Top Customer Service Challenges In 2020 and One Solution

Handling customers is an extremely difficult task. Every customer has different requirements or issues and dealing with these becomes difficult for your staff.

But, in the competitive world of business, your customer service speaks louder. It is one of the factors which defines whether your business will flourish or not.

There is constant pressure to innovate and innovation is not easy. So while you put efforts there, you also have to put efforts in customer service. That can be the differentiator between you and your competitors.

One of the reasons that a company loses customers is because they only focus on unhappy customers. Now of course, that is easy to do. They are upset with you and they are demanding your attention. This makes it difficult to focus on and cater to satisfied and happy customers.

Bad customer service will bring your reputation down, while good may go unnoticed. This is why you have to be proactive with how you treat them. You need to take care of things like time taken by the customer service team to react or help your customers or how they behave and talk with your customers.

This will of course, make it expensive. There is no guarantee of return on investment. You may think that hiring more people to combat that is the answer, anyone can do that. You need a new solution, one that can help you stand out from the crowd. A neat portal solution like Salesforce WordPress portal will help, but First, let’s look at the challenges that you are likely to face in 2020 to determine how you can use the portal:

Delay in Responding:

When customers are stuck with a problem, it is very likely for them to become impatient and expect quick responses. They don’t care if the problem occurred because of them, technical issues or anything else. They just need a solution to the problem.

Hence, you need to make sure that your customer service responds faster and tries to resolve their issues as soon as possible.If your customer service is not able to solve the issue in the first trial, that is fine. But, responding to your clients immediately is key.

Payment Issues:

Unpaid invoices or payment issues are common when you run a company.

You cannot tell your customer service team to track payments or pending payments, etc. constantly. This will result in you eventually losing lots of time for your customer service.

In a business having such issues is very common and you will need to cope with these things.

Unhappy Customers:

Your aim as a company is to make a top-notch product and make sure that it is liked by your customers. Problems are common and sometimes unavoidable. But, these things will annoy your customers. They will try to get to your customer service team and complain about it.

Thanks to social media platforms, customers raise their concerns and issues on these platforms. They go online and complain about the pathetic service your company gives. But, it completely depends on you and your team how well they handle such situations and maintain the company’s reputation.

Disney provides the best customer service. They use the technique known as H.E.A.R.D technique i.e. Hear, Empathize, Apologize, Resolve, Diagnose.

This will tell your support staff the exact things they have to do when they are working with your clients.

While working with angry customers, you need to make sure that you are listening to them. You need to make them realize that you truly care about their issues and you want to help them resolve it.

Video Chat:

When people are angry it is very likely that they will prefer talking to people rather than chatbots. They prefer having someone live in front of them who can listen to them, understand their problem and help them resolve it.

It would be perfect if you can use technology and have live video chat option for your customers. They will be happy to talk to someone who is calm and quickly helps resolve their issue.

It’s the era of technology and using it to the full capacity is the best solution. You can use a variety of online customer portals which can solve your issues of customer service.

Yes! You heard it right.

Portals let your customers easily play around and know your products. They can solve the issues on their own with a knowledge base. They can even easily talk with your customer service team from the portal itself and resolve issues.

There are various portals available in the market which can help you provide great customer service. You can go for like Salesforce online customer portal, SugarCRM customer portal, WordPress customer portal, Dynamics customer portal, etc.

Hold Tunes are Out of Style: Upgrade with a Customer Portal

When you run an enterprise company, you tend to focus on big things. How many customers you have, how much revenue you are generating, how many employees you have etc.

It doesn’t affect your bottom line if you lose a few customers sometimes. Moreover, you are likely to gain new ones over time.

However, the way you think about the power customers have, has changed in the last couple of years. While companies that don’t want to pay attention to the grievances that customers face, don’t. But everyone knows that they are only a few too many social media complaints away from losing customers.

When cabs don’t arrive on time, people tweet at the company’s account. When other potential customers see that tweet, they will avoid using that cab the next time they need to make it to their appointment.

Addressing the issues that customers face on social media and otherwise is important now. You can easily use this platform to direct them to the support portal and guide them to help themselves. If their issue is not something that they can fix, you can guide them to raise a ticket in your customer portal.

