Editor’s note: In the article, Denis dwells on customer portals and benefits they may bring to your customer service processes. In case you need more detailed guidance on setting up a CRM client portal for your business, don’t hesitate to consider our CRM consulting offer.
According to the State of Customer Service report by Microsoft, 90% of respondents expect organizations to offer them an online portal for self-service. What’s more, 74% of consumers prefer using a self-service portal first and contact a support agent only in case of inability to solve their issue by themselves. These figures clearly show what a big advantage a company that uses CRM customer portal may have over its rivals. If you’re looking to know how customer self-service portals can help you build your clients’ loyalty and create a favorable customer experience, keep reading.
What speaks in favor of customer self-service portals
Even if you provide 24/7 customer support via manifold communication channels, like phone, email, live chat, etc., it may still be insufficient to label your customer experience as good. Since a high percentage of your clients may prefer a self-service portal as their primary option, building one for your business looks totally viable. Typically, such a portal can be accessed from the company website and contain knowledge articles, how-to manuals, and FAQ sections. Besides giving clients access to useful information, the portal may serve as a customer community. Through forums and discussion groups available on the portal, customers can raise questions, vote for the best answers, share their experience and tips on product/service usage and find effective solutions to common cases and non-typical issues quicker.
Additionally, having a CRM customer portal allows you to give clients access to certain modules associated with CRM records (e.g., Account, Contact, Notes, etc.). It means that clients will be able to edit their personal info on the portal, thus helping sales reps and customer service agents to keep the info in CRM valid and up-to-date. Also, customers can make online payments via the portal (and get the details of these payments reflected in CRM), or create support cases that go right into your CRM for customer service. However, making all these things possible goes beyond basic portal deployment and requires portal configuration or code-based customization.
Top-3 CRMs with customer portal functionality
Among the most popular and effective CRM solutions with customer portal capabilities are:
Salesforce Service Cloud
The functionality of Salesforce customer portals allows:
- Setting up a branded self-service knowledge base.
- Creating customer communities.
- Highlighting relevant content to customers using artificial intelligence (AI).
- Submitting support tickets and connecting to an agent via live chat.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Dynamics 365 customer portal features include:
- Creating a knowledge base with articles on products/services.
- Building online community forums.
- Tailoring the portal’s content to the preferences of the target audience.
- Integrating the portal with external systems, like SharePoint, Power BI.
Sugar CRM
Sugar’s customer self-service portals have the following capabilities:
- Building a knowledge base with guides, tutorials, FAQs.
- Submitting and tracking support cases.
- Showing personalized content based on the preferences and online activity of the target audience.
Time to try a CRM customer portal!
Deploying a customer portal doesn’t only help your clients help themselves but adds to your customer service efficiency and speed as well. If you seek expert assistance in creating a personalized customer experience using a customer self-service portal, feel free to contact our CRM team.
Looking for a way to improve your customer service? Our specialists in customer service management provide a full cycle of consulting and optimization.
