The benefits of setting up a customer service portal
Offering your customers a portal can not only solve concrete problems: after-sales service, proximity, customer relationship management; it's also a major asset in terms of image and productivity. Find out all our expert opinions on CRM in the dedicated section.
How a customer service portal works
Its functionalities
The principle behind a customer service portal is that each customer can access it individually. This means :
- 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 UX: the famous User Experience. Today, 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), instruction manuals or online tutorials... By setting up a customer portal, your company aims to :
- bring together in one place company information that would otherwise be scattered all over the web.
- filter it: if a piece of information is relayed by you, it's because you know 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're on their own. The effort of multiplying and then cross-referencing sources, to judge their coherence, is laborious and can be a deterrent. If, thanks to your upstream work, the user is sure to find the information he's 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 an order, customers no longer have to enter their personal details the next time they place an order. Name, address and preferences are immediately associated with the session. As a result, any new purchase or restocking will be faster.
After the sale
After-sales service is another important aspect of UX. When the only way for the user 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. The online messaging system enables them to forward items to you if necessary, and to keep a record of their progress.
The benefits for you
Enhancing your image
The first benefit is a boost to your image. By optimizing customer satisfaction, you project the image of an efficient, available and reliable company. Customers feel considered 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 answer can be found every time. You no longer have to ask the customer for additional information: you don't have to repeat the article every time. Everything is in the box, and it's as if the user had a single point of contact. Exchanges testify to the professionalism of your teams. And your customer perceives that information flows well on your side.
Acquiring and retaining customers
More satisfied customers are more loyal customers. What's more, once they've experienced the fluidity of the portal, they'll have no reason to go elsewhere. Once a customer has logged in and everything is pre-registered with one supplier, they won't want to start all over again with another. It would take time to familiarize yourself with another tool, to get to know the new provider, and so on. If your service during and after the sale is top-notch, it becomes a lever for loyalty. In the same way, pre-sales content is an asset for acquiring new customers.
Optimizing 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 click away from 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 communication campaigns, after-sales service for operations, and accounting for invoices. CRM thus 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 multi-faceted 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