The reason people complain on social media platforms is: a. Because they want everyone else to be aware of the company that wronged them and b. Because sometimes it can be difficult to raise a ticket on the company’s website. If they find how to do it, then perhaps there is no option for the issue they are facing. It can get quite ambiguous.

This is where your ideal CRM customer portal comes in. Not only will it make for a great space for your customers to reach out to you, it will also make it easier on your support staff. At the end of the day, it’s a win-win for you.

Let’s explore what this portal can do that makes it such an obvious thing to have:

Financial benefits:

As an enterprise company, you are always spending a lot. But do you have to spend a lot in this case? Not particularly. The portal can do a number of tasks that support staff can, but better because it can do this 24*7*365! The portal works as a filter for the cases that actually need human interaction.

If your customer simply wanted to exchange a product, 2 buttons can do that task instead of ten-minute long conversation with someone from support. The resources you employ will be able to make better use of their time.

Avoiding repetitive inquiry:

Imagine you have an ecommerce store that sells electronic appliances. The number of questions your support staff has to fill about each item, and the difference in each variant and the technology behind it is enormous. But you have a knowledge base on the portal that explains each variant, the technology and has a buying guide for each product. This helps the customers make an informed decision, without engaging with your staff. Your customer feels taken care of even though you were only a passive participant through their decision making journey.

No hold tune:

Everyone remembers the scene from the TV show FRIENDS where Phoebe is on hold with customer support for hours. While it is funny in the show, if your customer has to go through that, they are ditching your product. You have competitors, and if they don’t make your customers wait on the phone, they will win the race.

Data management:

Large enterprises tend to have a lot of dirty data. Dirty data means duplicate data, and old data. Of course, you wouldn’t know if your customer has changed their address when they add a new one. A customer portal gives them the right to manipulate their own details. They can modify addresses, contact details, and even preferences. These changes directly reflect in your CRM and you can have a clean, well-managed system in place, with almost no effort from your side!

What are the options you have as an enterprise to get such a portal in place? You will have a large customer base, and you will need to take care of security. You also need a more robust solution that looks and feels sleek to use. Keeping this in mind, you can go for a Dynamics CRM customer portal, leveraging the efficiency of Dynamics 365.

We understand that each business has a unique requirement, and we offer customization on our portal solutions. Get in touch with us here, for a walkthrough of the product and your custom requirements.

Freelancing as a Content Creator Can be Easier with a Customer Portal

If you are a content creator working as a freelancer, you truly know the struggle of growing your career. If you are even slightly good, your inbox does not sleep. Your phone is always going off and the notifications from multiple messaging apps are off the charts. At some point, you must’ve taken client calls at 10 in the night explaining exactly which email thread has the document they are looking for.

The more clients you have, the more challenging it is to manage this communication. Technology can save the day though. You can opt for a project management portal. If you are a savvy person, you are sure to have a website to show your work and one that helps potential clients reach out to you.

If you currently communicate via email, you might be using several other software for the actual work, from a document collaboration software to a file sharing one. On top of this, you also need a niche contract management software, to streamline the legalities with your clients.

With a client portal, you can have it all in one place making it much better for you and your clients. Let’s see how:

Your brand image:

In a creative field like content creation, a cohesive brand image is important. This means your client portal should reflect your website. If your website and the portal have the same design language, it helps the client navigate it. They know what to expect from each button or swipe and this can lead to a smoother experience. On top of that, when you provide a collaboration interface, it looks more professional. You gain a much needed edge in the competitive freelancing market.

Smoother communication:

A client portal can streamline all your communication with each client. This eliminates the risk of miscommunication. All the work related discussions with them are in one place for them and you to refer. Since this portal can have design mock-ups, content documents, contracts, etc. all in one place it adds convenience to collaboration.

Work-life balance:

A traditional concept of 9 to 5 does not exist for a freelancer. So work and life can very easily be caught up in each other. But since you are juggling more than one specific project at a time, you need a work life balance even more. You can set your calendar on the portal so that your clients know when they can get in touch with you for a call or a meeting. They can also know if there are certain days when you are not working so that there is no conflict regarding your unavailability.

Technological comfort:

No matter the work these days, technology comes into the picture one way or the other. But not all software is created equal and not everyone knows how to use it. But that shouldn’t hinder the workflow. A project management portal easily becomes a single place where your client gets everything they need from you, from managing a contract, signing up for additional services after the initial one, etc. Because the tool is easy to use and provides hassle-free experience, your client is likely to come back.

