Stay Open for Business 24/7 With a Customer Service Portal

Your customers, partners, and suppliers want your immediate feedback at all times – day and night. They expect to be able to resolve their issues, purchase products and services, and track the status of their orders. So, to provide complete customer satisfaction, it’s essential to make self-service available and easy.

How? With a customer service portal. Whether you sell business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B), a customer service portal can enhance your services and boost customer satisfaction, while cutting costs and fattening up revenues.

Your company can slash up to 30% off service costs with a well-designed and deployed self-service portal that automates assistance and shrinks call volume. And if your competition doesn’t have a customer service portal yet, they will soon. It’s no longer a convenience; it’s a strategic improvement that enables your business to remain competitive, and builds your business.

Four Keys to Success with Your Customer Service Portal

1. Make it User Friendly and Feature Rich

Your customer service portal must be intuitive to use, and provide the information and features your customers seek.

That includes:

• Providing a single sign-on function that gives users access to all the applications they may need.
• Serving up all the information your customers demand, no matter how many different sources you need to tap into, and bringing it together in a uniform way.
• Making your portal easy to update because customers expect the latest information.
• Offering an advanced search so customers can find what they need quickly and easily.
• Providing interactive features, such as wikis and blogs, that provide a sense of community. These features enable customers to express opinions and provide feedback that helps you build a stronger, more customer-oriented business.
• Personalization so customers feel the portal is tailored to their needs.
• A streamlined product and service order process.

2. Create a Virtual Salesperson Who Sells 24/7

To super-charge the sales your portal generates, it must offer a rich catalog, including all company products and services. Arm it with intelligence for cross-selling and up-selling to maximize every opportunity and satisfy customer needs. Set up the portal to track these revenue-boosting strategies and to provide a window into your customers’ buying behavior. Then tweak and optimize your sales machine.

3. Make Payment Easy

Once your customers decide to make a purchase, you want them to sail through the checkout. So let them pay however is easiest for them, whether it’s using a credit card, debit card, another online payment method, or simply issuing an invoice online.

4. Care for Your Customers

You can build long-term, strong customer relationships if your provide the care and support they need. That goes beyond accepting orders to keeping them up-to-date on their order status, and not missing a beat when handling their requests and complaints. The more you automate these processes through your portal, the better service you can offer.

Common Customer Service Portals Features

Here are some of the key features your customer service portal should include:

• An easy-to-use interface is essential – user-friendliness is key to success with your customer service portal. This means ensuring functions are familiar and easy to use.
• Authentication of who is visiting your website with passwords and more.
• Account management that ensures the portal handles customer needs for password management, preferred payment methods, and help requests as easily as possible.
• Knowledge management that enables customers to find the information they need in a couple of clicks.
• Incident management that tracks the status of tickets that indicate issues in the portal.
• Performance reporting that permits customers to see the results they achieve with your services.

Business Challenges to Overcome in Implementing a Customer Service Portal

You may face some challenges in implementing your customer portal as customer expectations are high. Customers:

• Anticipate that their experience with your company, whether on or offline, will be seamless.
• Want easily available, detailed information so they can make informed decisions.

To overcome the risk taking a wrong step and alienating customers when implementing a customer service portal, it’s a good idea to partner with a company experienced in creating and deploying them.