WordPress Customer Portal, WordPress CRM Portal, WordPress Portal

Remember when you were a kid and tried to learn how to ride a bicycle? And then there was no stopping you. How you didn’t want any support from your parents and wanted to do it by yourself? 

Why?

Because riding it, on your own, brings a sense of independence, determination and an achievement that you can do something on your own. 

That’s the exact same thing your customers wish. Most of the tech-savvy people in this “I can Google it” era want to do everything by themselves. Even the product/service support that you want to provide. They want to learn and explore your business products or services on their own.

That’s one of the reasons why client portal platforms are popular among most B2B as well as B2C organizations. According to a research, 89 percent of US customers wish for brands and organizations to have an online customer support portal.

Why?

As mentioned above, your customers prefer to solve issues related to your product on their own first. 

And that’s not the only reason why having a client portal platform is a necessity for every organization. There are many other reasons.

But, before looking at the necessity of having a client portal, let’s discuss what is it:

Client portals are the first step of communication for your customers. It works as a gateway for your customers to track their orders, chat with your support team, check order history, make payments, access important files, etc. It works as a central hub or central storage system to access resources or gain information about their dealings with your organization.

Now let’s look at why having a client portal platform in this DIY era is a necessity. 

• Happy Customer Base

In a portal, you can create and share the knowledge base of your products with your customers. Which helps them to find and solve their issues on their own. Most importantly, if they are not able to solve, they can chat with your support staff right from the portal or can add their query as a case too.

Portals help to reduce your ticket generation which, in turn, allows your employees to productively utilize that time in researching or learning something new. Hence, having a customer portal results in saving time and resources and creating a happier customer base.

• Security

Portals use the latest security measures such as SSL encryption, firewall, etc. to make sure that there are no cases of the data breach. These encryption measures make sure that your organization’s and customers’ data stay protected. Additionally, it provides you with the functionality to provide only necessary access of the data to your customers.

Yes! you heard it right, these centralized portals give you the privilege to decide who can access what data of your company as well as of your customers.

• Build Community

Using these portals, it becomes easy for your customers to not only reach out to you any time, but they can also interact and share their knowledge of the product with each other. Portals work as a platform for your customers to interact with each other and share their insights and knowledge. This helps you to build up a community and even helps your company in increasing your customer base.

• Enhance Customer Relationship Management

Building a community, answering your customer queries immediately, securing data of your customers, all these unique features of portals will help you to enhance your relationship with the customers. It is very obvious that when you attend their needs on time, they are likely to stick by your side.

Another good thing about the client portal platform is that they can easily integrate with your CRM platform. Which means whenever a customer raises a new query, your employees get notifications which allows them to solve their query as soon as possible.

• Improved Communication

Your organization will be uploading almost all the important resources about your products in the portal which helps your customer to easily find the solution of their issues. Because of this, there will be less redundant and repetitive questions from customers which will help your employees to manage time and communicate more skillfully.

• Centralized Information

Your customers expect to reach out to you if they face any issue in your products. For that, you might be redirecting them directly to your website’s knowledge section or contact us page. But, as your company grows, you might not be able to help each and every one of your customers, quickly. You might not be able to provide proper attention to them.  

And unhappy customers will definitely leave. This is when having a unified information platform for storing and sharing important information is a necessity. For which, portals are the best fit.

Wrap up:

In this ‘I can Google it’ era, it is necessary to have a good relationship with your customers and provide them what they ask. And how they ask for it.

You can go in the market and search for a client portal platform or you can also opt for a customized portal. For a customized solution, it is necessary to keep your vision user-centric to get the best results. 

About us:

CRMJetty is a hub of innovative customer relationship solutions. Our tools ensure that you can render enhanced interactions at each stage of your customer lifecycle. So, if you are searching for a portal development company, we are here to help you in building the right customized portals. Something that your customers will love. We work with multiple CRM and CMS platforms. Be it a WordPress customer portal, WordPress CRM portal or with any other CRM or CMS platform like Dynamics, Salesforce, etc. We are serving in this industry for a decade now. Get in touch with us to create customized portals and we’ll help you kickstart your journey towards growing with portals.