Future options:

If you begin working as a graphic designer but in the future, you want to expand by getting into content writing, a project management portal would give you a head start. Just like you can add modules to your website, you can add modules to your portal. And when your client base expands, this portal is ready for it.

Secure access:

Since a portal is a gateway, it needs to have login credentials. A secure portal protects the client’s sensitive data and it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. A client will always trust you more if you make sure to provide them with a secure, reliable collaboration environment, and that definitely includes the technology you use to do the work.

A client portal is about providing top-notch customer service. And being a freelancer does not mean you can compromise on it. Maintain your quality of work, but also elevate how you interact with your clients and the ease you provide with a client portal.

We make customer portals in various CRM-CMS combinations and we can customize a freelancing portal for your use case. To talk about the nuances of your needs, drop a comment here and we will get back to you. You can also get in touch with us here.

3 Custom Features in SuiteCRM Portal for Better Customer Service

SuiteCRM is a customization boon. You get to set up your CRM as you want it. This includes things that your business flow needs.

Apart from these customizations, if you want a way to connect with your customers, adding a SuiteCRM WordPress customer portal can do the trick. However, it can often get overwhelming to know what features are must-haves in the portal and how much flexibility you need to manipulate those features easily. Some features are classic must-haves and others you build on top of the ones that SuiteCRM provides. Let’s take a look.

Custom relationship

SuiteCRM provides two kinds of relationships. One is one-to-one and the other one is the one-to-many relationship. If you integrate a portal, it is possible that you would have to configure it to work for the relationship settings that you have in place. But some portals can be dynamic in terms of code. No matter what relationship you have established in terms of your contacts, the portal should be able to handle it. The advantage here is that you won’t have to configure the portal especially to reflect this.

Custom module support

SuiteCRM provides a bunch of modules. But you may want to add more depending on your business logic. However, wouldn’t it be convenient if you could handle the configuration of this on the portal side as well?

Certain SuiteCRM customer portals come with all the modules that SuiteCRM provides. You can enable or disable them according to your business logic. You don’t have to go through any special configuration to view the module you actually need to see in your portal. A simple toggle can give you all the modules you need.

39111174 – the customer service target market support assistance concept

This makes your update cycles fast and your customers can get your new modules quicker.

Dynamic user accessibility

Once you configure all your modules in the portal, the next thing you would want is to provide access of these modules to the users. For that, it is imperative that your portal has the functionality that allows you to dynamically provide access to different types of users. Even for the custom modules added in the portal, you need this functionality.

This feature allows you to securely share data with only necessary people. It also builds a sense of trust among your customers.

Lastly,

These features are a must-have for when you want to get things done without special configuration cycles. They enhance a regular SuiteCRM customer portal and give you a little something extra. Your portal should reflect your business requirements and logic. These features go in addition to the usual features like secure sign in, unlimited sign-ins, etc.

When you are looking for a customer portal, keeping your customers in the center is important. But keeping your staff in mind is equally important so that they can take care of your customers effectively.

Knowledge Sharing Portal: Educate Your Customers, Teams, and Partners

Remember the days when you are not able to decide what to eat or where to eat? Well, we all have those days and what do we do? We directly go online and search for good nearby restaurants or if we are in the mood to explore, we search for must-try cuisines available in local restaurants.

Deciding about the restaurant was just a small example. Today, because of the internet, everyone can access any information easily. And we make so many decisions based on the available information, reviews, and feedback.

Almost all our decisions like purchasing clothes, gadgets, booking hotels, tickets, etc. are based on the information, reviews, feedback, etc. available online.

Our decisions are largely affected by what we see on social media or the Internet as a whole.

Because of these changes in the customer behavior landscape and the excessive amount of data generation, it has become mandatory for companies to share the right knowledge with their customers, partners, and employees directly. What knowledge you have to share with whom might vary but the means remain the same.

“Knowledge Sharing Portals”

First, let’s explore what a knowledge portal is.

According to IGI Global:

“A knowledge portal is an Internet-based computer program that constitutes a single point of access to organizational knowledge, integrating knowledge repositories, expert directories, collaboration tools, and other knowledge-intensive applications”.

