If it is the productivity, automation, and time management you seek, you must try the client portal for your business. Here is an overall study that shows 67% of respondents preferred a client portal over speaking manually.
With this period, the operations of the business and interaction with the clients have evolved drastically. Imagine a non-tech age without the customer portal; you are doing manual data entry, tracking activities, and other manual stuff.
Fortunately, now we have the customer portals to take over all the manual work. The portal comes in such a way that it makes work easier for each contact involved in the portal. The client portal can be of different types. I.e., WordPress Client Portal or Joomla Client Portal, or any other you should select based on the CMS you use.
Below is the elaborated information about the customer portals and when do you need them.
What is a Client Portal and When do you need the Client Portal?
A client portal is the safest way for your clients to communicate with you online. More specifically, it is mainly used for safely sharing documents across the organization. Once your client signs up to the portal, the client will be provided with a secured username and password, which they will use to access the dedicated areas with the client-specific information.
From shopping to healthcare, law, insurance, finance, and many other businesses have been using the client portal.
When do you need it?
- Do you frequently change the information?
If you and your client are constantly exchanging information over emails, now is the time to say goodbye to the emails. Client portals, especially the cloud-based ones, come with the latest security software to ensure the safety of your data.
Above all, when you create a customized portal, you can choose who can access your company portal. You can even choose the level of access different users can have. If you have a data-centric business, you have the first reason to go for a client portal.
- Do you have the requirement of Ticket Management?
Ticket management refers to robust software used to organize, prioritize, and resolve support tickets. Your employees or clients can issue these tickets then the ticketing system will automatically notify your agent to resolve the tickets.
In the business world, customer problems are unavoidable. There will be clients who need assistance with the big order or simply want to reset the password.
A ticket management system can prove to be a real game-changer to fight all such challenges and stay ahead of the curve.
- Do you need to increase productivity?
When it comes to business processes, 60% of occupations can save upto 30% of their time by adopting automation. Be it any field, marketing, cybersecurity, finance automation has drastically increased productivity.
A client portal is a perfect fit in this case. Right from automating the information sharing to defining the level of the users, sharing project plans, and offering support to the clients. You can do it all within a few clicks.
If you have the above requirements for your business, it is good to have an integrated portal. For example, if you use WordPress CMS, WordPress Client Portal is your way to go. After integrating, below are the benefits and features you will get from the portal.
Overall Benefits and Features of Client Portal
Benefits
Organized communication between team members and Vendors
97% of employees believe communication has an impact on the task performed every day. And you want a positive impact, right? You can save a lot of time by organizing long e-mails to connect with the clients or real-time conversations with your team members.
Above all, you can share the information with other users securely. You can add comments, and every user can give their feedback on the activity. Every user can seamlessly catch up with each other, and there will be transparency with clients throughout the process.
Offers real-time logical information and better user-interface
Each of your clients is different. Because of this, you need to provide logical information to your team members to conclude. The client portal provides you logical real-time information about the clients and what their issues are. This will help to provide the best solution to them.
To fetch such information a robust dashboard and better user interface are a must. Better UI makes the user experience smooth, and the user can get the work done in a few clicks. Also, with a better UI, you will have a better visual representation of the information to track and analyze. The client portal gives it all.
Reduce the Workload of Agents
Everyone wants to increase the efficiency of an employee with maximum client satisfaction. Agents don’t have to spend time answering every question. A question might be simple like this “How Can I Reset the password?”. The client portal will automatically suggest the solution to the client if you have uploaded it.
In addition, it will direct the customer to the suggested solution. With these suggested solutions the client doesn’t have to submit the ticket. This will reduce the number of overall tickets, and thus agents can focus on more complex questions.
Saves your time and money
As we have discussed in the above article, you don’t have to send emails. You don’t have to spend time resolving every ticket. You don’t have to enter data manually. This will spare you a lot of time to focus on the more critical tasks.
Time is money. No business person will deny it. By saving time you allocate the time to the meaningful ones. Apart from that, communication carries a certain cost. A phone call and courier services also carry a certain cost. The client portal saves such recurring costs and puts some money into your pocket.
Features
Offers you easy customization according to your brand
As business owners, you might have different needs for your business. There are many client portals that can be customized depending on your requirements. You can take out the unnecessary features from the portal and can add the new ones as well.
A robust client portal even lets you customize your theme as per your brand. You can change the color of the portal. You can place the logo of your brand. You can customize the email template and even the roles of your agents in the client portal.
Knowledge base to educate your customer
91% of customers would use an online knowledge base if available and tailored according to their needs. You see the power of the knowledge base. It is one of the key features in any client feature you will get. While setting up a knowledge base, you can even create it based on the categories of your products or services.
Having a knowledge base is an excellent way for companies to provide support and the support agents with easy-to-find information. Also, this streamlines the communication process between the client and the organization and increases agent productivity.
Interactive dashboard and easy to track activity
We had a word about dashboards, but that was just a bit of it. The dashboard is the management tool that lets you track, analyze key data points and other metrics to your screen. Dashboard lets you know each and every detail. Like How many clients visit your portal or what is their primary concern for them.
Dashboards also make the reporting efficient. You can enjoy the automatically generated report based on the configured time. Also, dashboards give you an overview of the pending activities, completed activities, and much more. This will assist you in tracking the activities.
Why Should You Use Customer Portals?
In a nutshell, the client is the one who wants professional service from the company. In contrast, the customer refers to the person who purchases the product and services from the company. Many people consider the customer portal and client portal as the same. Both have different purposes to serve
WordPress customer portal or Joomla customer portal is the best example of it. If you have a website based on WordPress, then the WordPress customer portal is your way to go.
Final Words
Client portals offer an automated communication channel that results in a healthy business-client relationship. In the above article, we discussed the benefits and features of the client portal. Simply attracting by watching the benefits is not going to help you.
You should also consider your requirements and resources. If you need the ticketing system, enhanced productivity, or secure data sharing, you should opt for the client portal.