Whenever your customers visit any e-store, they might have come across various statements that read:

“To submit any product related query, you can contact our support team at this email id.”

“If you need any additional information about our product, you can check out the FAQs page.”

“Our support staff operates between business hours only.”

In such scenarios, it becomes difficult for your customers to find where they must contact in case of a query. Being an e-store owner when it comes to interacting with customers, it is necessary to have proper flow to help your user navigate your e-store. And it is obvious you don’t want the products, contacts, services and new query emails to come to you over email.

The best way to handle this problem is to use web portal solutions. The portal is a perfect solution to handle customer related queries. They make it easy to solve real-life problems of your customers. But have you ever thought of building a custom base portal for your business?

Having a custom web portal is the best decision for your business. It helps you to handle your customers and grow your business graph.

Here I have mentioned some of the must-have features you must consider while developing a customized web portal:

Interactive Dashboard:

Dashboard is the first thing your customer interacts when they log in. So, having a dynamic and interactive dashboard is a must. It is necessary to provide users with quick modules of all the important features they might require directly on the dashboard. You can make it even easier for your users by categorizing your dashboard more minutely. It can be on the basis of their history and or a display of products that they generally prefer. Don’t make the dashboard complex for the user to understand and use. A dashboard is a quick summary of all the important features using a simple representation. Hence, you must ensure that it has the following things:

Make sure dashboard is properly categorized to make it easy for your customers to search around.

Provide quick features like “Add To Cart” or “Wishlists”.

Provide better UI/UX for better customer experience.

The most important factor while providing these facilities is to make sure that the interface is tidy and clean. Avoid displaying lengthy messages and content. Because such lengthy messages distract your customers while purchasing things.

Tracking:

Tracking is a basic feature. We all track our food, online orders, support tickets, etc. It has become an important part of the customer service. Providing your customers the ability to track their orders, tickets, food, etc. gives them good experience. Hence, it is necessary to provide your customers with updates on their orders.

Providing tracking features to your customers will make it easy for them to track the status of their goods, shipments, etc. You can even send your customers important updates regarding delivery via email or messages.

Using tracking features you can make it easy for your customers to make next order, because this helps them to know the estimated delivery time. You can even claim that the delivery is faster than usual as this inspires your customer to come back to you.

Knowledge Base:

Today we are obsessed with mobile phones and technology and as a result, customers need businesses to provide answers or solutions to their problems immediately. Currently, for any issue, your customers would be interacting with the support team. But, the best way to provide better support to your customers is to provide them with the perfect knowledge base that contains details and provides solution to your products. The knowledgebase provides the user freedom to search for a solution to their problems on their own and understand it till some extent. This helps your support team in turn as this knowledge base helps in decreasing support tickets and your team gets an opportunity to invest their time in some productive work.

Multiple Device Accessibility:

Today people need mobility. They cannot stick to one place and work for the whole day, as there are many other activities they manage simultaneously. It is necessary that people can access their data from anywhere at any time and can handle critical business communication. Mobile responsiveness is the number one priority for almost every industry to improve customer interaction. Similarly, it is necessary to have your web portal development done such that it supports multiple devices like smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc.

Business Logic:

I know, it is an easy solution to have a readymade portal solution but they have pre-decided workflow. However, different businesses have different workflow. Therefore, it is better to have a web portal development team on board or outsource web portal development services to a company that helps you customize it according to your business logic. The main purpose behind opting for a custom portal development is you can easily have full control over it. You can easily customize from scratch according to your business logic and add the flow of features and activities according to your needs and your customer’s requirements.

Final Words:

Web portal solutions are the key to customer management. When working with portals the primary goal is to make them scalable so that it supports your customer’s requirements.

Author Bio :

Mr. Maulik Shah is the founder & CEO of CRMJetty, the hub of innovative customer relationship solutions, provides ready to CMS integrate portal solutions for various CRM, including Web Portal Solutions. Maulik is a tech enthusiast and writes about the various aspects of e-commerce technology.