In simple terms: Knowledge sharing portals work as a gateway between you and your customers, employees or any other parties you interact with. It is a perfect medium to share organizational knowledge, product knowledge, technical knowledge, etc.

Now let’s see what’s the importance of knowledge sharing and knowledge portal that makes a must-have for every company.

Currently, millennials are the biggest target group for any tech company if not for any company and according to research done by Salesforce, 89% of millennials are using search engines to search for answers to their customer service questions. Additionally, 84% use self-service portals to find answers to their queries.

Pre-portal, it is possible that your employees were facing issues in handling customer requests, sharing documents, user manuals, handbooks, guides, etc. And to answer a single customer query, they had to go through the long email trails to provide the right support.

Additionally, being in touch with the customers through multiple channels like calls, emails, messages, etc. can be straining for employees as well as your customers.

And this is where a knowledge portal plays a vital role by providing your customers with a unified space to explore everything about your organization. It also automates the process of sharing data, information, etc. with your clients, partners, teams and any other people who need to have the knowledge of your organization. These people can log in to portals and get the information as and when they need it.

Not only this, but they can access user manuals, handbooks easily to find the solution to their technical queries.

We can easily say that with the help of portals, knowledge sharing is just a few taps away.

These are not the only benefits of knowledge sharing or knowledge sharing portal. Let’s look at some more:

Easy document sharing

This is one of the key features of knowledge sharing portals. They make sharing documents with your customers, partners, and teams effortless and efficient. This is one of the most secure ways to share important documents like invoices, contracts, NDAs, user manuals, product updates, analysis reports, etc.

Now, they can access these documents easily from anywhere at any time in a secure manner. Additionally, it also maintains the logs for the documents uploaded, shared, edited, etc.

Marketing campaigns

Knowledge portals let you send the marketing content directly to customers and portal users. This allows you to successfully run marketing campaigns and understand your customer base. You can even send notifications about new product launches or any new updates in product features.

Sharing case studies

It becomes easy for your customers to know about your work through case studies on the knowledge portal. Your employees can upload case studies, FAQs, etc. in the knowledge portals making it easier for them to understand your products and services.

Apart from all these benefits, knowledge portals also lessen ticket generation. As you will be providing almost all the necessary information about your products and services, your customers won’t need to contact you as much.

But before you go on investing in a knowledge portal, here are a few knowledge sharing practices you need to follow.

Go for custom knowledge portal development

Every company has a different way of operating and business logic. Of course, you can purchase a knowledge portal online. But, we would recommend you reach out to companies that can create a custom knowledge portal for you. This will save you those extra resources otherwise spent on customizing the original portal. Having custom portals gives you the freedom over the features, workflow, and logic of the solution too.

Add accessibility rules

With a custom portal, you can decide who should have what level of access. You can make your knowledge portal public or login mandatory. Not only this but you can even add extra security measures like two-step authentication if needed.

Add pre-sales queries

Nowadays, customers want to have in-depth knowledge of the product before purchasing it and so it becomes very obvious that they’ll do detailed research. And while doing so, they will have lots of queries.

In such scenarios, the pre-sales queries section comes to your rescue. Here, you can add all the answers to frequently asked pre-purchasing queries making it easy for your customers to make a decision. This will also help in building confidence and trust among your customers.

Integrate it with CRM

The integration of the knowledge portal with your CRM makes it easy for you to know more about your customers and business partners. Additionally, if any query raises, you can see it in the CRM and assign it a salesperson to resolve. This integration streamlines your operations. So, make sure to integrate your knowledge portal with CRM.

Wrapping it up:

Knowledge and data are the new oil that can take your organization to the next level. And sharing the right pieces of information with your customers can help build rapport with them giving you the upper hand of your competitors.

This Blog is Originally posted here: https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/knowledge-sharing-portal-educate-your-customers-teams-partners/

How a Customer Portal can Win You the Race in 2020

One of my pet peeves is to have to ask for help to fix tech problems, both software and hardware ones. On that note, I also don’t prefer asking for directions. Ever since I saw Google Maps, I have depended on it, not only in familiar places but also in strange cities, on hilltops and everywhere else.

