Customer experience is a crucial aspect that you can not afford to take lightly. Customer service is also among the factors that constitute customer experience. In fact, 89% of customers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.
Although there are some differences in the processes and types of clients in the B2B sector, the clients are ultimately “customers” and customer experience matters for them too.
With a B2B portal, the process of providing a better customer experience becomes easier than the regular support system that you may provide via calls and emails. Ticket system, knowledge base, etc. are some of the most important aspects that can take your customer service experience to the next level. So, let’s understand what B2B portals can do for you B2B business in detail.
Benefits of B2B Portal Development
1. Cost-Effective Ownership – Highly Valuable for Startups and Small Businesses
One of the biggest reasons to consider B2B portal development is the cost. For small businesses and startups, budgeting is a crucial deciding factor for them in all their operations. A big MNC may be able to afford to hire a large pool of support agents to manage costumes’ queries, inventory, and more but a small startup may not. The reason is simple – they may not have thousands of dollars to spend on hiring a pool of support staff.
This is where a B2B portal can fill the gap. The cost of setting up a B2B portal is comparatively much less than that of hiring a support team. Even if on an hourly basis or outsourcing basis, a support staff may cost you more than a B2B portal.
Hence, picking B2B portal development over hiring a support staff is an ideal and budget-friendly choice. In fact, even big companies like DHgate, TradeWheel, Alibaba, etc. also provide a B2B portal.
2. Speedier Initial Setup
Everything like creating a catalog, handling queries, promoting every promotional sale manually will neither be feasible nor time-saving. If you hire staff, you may also need to train them to finish time-bound customer support tasks like consultation or client onboarding. You may also have to stay abreast of the daily progress by having them reporting to you every now and then.
Do you really want all this “mess” – that too when your business has just started? Of course NOT.
Ideally, your first goal is to get your business off the ground fast and without any hassle. And a B2B portal development can do it for you. This is because it enables you to automate every manual task and kickstart your business instantly. Right from creating a catalog, integrating your new system or functionality with your existing software, changing product listings, running a promotional sale, etc.; it makes everything a matter of minutes.
This way, B2B portal development proves to be a great time-saver for your business – especially in its initial phase.
3. Real-Time Analytics – Speedy Insights
Tracking everything manually right from queries to complaints or sales can be a tough job. Not with a B2B portal though. With a centralized view of every business aspect, you can analyze your business requirements in real time.
You can view the customers’ demographics, common queries or grievances, etc. with a B2B portal. You can also get insights into your clients’ requirements and customize your products (or services) accordingly with a B2B portal.
You can manage your inventory efficiently by finding out which products are in high demand and which aren’t. Accordingly, you can decide on reordering certain products and holding a sale on the others.
You can also update your FAQs or content according to your most common questions or queries by your customers. This helps you align your brand with customers’ expectations and get better results in the long run.
4. Enhanced Security
Security is a crucial aspect to consider for both small and big businesses alike. If you are the admin, you can’t allow anyone to access anything from your CRM. Instead, to upkeep security of your CRM database security, you should enable different portal users to view only what their defined roles allow them to.
With a B2B portal, you can define user-roles and grant access to different CRM entities based on their user roles. You can document the roles and implement them well right within a B2B portal and keep your security tight.
Looking for the best B2B portal development services for your B2B organization? Our customer portal can be your best portal to start with. This portal can get your business off the ground fast and easily. It is a ready-to-integrate and scalable solution that you can integrate and start off. If you want, we can customize it for you too.
So, let’s connect to discuss your portal requirements to proceed!
5. Boost in the Overall Speed of Business Processes
As we discussed above, initial setup becomes much faster with a B2B portal than without it. Even if you may still dare to manually manage business processes at the start, you can’t continue it forever. Simply because the processes and operations grow more and complex as the size of the business grows.
With too much on plate to manage manually, you may not keep up with retaining efficiency. As a result, it may lead to a sluggishness in your business operations and of course hamper your business productivity.
Consider a real-life scenario. You set up your business and within one year, your customers increase in count to become 10000. Great. But what’s next? The number of daily queries and tickets that you have to handle now is 1000 on an average.
You had started with a support team of around 5 agents in the beginning but what would you do now? Would you keep making them overwork and wear out or hire more support agents to expand your team?
In either way, you might end up losing more than you invested and expected in return. Here’s how.
If you make your small support team over-work and incentivize them, they’re still likely to make more errors. Afterall, they are humans and not machines! With this rise in human errors, your customer satisfaction rate may drop and deprive you of some high-value customers over time.
If you hire more support agents, you may succeed in keeping the customer satisfaction rate intact but at a huge cost. A team of say 30 agents will force you to shell out a much bigger amount as salary than a team of just 5. Simple Maths! This will lead to a drop in your ROI and profitability margins which you won’t want.
6. Convenient Service, More Efficiency
With a reduction in the redundant tasks through B2B portal development, your support team gets more time to focus on the big picture. They can focus more on big issues and queries instead of answering redundant questions and handling repetitive tasks manually. This helps manage customers better and handle tasks more efficiently.
Besides, when customers get what they want without much hassle, they welcome it. Thus, with B2B portal development; you can also enrich your customer experience with easy and speedy self-service.
Features to Consider During B2B Portal Development
There are a number of ready-to-integrate B2B portal development solutions available in the market. While they may fit some organizations, they may not fit others. This is where a custom B2B portal comes into the picture. A custom portal caters to your exact business needs and helps you optimize your business operations.
However, there are a few common features that you may consider while developing a custom portal or picking a ready-to-integrate portal.
1. Easily Navigable Product Catalog & Services Display
The portal should make it easy to display your products and services to your current and new customers. It should be available and running 24×7 for customers to check out the available products and services with easy navigation.
2. Hassle-Free Communication
Your portal should facilitate an easy communication between your customers and your organization. There should be varied ways to connect including chat bots, tickets, etc.
3. Multiple Payment Gateways
There should be the freedom to make payments directly from within the portal when they log in. Further, there should be a choice between multiple payment options to pick from.
4. Better Insights
If you don’t analyze your user data, you can better your products or services. The portal you pick should give an exhaustive view of users’ data like preferences, demands, common queries, etc. This information will help you upsell your products as well as tailor them according to the changing customers’ demand.
5. Security
Whether you create a B2B web portal development as an extension of your CRM or keep it independent of your CRM, it should be secure. The database should remain on your servers to ensure the security is intact.
If you are looking to enhance security with B2B portal development, our customer portal can help you out. If you want, you can also customize it to fit your business needs.
CRMJetty – Avail of the Best B2B Portal Development Services
Now that you know how B2B portal development can give wings to your B2B business, it’s time to get one ready. If you are looking for a B2B web portal solution, you are at the right place. We, at CRMJetty, provide a ready-to-integrate customer portal solution that you can integrate and start off.
Our developer team can also customize the portal to fit your business needs better. Even if you have completely different portal requirements, we’ve got you covered. Our developer team can render B2B web portal development services to get you a portal from ground up exclusively for your organization.
Let’s join hands to build the best B2B portal for your business!
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