Source :- https://www.sooperarticles.com/internet-articles/web-design-articles/web-portal-way-success-1751911.html

We are all familiar with the functioning and advantages of the intranet. It’s a secured computer network that enables individuals across the organization to access the internet for sharing information and collaborating.

But it only lets you connect and engage with your colleagues and management. This computer network leaves out your outside connections like customers, vendors, suppliers, partners, and people who are not directly employed by your organization.

That’s where the extranet comes in! It’s a secure and controlled private network that lets you and your employees to communicate well and clearly with all the outsiders sharing only the necessary data with limited edit rights.

An extension of your intranet network.

The same way, organizations using CRM to store and share all the necessary information is limited to your office. And a self-service portal can be its extension.

If you are reading this article that means you are currently using SugarCRM and looking for a way to smartly engage your customers. So, let us help you understand the concept of the SugarCRM customer portal, its features, and how it empowers your customers, employees, and vendors.

What is SugarCRM Customer Portal?

A portal is a gateway that provides access of your data to outside entities like customers, partners, etc. in a secure and limited way. Not only access, but you can also provide them with the edit and manage rights to bifurcate some load of your support agents. Hence, a portal bridges the gap between your organization and the entities you deal on a regular basis.

For example, with a SugarCRM portal, you can provide your customers the access to their profiles and to a certain extent, they will be able to manage it on their own. This means one less task on your humongous to-do list.

This is only one of the many advantages of investing in a self-service portal.

Let’s explore some of the must-have features in SugarCRM portal and how they help you expand your customer base.

Customer Portal Features

Case Deflection: No need to be present 24/7 to provide impeccable customer support. With the customer portal, they’ll be able to log in, search for their queries and get answers without any hassle. In case they don’t find the answer of their query, they can add a case with their question which later on you can add answer to.

Role-based Accessibility Management: With this feature, you will be able to provide access to necessary CRM modules to your customers, vendors, suppliers, employees, etc. Such a feature helps you protect your data.

Scalable & Customizable: To ensure your ever-growing organization’s needs, you need to make sure that your portal solution is scalable and that you can mold to your business logic.

Online Chat : Another feature that is a necessity in today’s information-hungry world is online chat. Having an in-built online chat in your portal will directly affect your customer interaction. They’ll be able to reach you as soon as they log in to the portal. Imagine a customer’s issue getting resolved in a matter of minutes. How happy would they be?

Now, let’s see how your organization will benefit from such a solution:
Streamlined Communication: If you sit with your support team or even just overview their daily activities for a day, you’ll find that it’s really hard to communicate with customers over multiple channels. There are emails, calls, social media, direct messages, and whatnot. With a CRM portal, you will be taking away your team’s misery by giving them one platform to handle everything. Support tickets, calls, emails, all at one place.

Reduced Costs: As you streamline customer communication, you’ll realize there is no need to have a huge 15-20 people support team. Only 3 can support your whole customer base. Then you can reallocate some of your resources to different departments to maximize the efficiency of your organization. This can reduce your overall departmental and hiring costs.

Lesser Redundant Tasks: Have you ever had someone asking a single question at least 10 times over a period of one week? Well, ask your sales and support team. They deal with this on a regular basis. Customers asking them about that one complicated feature over and over again. What if you could put a rest to this once and for all? How? With the portal for SugarCRM. The knowledge base feature will let you create an inventory of such questions and your customers can easily log in and enter their queries to find ready-made solutions. So, your support team will answer 2 questions in place of 20 each day. And more importantly, they focus on other important things like enhancing the customer journey, coming up with unique ways to pitch clients, etc.

Enhanced Productivity: The above two points make the case for this point as well. With lesser redundant tasks and streamlined communication, your team will be focusing on impactful tasks. Yielding better results for you with improved customer interaction.

Satisfied Customers: Imagine you are a customer and you had a small question about how to start with complicated software. Would you want to wait for 24 hours for a representative to reply to your email or would you just go online and look into their customer base for that query? Definitely the online option, right? Well, again the portal comes in the picture that will help you be there for your customers even when you are not in your office space. This will not only reduce your response time, but will also improve customer satisfaction, increase team productivity, and a lot more.