In my research, what I noticed was the vibe of these communities. The ones that were official forums by HDD manufacturers had replies from the people working at the company, helping out, replying to each repeated question and tailoring their solutions for each question. Seasoned tinkerers and the company members sounded like they knew each other and remembered their previous interactions. Even though the product was proprietary, the company members did not insist on fixing it only at the service center. When I wanted to fix my hard drive, I poured over online forums, learning which ones were genuine, which ones were more likely to brick my HDD and everything in between. Then I threw caution to the wind, risked my assignments on the HDD and followed detailed instructions and fixed it!

More or less, the tech community has realized that there are people who like to fix these things themselves. So they give the information and use their staff’s time to fix the problems of the people who don’t want to get inside their gadgets themselves. It saves them time, money, and resources.

Since tech is one of the most impactful industries of this decade and the last, the way it does things is noticed and replicated. This has given a welcome rise to client portals.

Kodak. Radio Shack. Toys “R” Us. They are some of the companies that went bankrupt due to their inability to successfully innovate.

One of the reasons was also because traditional business models are not working for most of the industries now. That’s why CEOs ranked this as their number one challenge. Updating and reinventing their business model.

Business models need to keep up with the ever-changing customer landscape.

And building a dynamic customer portal can help you tackle these challenges. On top of that, here’s why a customer portal can help your business scale in 2020:

Tailored support

No matter what the product or service is, customers have various pain points. They don’t want the common answer, “turn it off and turn it back on”. A customer portal becomes the place where they can come and get the answers they need, and more importantly when they need it. Prompt customer service, whether it is by the support staff or a portal goes a long way in customer retention and loyalty.

An information repository

For someone like me who learned everything I know about gadgets outside the classroom, such a knowledge base was one of the best tools. Not only does it work as a way to give your customers a platform to get information about the products they have, but also as a way to give information that can help them make their buying decision.

The knowledge base in a client portal gives customers and potential customers a way to learn about your product and how it can benefit them. Pretty much what this blog is aiming to do. The knowledgebase is sneaky that way but that’s the fun of it!

Emails are ancient

Recently, one of my friends ordered a bunch of bags from a store and coincidentally got the same ones as a gift from her partner. She was out of $100 and so was her partner and two sets of the same things. So, they had to return one set. When she went back to the website to hunt for a return button, there wasn’t one! So she had to resort to emails.

It gets worse though.

The store claimed that they never got her emails and the return window had closed but if she still wanted to, the shipping cost would be on her. It is safe to say that the less than acceptable customer service overshadowed the superior quality of the product. This happened because of not having a fully equipped customer portal and instead of having to use emails!

In 2020, if you want your business to get anywhere, focus on customer experience and I can promise you, email helps you nowhere.

Proactive offerings

Your CRM is a database of all the customers’ information and your products. If your business is lifestyle products and services, you can automate surveys to get your customers to tell you their preferences. Apart from surveys, when they buy a product, for example, trousers, you can have the portal ask whom it is for. You can configure your portal to proactively alert them about the preferred styles and even suggest sizes based on previous purchases.

This shortens the time that they need for making a positive buying decision. The effect of that is, of course, positive for you.

2020 is the year that the experience industry builds excessively on the last year’s experience. You can learn a lot from a year that brought to light how large companies treat consumers (not that great), their employees (absolutely horribly).

A customer portal serves both these parties well. And you most certainly want to make sure you don’t do what they did to their businesses because they didn’t focus on the right things.

Source: https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/how-customer-portal-can-win-you-race/

Bringing Together the Power of CRM and IoT

According to research carried out by Gartner, more than 25 billion devices will be connecting by 2020. And, here we are, already in 2020.
As per the Gartner’s research, IoT forms a connection between people-to-people, people-to-things, and things-to-things.

Apart from that, it also changes the way we live and constantly transforms our surroundings. For example, it expands the internet connectivity beyond the basic devices like laptop, mobiles, etc. and even connects devices like thermostats, our watches, etc.

With such larger capabilities, it can make a win-win combination with CRM products. For example, Sugar CRM client portals help businesses serving their customers for better. Now, when you combine them and IoT together it can help you in serving your customers in a better way.

Mixing Automation for Ease:

IoT changes the way we live, and Sugar CRM transforms the way enterprises operate. Imagine the wonders the combination of these two can create. For example, this synergy helping the environment of predictive and preventive functionalities to send alerts for future actions. Such a system will notify customers in advance before they come across any problem, provide a service or the solution to the issues they might face. Additionally, it will decode the buying pattern of the customer in real-time, helping the SugarCRM customer portal to include them in the right marketing campaign.

