Custom web portals have become crucial for businesses looking to provide personalized, efficient experiences for their customers and employees. But what exactly makes a custom web portal effective? To ensure your project requirements are fulfilled through a web portal, you must have enough features to help you with that. Custom web portals are the best way to have features that suit your business and customer needs, but some features need to be in your custom web portal.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the must-have features for any custom web portal, ensuring your business meets both its own needs and those of your customers.
What Features Does Every Custom Web Portal Need?
Developing a custom web portal requires careful planning and expertise. Here are the essential features you should consider:
1. Interactive Dashboard
An interactive dashboard serves as the gateway to your web portal, making a crucial first impression on users. Here, you want to ensure that the homepage is neat with smooth navigation, has information in the proper place, and is highly interactive.
Key elements of an effective dashboard include:
- Prominently displayed contact information
- Easily accessible self-service options
- A prominent search bar with voice input capability
- Customizable themes for user personalization
- A section for bookmarked products or wish lists
This way, you can make an interface suitable for users of all skill levels.
2. Self-Service Tools
Self-service is a mandatory feature in modern web portals. Users mostly prefer the luxury and comfort of finding the answers to their questions without waiting for another human to respond to them on business days.
Effective self-service tools offer several benefits:
- Empower users to find solutions independently
- Reduce the workload on customer service representatives
- Provide 24/7 support availability
- Improve overall customer satisfaction
To create a robust self-service system, include resources such as:
- Knowledge-base articles
- FAQs
- Chatbot services
- Instructional videos
- Community forums
3. User Personalization
With a web portal, you can personalize recommendations for your customers relevant to their interests, resulting in increased engagements and sales.
Personalization can be achieved through:
- Analyzing user activity data (e.g., order history, search history)
- Offering tailored product recommendations
- Providing personalized shortcuts and themes
- Customizing content based on user preferences and behavior
Implementing effective personalization can lead to:
- Higher user engagement
- Increased conversion rates
- Improved customer loyalty
4. Easy Access to Information
Users demand quick and easy access to information, so you need a simple design. When listing requirements for a custom web portal, determine the important information that needs to be visible right away after logging in or on every page. You also need to consider the amount of content you want to allocate in each section.
A pro tip: Don’t stuff too much content for users to get confused and overwhelmed with the information. Keep it informative enough to serve what customers need.
Best practices for information accessibility include:
- Implementing a clear and intuitive navigation structure
- Using descriptive headings and subheadings
- Incorporating a powerful search function
- Utilizing white space effectively to avoid clutter
5. Interactive Insights and Analytics
Business processes need to be well organized to streamline functionalities across all departments. It is important to build insight functions that allow you and users to create, share, and print reports with information like the status of order history, current business affairs, support issues, and other data.
Key features of effective analytics tools include:
- Customizable dashboards for different user roles
- Real-time data visualization
- Export capabilities for further analysis
- Predictive analytics for business forecasting
6. Tracking Tools
Having real-time tracking features is necessary for you and to showcase your customers. You can update them with real-time delivery updates. You can track orders, support tickets, shipments, and whatnot. This feature will eliminate the confusion regarding delivery status, reducing the number of support tickets. Plus, customers trust your company more as you give live updates on their orders.
7. Content Management
As you are aware that content is the foundation of your web portal. If you don’t have relevant, accurate, and updated content, the chances of customers exiting your website are high. With custom web portal development, you can have the right features to simplify content management.
A Content management system needs to notify users when a document is created, updates need review, or expires. You need features and functionalities like the ability to restore previous page versions, add start and expiration dates, tags, and widgets, and analyze the order history and searches.
8. Accessible on Various Devices
In today’s time, it is a necessity to make the web portal accessible from multiple devices. Staying at your desk for the whole day might not be possible, but you need to be able to access the portal at any time. In such situations, it would really help if you can access it through a mobile phone or tablet, right? And this is not only required for the admin of the employees, but for customers too.
With such a facility, they can access your portal 24/7 at their convenient time, at their convenient place, and from any device. Providing mobile responsive solutions to customers is the most important step you can take to reach the goal of providing the best customer experience.
9. User Acknowledgments
This is an area of security where businesses can request a user to acknowledge, agree, or give their consent to any terms and policies of the company. You want to consider the format of acknowledgments for this feature, like pop-up messages while logging in. You will need to display different messages, take different consents, and ask for different permissions for different functions, so ensure you have it all in the customer web portal. You should never miss user acknowledgments as they can cost you if not done correctly.
10. Social Features
Social media is an inseparable part of any business. Your custom portal needs collaborative tools to enable users to connect directly from social media channels without hassle. Enabling comments on blogs, interacting with polls, following users, etc., can increase your business’ brand awareness and engagement. You can even let them share your product pictures from the website directly to their social media to share with people, have their opinion on whether to buy it or not, etc.
11. Integration with Software
You can easily integrate the custom web portal with your existing software. You can integrate with CRM (customer relationship management) systems, LMS (learning management systems), or other information management systems. Integrating it with the system can be more comprehensive and interactive.
You can connect the portal with popular software like Microsoft Office 365, allowing you to use these tools without leaving the portal. You also want to consider how the built-in integrations can appear and what kind of information or data can be pulled through to the portal.
Build Your Custom Web Portal Today!
At CRMJetty, we specialize in developing and building custom web portals tailored to your specific needs. Our team of experts is committed to delivering high-quality solutions that incorporate all the essential features discussed above and more.
Here’s why you should choose CRMJetty for your custom web portal development:
- Years of experience in portal development
- Expertise in integrating the latest technologies and best practices
- Customized solutions tailored to your business needs
- Ongoing support and maintenance services
Ready to take your business to the next level with a custom web portal? Contact CRMJetty today to discuss your requirements and get started on building the perfect portal for your business.
All product and company names are trademarks™, registered® or copyright© trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.
