When you visit any website as a customer, you must have come across several statements like below:
“To submit any product related query, you can contact our support team on 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, you might have felt overwhelmed. Because there were a number of ways to contact for a single query.
On the business side, as customer service reps, you need some specific skills to navigate this influx of customer queries and respond to them properly.
Even with these skills, it is crucial to have an efficient and proper workflow that helps you navigate customer service and helps your customers navigate your e-store.
The best solution for this problem is web customer portals. The portals help you to get rid of this chaotic jumble. They are the single click destination for all types of customer queries. When you consider any of the web portal solutions for your business, it becomes important to solve the real-life problems of your customers exclusive to your industry and build the portal around it only.
And we promise you, a custom made portal can and will make all the difference!
If you are also considering web customer portal for your business, then it’s going to be one of the best decisions you ever made.
But make sure to include below mentioned essential features in it:
Interactive Dashboards:
A dashboard is the first thing that your customer will see after logging in the portal. So, it is wise to provide a quick recap of all the important things right on the dashboard. You can also categorize the major tasks according to their activity history & display them for convenience.
One more thing, when you integrate a dashboard into the portal, make sure that you don’t end up making a complicated hierarchy which might perplex the user. A dashboard means a quick summary of all the important tasks with a simple visual representation. Therefore, ensure that you include the following things to your dashboard functionalities:
- List the overdue and urgent tasks that need important actions
- Ability to mark the tasks as complete or resolve them
- Provide quick links of routine tasks and content
Additionally, make sure that your dashboard looks tidy and clean. Try to avoid displaying lengthy messages and content at the front door of your portal. It might distract your customers from more important tasks.
Tracking:
We all know the importance of tracking. Whether it’s about tracking orders, shipments or support tickets, it is an integral part of customer service. Providing them with the ability to track their things or tickets, adds positively to their experience. Hence it becomes necessary with customer portals as well, to provide them with updates about their support tickets or appointments.
It is all about making your customers feel like they are your priority when they interact with you through portals.
By proving tracking functions, your customers would be able to track their status updates in no time. You can even send them important messages of due tasks and other things via email. And then they will be able to plan their schedules for the next tasks to organize their workflow.
Self Service:
According to a study by Salesforce, 89 percent of millennials use a search engine to find answers before making a call to get customer service. And not only millennials but each of us is obsessed with mobile phones and technology. As a result of it, we expect fast results from all the business brands we interact with.
But when it comes to providing support, the best way of improving customer experience is to provide essential support through knowledge base and resources. And minimal direct interaction. Currently, they might have to contact the support team when they face any inconvenience during the installation or usage of your product.
But with exhaustive knowledge resources, they get one type of freedom. They can freely lookout for the queries they have regarding the product and can solve them to some extent by themselves.
This way, the burden of your support team gets decreased and they can invest the time in more productive work.
Multi-Device Accessibility:
It is simple. Today’s workforce needs mobility. They cannot afford to stick to their desk for the whole day as they need to manage other activities simultaneously. They should be able to access their data from their phones to handle critical business communications from anywhere and at any time.
After all mobile responsiveness is a number one priority for almost each and every industry in order to improve customer interaction. The same way the portal that you will build should also support the other frequently used devices like smartphones, laptops, tablets, iPad and so on.
Business Logic:
If you opt to buy a readymade portal solution available in the market, the overall workflow will be pre-decided. Whereas, when you have a diverse business flow and want the portal to blend with your business logic then you might need customization in the readymade portal.
But when you go for the custom portal development, you have all the control over the build and application of the product. You can get it made from scratch according to your business logic and add a streamlined flow of activities which is crafted according to your users’ requirements.
Reporting:
For most of the vendors, this feature is the key functionality that is a must. To implement a comprehensive business process which is well organized, it is important for organizations to provide effective reporting and analysis reports to their customers.
There should be an option available for your account holders to create interactive reports which give them an idea about the current business affairs and their interactions.
In a Nutshell
Web portal development is a widespread phenomenon and when getting a custom web portal developed it will vary from industry to industry and business logic. What matters the most is to make a scalable web customer portal that supports your customer requirements and makes their tasks easy. Ultimately it makes your business grow.
Do you want to create your own custom web customer portal? Get in touch with us today and we would be happy to assist!
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