IoT decodes the buying pattern of customers in real-time by sharing data that help your staff members to use in the SugarCRM client portal or application to find the correct way of a marketing campaign.

The Possibilities

Yes! You can integrate the “Internet of Things” with the Sugar CRM client portal and its applications.

The following are the three vital components of IoT. They will be generating huge benefits for various organizations:

Sensors
Wireless Internet Connectivity
Data Processing Capability

Recently, Gartner did a study on the drivers of CRM applications. According to that study, the most important attributes for CRM drivers are Mobile, Cloud, Big Data and Social Networking. Not only this but they even stated that the Internet of Things is said to be the fifth driver after these four.

Let’s understand that with an example.

Suppose, there is a hearing aid company. It has become more advanced by introducing technology aspects. Now, it is trying to bring innovative features in their product lists.

Those features could be Long battery life, Bluetooth compatibility, noise reduction. Not only this, but it is also introducing products for controlling hearing aid devices through smartphones.

Here is how the synergy of IoT and CRM can work in the below scenarios:

A customer’s hearing aid’s instrument battery is malfunctioning and needs replacement in a few days. So, here IoT will help in notifying the status of the machine. This will even help the staff to inform customers about the issue actively and update them. Additionally, this will help customers to replace the battery and will make sure that they do not face issues while using the product.
Considering the second scenario, a customer’s hearing aid is still under warranty and failing to work properly. Here, the IoT will make sure that your staff comes to know about it immediately. Your customer service representative can call the customer and they can even get the failed hearing aid replaced as it is under warranty.
Due to some reason, if a customer is not using the new features of the hearing aid, here IoT analytics will be helpful to you. The analytics will send alerts and your support team will reach out to your customers to ask them for training to make them aware of those new features and they can start using them.

Wrapping it up:

The IoT and CRM help you in the functioning of sales and marketing in multiple ways. The real-time data generated by IoT helps you to understand your customers in various ways.

It helps you in knowing the usage of products, purchase patterns of customers, understanding the opportunities for cross-selling or upselling, etc. These aspects help your sales team to understand and analyze the IoT generated data.

Additionally, it will help you reduce the cost of market research and your team can focus on potential users with this data. Not only this but after studying important aspects of these users, your staff can run a number of campaigns to turn them into customers.

Source: https://www.sooperarticles.com/technology-articles/software-articles/bringing-together-power-crm-iot-1757819.html

What is Salesforce Customer Portal?

Before we start with the Salesforce customer portal, let’s explore all the types of Salesforce portals, their differences, and their use case.

Types of Salesforce Portals

Salesforce offers three types of portals that have different use cases:

– Partner Portal

– Self-service Portal

– Customer Portal

It is crucial that you pick one based on your requirement and which entities you want to manage. If it’s partners, then the partner portal should be your choice. Similarly, to manage customers you can either go with self-service portal or customer portal.

Let’s look at the difference between them.

Difference between Customer and Partner Portal

The key difference here is that a partner portal is useful for when you want to share business-level insights with your partners. Each partner can get only the required data without being able to access all of your organization’s private data.

Compared to this, a customer portal works as a platform for your customers to approach your business, and get support on their own from the portal.

In this blog, we are going to explore multiple aspects of the Salesforce customer portal.

What is Salesforce Customer Portal?

Customer Portal is a unified platform that provides self-service support, a user interface and online support channels for customers.

How to Enable Salesforce Customer Portal?

You can follow the steps given below to enable the Salesforce Customer Portal.

1) From Setup, enter Customer Portal Settings in the Quick Find box. Then selectCustomer Portal Settings or In Build, click customize, select customer portal, then click on Customer Portal Settings.

2) Click Edit.

3) Select Enable Customer Portal.

4) Click Save.

5) This is the view of Customer Portal after enabling the same. From there, you can create a new portal by clicking on ‘New’ or edit an existing portal.

6) You can change portal fonts, color with the option Change Portal Fonts and Colors button, and use the Edit button to change the header, footer, etc. Click on Edit and change it.

Note: This feature available only in Salesforce Classic.

How to Enable Customer Portal for Contacts

1) From a contact detail page, click Manage External User, and then select Enable Customer User.

