role based accessibility in the default portal has multiple layers and it can become cumbersome to navigate the complex set of permissions.

However, if you want to go with a third party solution, you can opt for the Dynamics 365 Customer Portal for WordPress. Compared to the default solution, the third party solution is simpler to navigate and the hierarchy is easier to understand. You don’t need to take multiple steps and instead you can focus on just a few steps and get the desired results.

Dynamics 365 Customer Portal for WordPress Role management :
Steps to create web roles:

You can create Roles and assign accessible modules to that role, then follow the steps given below:

Step 1: To create a role in CRM Click on Sales -> CRMJetty tile.

For Unified Interface, click on Sales -> CRMJetty from bottom left.

Step 2: Click on Roles. There will be a Default role already existing along with default layout; you can create a new role by clicking on the New button. This will open up a page to add roles.

Step 3: Fill role details like Role name, Is Active, Description and Accessible Modules. Click Save to create the role.

To disable a module, select Disable option from the status dropdown. To provide dynamic access rights of Create, Edit or Delete check the boxes against the respective module.

Note: By default, Default groups will be assigned to a newly created contact record.

Note: Access rights of the default user group cannot be changed.

Step 4: You can also define advance configurations for different user groups for the features like case deflection and calendar accessibility.

While creating cases from the portal, Case deflection feature helps your customers find probable solutions. If no relevant solutions are found, then the customer can proceed by adding a new case.
It will search for a solution for the enabled Case Deflection subject (which belongs to articles or Knowledge articles categories of CRM). So, on enabling Case deflection option, you will be setting entities and respective categories to be searched from while the portal user looks for a solution.

Note: Case Deflection will only work if Articles or Knowledge Articles module is enabled and the Category is selected.

For adding articles either for article entity or knowledge article entity navigate to the role page and click on the Add Article button.

Add the existing article to this user group and it will get visible on the portal side. Note: For adding data from article entity, you need to switch to classic interface.

You can also enable calendar for specific user groups. Note: Calendar can only be enabled if Phone Calls or Appointments module is enabled.
Steps to assign roles to portal users:

Step 1: In Dynamics 365 Go to Sales -> Contact

Step 2: Open portal user account (contact) for which you want to assign a role. There will be a field called Role Code you can change/assign a role form that field.

The portal you choose depends on your workflow. There are steps for two options here to help you choose between the complexity you want to deal with while enabling the feature you need.

Benefits of Using Dynamics 365 Portal

The general dislike towards haggling with customer support and regulatory agencies is well-known. As such, who likes overwhelmingly endless forms, long wait times, and queues for fulfilling their demands? If you think that these processes are frustrating just for the customers, you might be wrong. The employees who need to manage the flow of the application and process them well are even more flustered.

Thanks to digital transformation and advancements in cloud technology, you can digitalize the customer support process. And portals make it even better. You can connect with your customers and manage their data by having control over it. It makes customers happier and enables agencies to work with better efficiency.

They want a solution that is efficient, easy to use and. That’s where Dynamics CRM Portal comes in. It makes the task of managing documents, cases, schedules, accounts as well as order sheets absolutely seamless! Also, it just doesn’t process your database but also keeps all the records in detail.

Let’s check out some of the features of the Dynamics CRM Portal and its benefits:

Easily Configurable & User-Friendly:

DynamicsCRM Customer Portal intends to extend the basic functionality of MS Dynamics CRM and make it all-inclusive. Apart from the compact layouts, there are organized and stacked elements on the dashboard. With the help of it, users can navigate the portal seamlessly.

Now, let’s talk about the configuration part. This portal plugin can be deployed rapidly. They are ready to use and will start running in a matter of a few minutes. As an Admin, you just need to sign into the system and follow the configuration steps.

Solve Problems Easily:

As a business owner, your biggest goal should be to eliminate the gap between the problem of your customers and fixing them. And you would want this process to be hassle-free. With the help of Dynamics CRM Customer Portal’s ticketing system, you can not only process your database but also keep all the records in detail.

One of the major benefits of this portal’s ticketing system is that it enables CRM users to communicate with customers without sending them long emails or haggling with them over calls. You would also be able to manage cases, documents, schedules and accounts with utmost ease and save a lot of time.

Dashboard with Power BI integration:

The Dynamics Portal dashboard can fetch data from Power BI which helps significantly because you can get customer insights directly on the dashboard. It has an intuitive user interface and offers seamless navigation. These insights help you get quick insights which in turn help you take action based on them. Power BI integration elevates the default portal’s dashboard and you can make use of this for better productivity.

Sharepoint Integration for Document Management:

Sharepoint integration makes it much easier for you to share documents internally with your employees directly from the Dynamics CRM portal. It helps you collaborate seamlessly across the board. Collaboration on such native level in the portal enhances your workflow.

