The benefits of setting up a customer service portal
Offering a portal to your customers can not only solve practical problems: after-sales service, proximity, customer relationship management; it is also a major asset in terms of image and productivity. Read all our expert opinions on CRM in the dedicated section.
The principle of a customer service portal
Its functionalities
The principle behind a customer service portal is that each customer can access it individually. They will find :
- general information about the company, news, its sector, etc.
- their own information: on past and pending orders, customer follow-up, etc.
Your role
Setting up a customer service portal improves the UX: the famous User Experience. These days, we aspire to greater autonomy and immediacy. When we have a problem, all we have to do is Google it and the solution appears in search engines, forums, FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), user manuals or online tutorials... By setting up a customer portal, your company aims to :
- bring together in one place information about the company that would otherwise be scattered all over the web.
- filter it: if information is relayed by you, it's because you're sure it's relevant.
Benefits for your customers
Before the sale
When you take on this role, you save the user time. Browsing the web alone, they are on their own. The effort of multiplying and then cross-checking sources, to judge their consistency, is laborious and can be a deterrent. If, thanks to your upstream work, the user is sure to find the information they are looking for, and in a qualified manner, then the customer benefit becomes real.
During the sale
In the same way, a customer portal helps to facilitate the act of buying. By registering as part of their order, customers will no longer have to enter their personal details the next time they place an order. Their name, address and preferences will be immediately associated with their session. So any new purchase or restocking will be quicker.
After the sale
After-sales service is also an important aspect of UX. When the only way for users to reach you in the event of a problem is to send an e-mail, with no idea of the response time, or to go through a saturated switchboard, user satisfaction is at an all-time low. On the customer service portal, the dedicated interface makes support more accessible and easier to understand. Customers can open a ticket and track its progress. Using the online messaging system, they can forward items to you if necessary, and keep a record of their progress.
The benefits for you
Enhancing your image
The first benefit is a boost to your image. By optimising customer satisfaction, you project the image of an efficient, available and reliable company. Customers feel valued and reassured. The second benefit is professionalism. Take the case where there are several exchanges on the same ticket, for example. Even if it's a different person in your company who answers each time, the history available on the platform means that the right response can be given each time. You no longer have to ask the customer for additional information: there's no need to repeat the article each time. Everything is in the box, and it's as if the user had a single point of contact. The exchanges testify to the professionalism of your teams. And your customer can see that information is flowing smoothly on your side.
Acquiring and keeping your customers
More satisfied customers are more loyal customers. And once they've experienced the fluidity of the portal, they'll have no reason to go elsewhere. When a customer has a session and everything is pre-registered with one supplier, there's no point in starting from scratch with another. It would take time to familiarise yourself with another tool, to make yourself known to the new provider, and so on. If your service during and after the sale is of high quality, it becomes a lever for building loyalty. In the same way, the content made available before the sale is an asset for acquiring new customers.
Optimising operations
Setting up a customer portal is not synonymous with extra work. On the contrary! As long as your CRM already has :
- your customer database
- the history of exchanges with them
- problems reported to support,
- order tracking
- etc.
It's just a short step to turning this information into a customer portal! With a CRM like TigerPro, you can use this extension internally to keep the customer at the heart of your business.
A tool like this even becomes an operational asset for you. Your various departments use it: sales for customer follow-up, marketing to orchestrate its communication campaigns, after-sales service for its operations, and accounting for invoices. CRM then becomes a central tool for your company. Integrated with your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), or interfaced with your other management tools via its APIs (Applications Programming Interface), it is a key factor in productivity and collaboration.
A customer service portal, whether as a knowledge base to facilitate customer relations and after-sales service, or as a tool to improve internal operations, is a multiple asset for a company. Combined with CRM, it becomes the operational extension of the latter, while generating real benefits for your customers.
Article translated from French