2) Verify the general information and locale settings, and enter any missing information. The customer’s Username defaults to the customer’s email.

3) Select a portal user license. The user license that you choose determines the permission sets, user profile type, and role hierarchy options which you can select for the user. See Customer Portal User Licenses.

4) Click on save to save the settings it.

5) Go back to the Contact Detail page and click Manage External User and select login to Portal as User.

After performing all the steps, this is how the Salesforce Customer Portal will look like.

Salesforce Customer Portal Features

– User interface

– Salesforce CRM content

– Custom objects and Tabs

– Multiple User profile and Record types

– Account Role hierarchy and sharing

– Branding and style configuration

1) User interface

In the salesforce customer portal, there are user interface features like search, quick solution identification, creating cases, reports, etc.

2) Salesforce CRM content

Through this Salesforce CRM content feature, your customers can access any product document and you can share relevant content with customers as well. It also has features like sharing, subscription and commenting.

3) Custom objects and tabs

You can create custom objects and tabs in the customer portal and share the same with your customers. These objects and tabs help you implement your business logic throughout the portal.

4) Multiple user profiles & record types

A feature to create multiple user-profiles and record types to help you provide some customized experience to your customers.

5) Account role hierarchy and sharing

You can use three-level role hierarchy and sharing with your customers.

6) Branding and style configuration

Customizations in the home page, header, footer, colors, and fonts enables you to match the portal with your brand, therefore creating a synergy.

Limitations of Salesforce Customer Portal:

The Salesforce customer portal is expensive if you put it at $1 per user, per month. It increases your customer retention cost.

Apart from cost, there is also a certain limitation when it comes to the number of accounts. You cannot have over a certain number of accounts, depending on the Salesforce edition you use.

But there are third-party solutions that you can use that to allow you to scale your customer base at a much more reasonable price point.

About CRMJetty:

CRMJetty is a hub of innovative customer relationship solutions. You can connect, collaborate, and engage with your customers smartly using our ready to integrate portal solutions for SuiteCRM, Sugar CRM, Salesforce, and Dynamics CRM.

Gear up your business with our portals to drive new customer relationship intelligence!

Get Started Today

This Blog is Originally posted here; https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/salesforce-customer-portal/

5 Types of Business Web Portals for Growth

“Portal” is one of the most buzzed words. You might have read it in your day-to-day life.

But, what is it?

Well, there are many complex meanings of portals, but here we have tried to simplify it for you:

‘It’s a gateway or an entrance’.

And from a business angel, a portal or web portal gives your employees, customers,

and suppliers a platform to collaborate with you. This shortens your operations

cycle and provides you with control over your day-to-day processes.

The best part of having a portal is that it is easily accessible from desktops as well as mobile devices.

But wait, developing a portal is a difficult and complex task. You need to consider many things like the purpose of developing it, your business model, etc. Asking these questions, in the beginning, will help you have a clear picture of the type of portal your business requires.

To give you a clear picture, here I have discussed the types of portals:

Vertical Portal:

If your company is known for its mastery in one sector like insurance, health care, etc. then you can build vertical portals. They are known as Vortals.

It gives a platform to access information to a certain market niche, industry or unique area of interest. They deal with limited subjects, addresses a single topic like insurance, health care, food manufacturing, etc.

We can also call it an interest-based community website as it brings people of the same interest together by selling, buying or exchanging information about a specific industry. It’s also necessary to understand that there can be multiple vortals for the same subject.

Horizontal Portal:

Horizontal portals serve as an entry point for a web surfer into the internet. It provides content on a wide range of topics and directs them towards the right path to get related resources of a particular search.

It provides them with aggregated data from multiple sources in a single view. Users prefer such portals as it does not require them to log in to read, write or amalgamate information.

An exclusively shared horizontal web portal can take the form of a reporting system that collects the Key Performance Indicator (KPIs) information from multiple business systems and shows them in a unified manner.

Marketplace Portal:

Marketplace Portals supports B2B and B2C e-commerce. It also provides software support for transactions and the ability to find and access information about the products on sale or involve in discussion groups with vendors or buyers.

Knowledge Portals:

It is useful in providing knowledge to employees, customers, and vendors. They are available in different formats like information discovery services, collaboration services, knowledge maps, etc. Hence if your company’s aim is to provide the information to your users then this portal is a perfect choice for you.