Wrapping Up:
If your customers are at the center of all your marketing, sales, and product development strategies, then a self-service Sugar portal is something worth investing in. You can just search for ‘customer portal’ on SugarOutfitters and choose from the many available options. Take the features we’ve mentioned as a checklist to find the best suitable solution.

Source :- https://www.sugaroutfitters.com/blog/empower-your-customers-employees-and-vendors-with-selfservice-portal

As the clock inched closer to midnight, the staff got ready to open the doors to their store for the beginning of the holiday season. It was the fourth week of November, and every year on the Sunday that kicks this week off, they start their sale. The latest and greatest consumer gadgets of the year like drones, computers, and phones have finally come out and the older ones are ready to be off the shelves.

The staff prepares for these events rigorously; taking care of various elements like inventory, security, billing process etc. Holiday season sales can be chaotic but they bring in a huge amount of revenue.

This of course was a story of your usual consumer gadget store in the town. So, what is the story of a similar store if it were to be online? When it comes to web stores, the process is almost similar. Webstore owners and staff have to prepare for the same holiday season. They have to take similar measures to ensure that they take care of their customers and meet their demands.

Let’s talk about the preparation that online stores have to do this holiday season and how certain measures can help them:

Product quality:

The most important thing to do is make sure that your products maintain quality. Since the demand is high, you cannot use that as an excuse to rush production, whether you produce your goods inhouse or have a supplier.

Before you begin fresh production for the holiday season, make sure to analyse your previous sales data and produce accordingly. It is beneficial if you produce enough to meet the requirement, and have a little to spare, without overshooting the production.

Website technicalities:

Just as stores have an increased foot traffic, people will flock to your webstore. With the increase in the number of people coming to your store, you have to prepare for it. Make sure to update it with the discounts that you are offering and update the pricing structure of everything accordingly.

If you are giving coupons that customers can apply at checkout, then make sure to update the site to reflect that as well the valid coupon code that are available.

Make sure that your site can handle the traffic. If it crashes, you will lose out on customers.

To add a certain festive mood to your webstore, you can add a holiday centric banner on your home screen, or change the page load animation to match the festivities, etc. This adds a nice touch to the overall website and is quite similar to decorating a physical store.

Security:

With such a huge number of customers coming to your website, it is of utmost importance that you make sure your site is secure. Vulnerabilities leads to stealing or tampering with your data. Similarly, your customers’ data can also fall prey to hacking if you don’t take appropriate measures to secure your website. If your customers don’t trust you, they are less likely to shop from your store.

Depending on what your business is about, you will have sensitive customer data that should be private. Moreover, the addresses of millions of people can certainly not fall into the wrong hands.

Customer management:

Customer management is one of the most challenging aspects to handle during the holiday season. Your staff is easily outnumbered by the number of customers you have. Customers usually have a lot of questions regarding the discounts you are giving as well as the products themselves. They will flood your inbox with questions about discounts or requests to change their shipping address after placing order.

However, there are neat solutions for such a problem. You can use a customer portal. This portal acts as a gateway between your CRM and the customer. They can manage their contact details as well as their address changes if they want to make any. Additionally, they can use this portal to request an exchange or return on their products.

With this tool, your support staff need not feel quite as outnumbered because the customers can be more or less self-sufficient.

Shipping management:

Shipping is intricately tied in with customer management. If not done right, customers tend to not return to your store. With so many packages to send, the amount of packing materials you use will also increase. You can be mindful about using the right size of packing to cut down on waste and can even have a recycling option where customers can return the packaging to you.

When it comes to the holiday season, the more you prepare, the better it is. Get your customers the best service you can offer, on top of the best quality of products you can offer. A customer may come for the product but generally tends to stay for the service that comes with it. And holidays are stressful times anyway; if something were to make it easier on them, they are sure to appreciate it.

