Look for community, knowledgebase, industry-specific, or technology-driven solutions.
Web portals are not limited to one type. Depending on your target audience and business needs, you can create a wide range of portals to support your business’s daily operations. Say you’re in an insurance business and tired of customers’ calls asking about their account balance, investment updates, loan status, or so. You can ease your agents’ and customers’ collaboration with a custom portal solution. Agents will be able to handle their tasks, and customers can control their accounts, investments, and loans themselves.
However, a self-service approach is not enough to increase conversions. You need to choose the right type of portal and the features to deliver excellent value. Hence, this article will cover the different portal types you can choose from for custom portal development.
1. B2C & B2B Portal
B2C portals serve customers’ unique needs, whereas the B2B portal helps organizations manage suppliers, distributors, and other stakeholders’ needs. B2C is the typical customer portal that helps customers in purchasing and managing orders and activities. B2B helps handle many complex processes and thus comes up with features such as invoicing, approval workflows, compliance, business analytics, etc.
The best example of a B2B and B2C portal is Amazon. It allows end customers to make purchases, track orders, pay instantly, and return orders. With Amazon Business, it makes it easy for businesses to connect. Sellers and retailers can create their accounts and connect an entire team or purchasing groups to them. They can access business-specific prices, customize order approvals, consolidate deliveries, leverage guided buying, and track and monitor spending with handy charts.
2. Community Portal
An information-sharing custom portal solution with the ability to connect and collaborate is a community portal. Where other portals give users the ability to access and perform specific actions, a community portal connects the right people and empowers them to support one another.
The community portal allows external users such as customers or partners to chat with one another. It allows them to post questions, start discussions, or ask for help. They promote engagement and allow users to receive instant feedback and replies in most cases.
A popular example of a community portal is Quora. It’s a platform where users can ask questions and get solutions. People can share their insights and learn a lot of interesting things. Another example is GitHub that connects developers worldwide to shape the future of technology. Developers can share feedback, request help, review code, and discuss technologies and solutions.
Note: Any business looking to build a brand community should go for community portal development.
3. e-Learning Portal
Since the COVID-19 outbreak, e-learning has become the center of our lives. Schools, universities, and companies can benefit from an e-Learning portal. Businesses can use an eLearning portal to help their employees up-skill and re-skill. They can provide periodic training and up-skilling programs. Schools and universities can leverage eLearning solutions to access various information on academics and students, teaching and grading, enrollment and employment, training and finances, etc.
With e-learning custom portal development, organizations and institutes can share content easily and provide a better user experience.
LinkedIn Learning is an e-learning portal that allows users to gain access to more than 20k courses. This unique portal enables learners to access and learn at their own pace. Course creators can log in to access the total enrollments, view feedback, ratings, reviews, troubleshoot the queries, etc. Learners can log in and glance at their progress, while administrators can track the progress of both learners and course creators.
4. Partner Portal
Another type of custom portal solution in demand is a partner portal. It’s important for businesses that focus on indirect sales with the help of partners. A partner portal helps businesses convince their partners to sell more using different marketing, sales, and training tools.
Developing a partner portal helps everyone stay on the same page. Businesses can track partners’ activities while partners can access the information they need and take action.
An example of such a solution is a partner portal created by Liferay for a popular pizza chain Dominos. The fully functional portal provides team members and franchises quick access to updates, department-specific home pages, and links to important information. Another such solution is a sales analytics platform used by a company working with beverage and drinks distributors. The portal provides everything from data management to mobile accessibility and advanced analytics to facilitate work for partners and other staff members.
5. Knowledge Base Portal
One of the most talked-about custom portal development examples is a knowledge base portal. The objective of a knowledge base portal is to automate customer support by providing access to FAQs, articles, how-to guides, training videos, user manuals, etc. A knowledge base portal is where customers can find answers to all their questions. It improves teamwork and helps maintain productivity. With a knowledge base, customers can find the relevant information themselves, reducing the load on the support team. Employees, on the contrary, can find specific details while collaborating with external stakeholders.
It’s a hub of knowledge related to your products and services. The best thing is that your customers, employees, and stakeholders don’t have to look outside for information. They can find everything right in one place.
A knowledge base portal comes with advanced search, query management, presale queries, role-based access, CRM access, and more. Make sure it’s well-built, structured, and organized. The content should be relevant and helpful.
Slack, HelpCrunch, Spotify, Apple, and Asana are good sources of inspiration for knowledge base portal development.
Build a Custom Portal Solution
There’s no question as to whether you should go for a custom portal development or not in 2021. Even in 2018, 88% of customers said they prefer an online self-service support portal.
Now, what remains is the type of custom portal solution you should build. If you’re looking to ease customers’ efforts, go for a customer portal. For brand building, a community portal or brand portals are the go-to options. Bring in a knowledge base portal to speed up the customer support, and the list goes on.
If you need any help deciding the portal or portal development type, feel free to contact us.
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