Keep Your Data Safe:

If you have a business, you must understand the importance of data security. And here, we are talking about your customer data. The best part about this portal is that the data stays in your Dynamics CRM and gets processed there itself. So, there are no data leaks or breaches.

Final Thoughts…

It’s time to get over the traditional help desks and call centers. With all the above-mentioned benefits and many more, this Portal plugin is sure to make you and your customers smile. Your portal should enable you not restrict you.

7 Benefits of Online Knowledge Portal

Content is ever-evolving and here to stay.

We are surrounded by it and constantly consume it in some or the other form.

It is important for companies like you to understand their customers and provide important information about your products, services or the industry upfront.

Today customers want to have full knowledge of your products before they invest. Also, they want to find out answers on their own. They don’t want to interact with your customer support team through different mediums unless and until it’s something big.

In such situations, an online knowledge portal is your answer. It becomes your visitors’ go-to medium to find answers and understand your product/service. Besides that, there many other benefits of integrating an online knowledge portal to your website.

So, let’s look at some other benefits of having an online knowledge sharing portal:

Decrease in the number of support tickets:

Having a knowledge portal will help you maintain all the necessary information about your products in one place. This makes it easy for your customers to know your products in-depth without having to make efforts to put together scattered information from all over the web.

Thus, if your customers make an informed decision, this will directly reduce the generation of support tickets. Even your employees will have more time for research, improving conversion rates, and providing premium support to customers who might have major issues.

Marketing resources:

Knowledge portals make pitching your products/services easy for your marketing as well as the sales department. Not only that but you can also run the marketing campaigns inside the software to upsell or cross-sell your products. This will be a more targeted approach with better conversion rates than anything you will achieve from normal platforms. The reason being these customers already trust your brand and are willing to invest more in you and your products. You can also use this channel to notify your customers about any discount offers.

Knowledge portal makes it easy for your customers to come online, check the new offers or coupons if any are available on your products. These things make it easy for you to provide the best of your services in a very cost-effective manner.

Provide support anytime & anywhere:

As a company, many a time you will need to update your product manuals, documents, terms, and conditions, etc.

Let’s say if you roll out any feature in your product then you will need to make the necessary changes in your user manual as well. This is when having a knowledge portal becomes a boon. With the help of it, you can easily make necessary changes in the manual or the documents and simply upload it. With that, you can just set up a notification that alerts your portal users about the new feature and redirects them to the updated document. And if they have any questions, they can always type in their query, look for answers, or submit a support ticket.

This way, you can easily be there for your customers anytime and anywhere.

Benefits of Cloud Based Solution:

Developing these portals and then storing huge amounts of data on a server can turn out to be a costly affair. This is why a cloud-based portal solution can be a cleverer as well as a cost-effective choice here. How? Because for such a solution, you pay as per the usage of space. No extra headache of setting up a server, daily maintenance cost, etc. This way you can lower down the cost of customer support while providing them with high-quality 24*7 support on the go.

Security:

Portals help your customers to securely access CRM data based on the accessibility provided to them from the backend. Customers will be given credentials using which they can securely login and have access to your portal.

As a company you will be having thousands of users’ data, authorized documents, etc. and to keep this data secure is your responsibility. To keep this data secure and its sharing more secure, you need to make sure that you are using the latest encryption techniques.

Using the latest techniques ensures that data is secured, away from the reach of hackers or unauthorized persons.

Integration with AI:

There is no field today which Artificial Intelligence (AI) has not touched. Be it healthcare, automobiles, banking, or our day-to-day lives. It is present everywhere and is rapidly becoming part of our lives.

In fact, many companies have started using AI to provide better customer service.

How?

By integrating Artificial Intelligence with their knowledge or web portals.

Properly crafted customer journey, conversational AI, and chatbots, by having these three things in your knowledge portal, you can provide exceptional customer service in different time zones 24*7*365 days. This means no more waiting for days for a call back or a reply for customers and good word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

Additionally, it helps your sales and support team. The benefits of AI are beyond our imagination regardless of its application or industry.

Increased customer satisfaction:

Online knowledge portals help you be there for your customers when they need you the most. This directly affects their opinion about your organization and can make them your promoters too, if all went well. This lessens the burden of your support team whilst keeping your customers happy and in your sales funnel.

And we all know what’s the result of happy customers; business and revenue growth.

Final words:

Knowledge sharing portals are here to disrupt the customer support and service industry especially with the proper application of Artificial Intelligence. Your customers are evolving and so are their needs. To keep up, businesses need to adapt the new, effortless, and quicker ways to interact with their customers.

If you don’t want to go for a pre-defined portal solution, you can always get in touch with a custom portal solution provider for your company. The advantage of having a custom portal is that you can add features according to your requirements and your business logic.