Intranet/Enterprise Portals:

The purpose of developing an Intranet Portal is to give access to the members of the enterprise network. The most common benefit of it is that it provides data and statistics to the staff in a timely manner. Now, this can make or break an enterprise’s efficiency.

Along with data, it also provides with the document management system, online training courses, availability of applications on-demand, etc.

Now that we understood the types, let’s talk about the benefits of having a portal for your business.

Benefits of Portal:

The major benefit of having a web portal is that it enhances user satisfaction, improves data access and basic login functionality. Other benefits include:

Better decision making
Scalable IT licensing options
Decreases back-office administration
Improves communication which results in strong customer and supplier relationships

Not only these, but there are also endless benefits of having web service portals. If you are thinking that the above-mentioned portals might not fit in your business model, then you can invest in a customized solution which exclusively serves your company.

In that case, a web portal development company is the way to go. Such a portal development company can help you in developing a portal keeping your business logic and model in mind. A right web portal development company will make sure that your web portal is serving its purpose and reflects your business model.

If you don’t have a big budget, then you can always hire freelance web portal developers. An option we easily forget. They will help you in developing a customized web portal in your budget.

Wrapping up:

Nothing should stop utilizing the benefits of web portals for your company and users. Get your web portals now and enjoy the undefeatable services it provides.

SalesForce and WordPress: Integrating Two Powerful Products

The first thing which comes to our mind when we hear the words Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is “Salesforce”.

Right?

It’s the company that made businesses realize the importance of using a CRM platform. Not only this, but many businesses claim their CRM platform to be the best.

Spotify, American Express, Canon, Toyota, and many other big brands use Salesforce CRM. These companies with data-heavy operations reflect why it is popular among thousands of businesses.

Similarly, when you hear the words Content Management System (CMS), what comes to your mind?

“WordPress”.

Correct?

It’s just five years junior to Salesforce, but has made a strong reputation in the market for itself. Any person who wants to start blogging usually prefer WordPress because of its simple hosting and easy to use interface.

Just imagine the combined power of these two highly functional products. Salesforce to manage the data of your customers and WordPress for the content of your website. Both have a unique set of features. But the major complexity arrives when you have to integrate these products. It is essential to make this integration seamless to get the best of them.

With this integration, lead generation and nurturing become effortless. Capturing leads from your website and directly collecting the information in your CRM leads to more organized data and lesser human errors.

Going further if you wish to give your customers a more personalized browsing experience and boost engagement then you need to include plugins like Salesforce customer portal for WordPress or any apps or customized integrations. It depends on your requirements.

Let’s see the ways you can integrate these powerhouses.

Integrating with Other Applications

Businesses prefer using third-party apps when integrating Salesforce CRM and WordPress. Using these third-party applications, you can implement additional functionalities. Let’s say, you are running an email campaign and you wish to link your email with Salesforce, then you can use the famous email marketing software named MailChimp. A third-party app. You can easily add sign up forms for your websites, get details of subscribers and even send the broadcast emails.

MailChimp comes you with an option to integrate with Salesforce easily, which allows you to even import your Salesforce contacts with your lists and easily access it from anywhere. Most of the third-party applications are easy to integrate and get the work done. Yes, you might need to invest in these apps but they are cost effective and user-friendly.

Customized Integration

There would be times when you would come across complex requirements. This is when custom-built integrations or customizations come to your rescue. Using these integrations, the sky would be your limit. One such customization is adding a WordPress customer portal to your CRM. This enables your customers to update their details and manage all the other aspects of interacting with your business.

But developing these solutions you might need to have an expert by your side to help you. Even though availing these services can be expensive but you won’t have to spend on licensing costs. You’ll have control over style, interface, and experience that you will provide with these customizations.

Pro-tip: While integrating Salesforce and WordPress, it is very obvious that the number of leads will increase and their quality will get better too. Your choice of plug-in depends on the budget and features you require. Being a first-time user, it is better to go for a third-party plug-in which already has features rather than investing huge chunks in developing one. This will also help you understand whether or not you can work with it. If you think this is not flexible for you, then you can go for a customized plugin according to your requirements.

Wrapping it up:

Using Salesforce WordPress integration is one of the great decisions as it helps you in growing your business and generating quality leads. Not only this, but it also helps you in keeping the customer data organized.