As a writer, I like writing about portals and how self-service changes how we approach business. As a customer, I like that we have a self-service option. It’s not that I have any problem asking for help from support reps. Waiting on calls for hours or a reply email is too much for me. I prefer solving problems on my own with the help of knowledge base articles, videos, and more. While it gives me complete control over my activities, it also challenges me to learn and grow by tackling complex problems independently. If that’s not a success for me as a customer, I don’t know what is!
I am not the only one who prefers self-service. According to Statista, 88 percent of customers prefer self-service over talking to customer support representatives. What would you do if customers don’t want support reps as their first line of support? How will you provide effective support?
The answer is a customer success portal. This tool makes it easy for customers like me to find solutions in a way that’s convenient to us. It helps businesses deliver services efficiently and enhance customer experience without increasing business costs. In this article, we will learn what a customer success portal is and how you can turn your customers into loyal ones with it.
1. What is Customer Success Portal?
2. Why is Customer Success Portal Important?
3. How Customer Success Portal Adds Value to your Business
4. Walk on the Road to Success with CRMJetty
1. What is Customer Success Portal?
A digital solution that anticipates customers’ challenges and problems and provides proactive answers and solutions to them. Customer portal provides self-service via a knowledge base to help users with relevant information. It focuses on customer support and thus helps customers with help centers like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and DeskXpand.
Plus, it’s a digital gateway that manages customers’ relationships with businesses and provides new opportunities to connect, share, and grow through communities. Examples include the Hubspot community and Drift community.
Apple Support is one of the examples of the self-service that we are talking about. They provide search tools with personalized workflow options for customers to click on. They have links to provide support via community, knowledge base, and social media underneath workflow options.
Customer success is about providing value to your customers and increasing loyalty and revenue.
Customer Success V/s Customer Support
Customer success and support are intertwined. Together they result in customer satisfaction and are often confused as being the same. They are not.
- Customer success offers support proactively. Here, businesses stay with customers throughout their journey and improve their overall experience.
- Customer support works on solving customers’ problems after they reach out for help.
2. Why is Customer Success Portal Important?
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said and what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou
This applies in business too. Customers today expect a certain level of self-service. They are tech-savvy and capable of solving their problems themselves. They have high expectations of customer service, and any delay in the service tends to result in decreased CSAT (customer satisfaction) score.
Hence, you need to bring in a customer portal to stay abreast of the changing customer expectations and acknowledge the urgency of solving problems.
A customer success portal is a problem-solving, time-saving, productivity-boosting, and communication streamlining tool. It eliminates unnecessary interaction touchpoints and empowers users to find resolutions independently. It offers more capabilities than customer support channels, including email, large file and document sharing, access information, etc. It reduces churn rates and increases efficiency by automating all the repetitive tasks.
Overall, it eases customers’ and agents’ life in terms of service and support by offering everything they might need to accomplish their tasks. This is why choosing the right portal becomes paramount.
3. How Customer Success Portal Adds Value to Your Business
You don’t need a customer success portal only to automate the support. The purpose is to empower your customers to experiment with different tools and technologies. It’s about putting power in their hand, giving them instant access to all the required information.
Here’s how the customer portal accomplishes the desired goals and purposes.
i. One Place for Everything
A portal is a one-stop solution that syncs all the data from different channels and presents it systematically in one place. It ensures customers and agents won’t have to switch between platforms to find the relevant information. With centralized data, businesses can make informed decisions. It helps them focus on trivial matters and find solutions instantly.
ii. Granular Level Access
On the recent Lapsus$ attacks, Microsoft provided organizations with several steps to improve their security, including strengthening multifactor authentication and limiting access control.
A customer portal ensures that users have only role-specific access that limits the access only to authorized users, unlike the DEV-0357 case, where some companies give their help desk the ability to change the privilege rights of the users. It also provides multi-factor authentication with social login options.
iii. Proactive Customer Support
A customer portal offers help that customers might need. For example, suppose you’re in an eCommerce business. In that case, the portal will allow your customers to track their order status, view their transactions, understand refund policies, and more without contacting the customer support team or before they realize they might need these features or help.
iv. Engage Customers
Knowledge base and community together foster customer engagement. It enables users to find relevant information through articles and engage with other customers through the community forums. They can help one another, offer solutions, share ideas, and give feedback about the products and services.
Community forums are a way for businesses to build a strong support network without investing in one. It also helps them get valuable feedback to improve their business offerings.
v. Automate Repetitive Tasks
A feature-rich customer success portal has features like a ticketing system and workflow automation to streamline internal operations and reduce your support team’s burden. For instance, if a ticket is raised, it should be auto-assigned to the respective rep as per the priority. It should also update customers about its status. Or, you can allow customers to search for queries, and if an article or a ticket with a similar issue exists, they should be able to view it instead of raising a new ticket.
vi. Enhance Agents’ Productivity
As customers can self-serve themselves and troubleshoot basic queries, agents get more time to focus on complex queries. They don’t have to answer basic questions, which are usually repeated. For example, what’s the refund policy? or can I change my password? They can redirect customers to FAQs and relevant articles.
Solving complex queries creates curiosity, which increases their efficiency and productivity.
vii. Prepare for the Future
A customer success portal helps manage business continuity and ticket volumes with automation and multiple support channels during challenging times. It gathers data at every touchpoint and provides businesses with valuable insights about customers, sales, marketing, and overall business operations.
It helps you take a calculated risk, one where chances of profits are more.
4. Walk on the Road to Success with CRMJetty
Developing a customer success portal is easy and tricky, depending on your business and requirements. There are readily available solutions you can integrate into your CRM or go for custom development if you have unique requirements.
I recommend custom development as the solution is specifically tailored to your business. Features, workflow, terms, UI and UX everything is designed and developed keeping your customers in mind. As an experienced custom portal development company, we can help you with the customer success portal your customers would love to interact with.
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