A little something extra:

We understand that the holidays are a particularly tiring time for those of us who work in support. Customers reach out in distress because they need 5 more pairs of headphones but your website shows they are out of stock.

Train your staff to reply to them calmly and make sure that as soon as something goes out of stock, it is off the website until restocked. Apart from that, also tell them to keep updating the knowledge base of your website to show user manuals for each product. While gadgets make for great gifts, they are also quite expensive to break in the same hour as you receive them. And customers will come looking for ways to set up a camera. If you have a simple manual for the same, they will come buy a second from you!

About us:

We are in the business of helping you with your customers. If you are looking for a customer portal to give the best of you this holiday season, look no further than our sugarcrm customer portal and feel free to contact us if you have any queries. Happy holidays!

Source :- https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/seasons-greetings-customer-service-holiday/

• 

All of us are customers to some business or the other. All of us need products and services ranging from the scale of a soap to TV channel subscription, internet connectivity, gadgets of varying kinds, etc. When you, as an entrepreneur, face bad service, you must have said how your company would never make such a mistake.

However, as a business owner, you need to learn from these incidents that customer service is multi-layered.Whether your industry is consumer gadget, automobile, medical, or anything in between, you have to deal with customers beyond the initial selling of the products.

And customers have questions; sometimes brand new ones, most times repetitive. These questions come up in post-sales services, during maintenance services or out of the blue. In order to retain a customer and bring them back after the first sale, or even to finish the initial sale, you need to answer all their doubts and questions.

And not just these questions, there million other difficulties in customer service that a company faces. So, in this blog, we are going to talk about these challenges and how to tackle them.

Customer Service Challenges 2019:

Dissatisfaction

Dissatisfaction comes easy to certain customers. As a company, it is difficult for you to think about all types of customers and design your products or services around each and every them. Therefore, you will have a few customers who don’t like anything that you have to offer or who will criticize all that you try to offer them.

Having No Solution

Sometimes they ask questions that are completely new. If you have not thought of these, then it is easier for your support team to give up and tell them that they don’t have any answer. This is not the right way to handle such a situation though. Also, sometimes the support teams are not equipped or educated enough about the product/services to handle any new questions.

This issue is even bigger when it comes to providing technical support. If you have a complex product, then there might be many technical support challenges faced by your support team.

Repetitive Questions
Customers also ask the same questions over and over again. They forget what you said, or the sheer number of customers is so huge that, the common questions come from everyone. This is obviously very cumbersome for your support staff.

Sometimes they don’t maintain their product, like a car or a phone and come down hard on the company when it stops functioning well.

How to Tackle These Challenges?

1) Listening – adding that human touch
One of the easier things to do in such situations is to always listen to your customers. When they feel heard, they will trust you and are more likely to let you help them at a comfortable pace.

When customers ask unique questions, they are not acting against you; therefore, you have to give them a better answer than ‘I don’t know’. You can understand their query, try to find an answer for them and then help them with the solution. It is very frustrating for them to see that the company that owns the product does not have a solution to their problems. But as long as you are handling it with patience, you’ll be just fine.

2) Understanding your customer is the key
No matter what medium you communicate through, it is important that both you and your customers understand each other. You can build this understanding by hiring locally, or regionally, and people who speak more than one language. This builds their trust in your company and brand.

3) Self-service portals
You can also give customers some autonomy when it comes to basic queries and tasks. Depending on your CRM, and you can deploy a client portal from where your customers can get a certain level of support. Such a solution allows them to manage the changes in their address or contact details, as well as gives them some freedom to request a return or exchange on products, etc.

You can add a knowledge base with answers to all the repeated questions and queries that your customers have. This was your customers can access it when they need to. This will create less friction between them and your support staff.

Use such technology to get ahead in your customer service. Remind them about product maintenance, send them discount coupons or give them referral points.

At the end of the day, customer service is about the human touch. Last week my family and I went to a restaurant for dinner to celebrate my sister’s birthday. There was too much cake for the four of us, so we shared some of it with our fellow diners and with the staff. The staff was pleased so they gave us some of their special dessert as a gift! It was such a pleasant delight!

