Customer portals are a common tool for helping customers address their service issues and information needs. They can be a useful element of a comprehensive approach to providing self-service. Here is a summary of the customer benefits your business can derive from this powerful customer experience tool.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
Well-designed and promoted customer portals can increase self-service adoption, which leads to greater customer satisfaction. Extensive research shows that the easier we can make it for customers to solve their own problems, the more satisfied they become.
Reduced Support Costs
Any tool that increases the number of customers that opt to solve their own challenges instead of speaking to a live person improves a company’s cost structure. Further, an online customer portal can enhance customer retention by increasing speed to resolution.
More Customer Options
Customer portals enable you to offer self-service tools of many types, giving customers multiple ways of resolving their issues. For example, your organization could provide digital self-service apps, a knowledge base, a community forum, and a chatbot within the same environment. This approach enables the customer to address their challenges in the manner which is most comfortable for them.
24/7 Access
Today’s customers want the option to address their needs at any time, not just during working hours. A customer portal provides easy access for users to resolve their challenges on their timing and terms.
Centralization
Customer portals centralize self-service service options in a single location. Users can visit this page and see the full array of customer experience options available for their use. By bringing together all your self-service options in a single place, you can eliminate the need for customers to search for these solutions whenever they need to address an issue. While best practice is not to confine access to self-service options only via a portal, having a single, dedicated location may help boost adoption and customer engagement.
Speed to Resolution
These portals can increase the speed with which customers resolve their issues. By requesting customer login and identity verification once, you can streamline the steps required for the customer to complete multiple actions in a single session.
Secure Sharing Environment
A secure client portal offers a safe way to share private information with customers. By placing the applications behind a login gate, you can control access and give clients a sense of safety and security as they resolve their own customer issues.
Personalization
Portals offer a great place to provide customized or personalized information to customers. For example, your company can adjust offers each customer sees to reflect likely customer needs or their relative value to the company.
Omnichannel Access
Well-designed portals can provide content and options to customers on whatever screens they are using to access. A modern customer portal will be compatible with PC, Mobile, or Tablet screens.
Sales and Marketing Opportunities
Many companies integrate sales and marketing messages into a customer portal to build awareness for products/options, collect more leads, and even enable self-service sign-up and conversions. These powerful tactics cuts overall sales costs while fostering greater customer entanglement. Further, the messages and sales options can be tailored to the likely needs of each logged-in user.
Aid to Live Contact Center Engagements
When customers do find the need to speak with your support team, having a robust customer portal can help representatives quickly direct customers to tools and even conduct co-browsing sessions. This increases customer understanding, reduces connected time, and can help increase self-service adoption in the future.
Analytics
Customer portals can provide analytics to help companies understand customer needs. You can analyze this information to inform your overall self-service adoption strategy.
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If you’d like more information on creating or enhancing your customer portal, visit our Callvu web page and explore our other valuable content. You’ll find links to many relevant articles on customer portal benefits and best practices below. Explore the rest of Callvu.com for other solutions to drive improved customer satisfaction.