As customers who go to restaurants, we generally get quite irritated when there is a birthday celebration as it tends to get loud. The staff has to work in the middle of that! You’d think they would get annoyed. But this restaurant knew how to serve their customers in just the right way! I am here talking about them after a week, such is their impression on my mind!

Good customer service is not simply following guidelines defined by the industry. It goes above and beyond that. Both you and your customers are humans, and the more you remember that, the easier it will be to create a lasting impression as a company.

4) Educate/train your support staff

The support staff tends to get the worst of an unsatisfied customer. The changes you make in your company’s way of dealing with customers, not only helps the customers, but your staff will also appreciate you.

You can take plenty of the above-mentioned measures; have a multilingual staff, use a self-service portal for certain interactions, have a neat ticketing system to solve small issues without your support staff interacting at all, etc.

Train your staff in soft skills. Tell them that it’s okay to not know the answer to questions immediately as long as they are nice to the customer. Give them the freedom to be a person serving another person, rather than just following rules.

Happy customers and happier employees make for a company that can succeed.

About us:
CRMJetty is a portal solutions company. We are in the business of contributing to making your customers and employees happy. We have client portals for small and medium businesses as well as enterprise solutions like Salesforce client portal or Dynamics WordPress customer portal. Contact us here for any information you need, and we will take care of you and help you take care of your customers.

Source :- https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/unique-ways-tackle-customer-service-challenges/

Website owners use self-service portals widely. With them, you can provide better support services to your customers. It is a critical part for any company as customers might need it anytime when using your services/products. And with portals it becomes easier than ever to assist them on-time.

Let’s see how self-service portals can make your customers’ life much easier:

Thanks to technology, most of our operations are dependent on technology. Whether it is shopping, whether it is for clothes, furniture, medicines, food, or electronics, customers prefer online stores over going to an actual shop. This has made it all the more necessary to provide the support they need.

For instance, if you are a store owner of any fashion brand, your website has all the information about clothing items, discounts, new trends, available sizes, etc. And this store is global. Hence it might be difficult to provide support across time zones. You have to hire support staff that can work according to all time zones. This can end up being expensive. A portal, on the other hand can be accessible 24/7 365 days without much effort from the support staff.

Your self-service portal helps you to keep up with your customers’ needs. They also help you provide them the support they require for any product. Additionally, it provides a knowledge base where you can share information they actually need.

Such type of features help you to serve your customers better, leading to better customer satisfaction and retention:

Secure Sign in:

Security is essential when it comes to your customers’ data. Therefore, a twostep verification process limits hackers from getting access to accounts. If you use CMS based portals, they should not store any information.

Personalized Dashboard:

Users can get personalized dashboard and can know about their order summary, track orders, see their wish lists, etc.

Knowledge Bank:

This feature helps you to publish articles and FAQs. FAQs can mention the details of your product, which will help your customer understand your product in a better way. The purpose of this feature is to provide your customers with knowledge and clear their doubts regarding your product. While developing this feature you also need to make sure that your users can easily navigate your website and get exactly what they’re looking for.

Communication management:

With such a portal, your support staff doesn’t have to spend all of their time on calls and answering emails repeatedly. Knowledge base and the ticketing system of a portal can easily help customers effectively, and reduce the redundancy of their work, significantly.

Overall, this helps customer support team work more efficiently. Customers will be approaching your support team less because you will be providing them with the knowledge of your products. This, in-turn assures that they attend to lesser customers who cannot resolve their issues with the provided tools, and solve their issues patiently.

If you are looking for such a solution for your business, there are portals based on CRMs such as Salesforce self-service portal, Dynamics 365 portal, SugarCRM portal, etc. You can choose the portal on the basis of the CRM your company uses.

Self-service portals are truly the necessity for the current ecommerce market, and if you are looking for an enterprise solution, look no further than salesforce client portal to fulfil this need.

Source: https://www.sooperarticles.com/business-articles/business-ideas-articles/4-features-self-service-portals-better-customer-service-1746083.html