A big part of delivering seamless customer experience is empowering customers to resolve queries (at least some of them) on their own.
Offering self-service options shows customers that you value their time and is one of the most important things you can do as a business. Not to mention that self-service can result in savings of around $3 million annually!
One of the best ways to enable customers to self-serve is to offer them a dedicated space where they can access important information without having to get in touch with your support team every time.
That’s what a customer portal is, in a nutshell.
Implementing a customer portal is the easiest way to be there for your customers without the burden of overhead costs. It also offers the flexibility for customers to interact with your business and get quick answers whenever they want to.
Read on to learn more about customer portals and its role in improving your customer experience strategy.
Let’s start with the basics.
Table of Contents
- What is A Customer Portal?
- What are the Features of A Customer Portal?
- How Customer Portals Improve Customer Experience
- Best Practices for Implementing A Customer Portal
- 1. Focus on a user-friendly design
- 2. Provide comprehensive self-service resources
- 3. Ensure security and privacy
- 4. Monitor and optimize
- A Well Designed Customer Portal Can Improve User Experience
What is A Customer Portal?
A customer portal is a centralized, self-service platform that allows customers to interact with your business and access information. Most customer portals allow customers to manage their account information, track the status of tickets, find useful resources, and reach out to support at their convenience.
It can streamline your customer service process by empowering customers to resolve queries themselves. This reduces agent overload and allows your support team to focus on tackling more complex queries. You can implement a customer portal either on your website or your mobile app or both.
An example of a customer portal is Amazon’s user account portal. Customers can track their orders, update their addresses, chat with customer support, and view details of their membership at any time on the website or mobile app.
What are the Features of A Customer Portal?
Here are some features commonly found in a customer portal.
- Personalization: Tailored dashboards and content that is relevant to the customer. For instance, a customer portal on a banking website may show the customer’s transaction history, account balance, list of saved beneficiaries, or upcoming payments.
- Knowledge base: Customers should be able to easily access resources such as help articles, tutorials, and guides that can help them with feature adoption and query resolution.
- Order tracking: Online retailers should look for customer portals that allow users to track the status of their orders.
- Ticketing: Enable customers to raise tickets and view the progress of their complaints through the portal.
- Account management: Customers should be able to view account information such as saved cards, addresses, passwords, personal details, preferences, etc. and update them when needed.
- Security: Ensure that interactions through the portal are always secure and private.
- Cross-platform accessibility: Customers should be able to access the portal across devices such as desktops, mobiles, or other smart devices.
Hiver offers a robust customer portal that allows users to raise tickets any time without having to directly contact your support team. Customers can submit their queries by using a query submission form that is available on the portal. You can customize the fields in the form to capture all the necessary details needed to accurately resolve the customer’s query.
Once a customer submits their query, Hiver also offers a query tracking feature that allows them to view the status of the issue raised and the person who the ticket has been assigned to.
The customer portal can be customized according to your brand’s logo and colors so that it fits seamlessly with your website.
If your company gets a lot of repetitive queries, Hiver also offers an option to build and share a knowledge base. You can basically create a repository of help articles that your customers can access anytime, anywhere.
How Customer Portals Improve Customer Experience
There are several significant benefits in implementing a customer portal on your website or mobile application. Let’s take a look at some of them.
- Convenience: Allow customers to raise tickets or help them find self-service solutions at any time from any device at their convenience.
- Faster resolutions: Instant answers and 24/7 assistance means that customers can get their queries answered without having to wait in long queues.
- Transparency: Customer portals allow users to access information on the status of their tickets, orders, or account changes. This helps to keep communication lines between customers and businesses open and transparent.
- Document management: Often these portals can be used to centrally store important documents such as contracts, invoices, payment confirmations, and legal paperwork in a secure environment. They are easy to access and can be retrieved or shared with anyone the customer authorizes.
Best Practices for Implementing A Customer Portal
Let’s look at some best practices you need to consider to effectively implement a customer portal.
1. Focus on a user-friendly design
Users should find your customer portal intuitive and easy to use. A complicated user-interface defeats the purpose of the portal, which is to simplify customer support and self-service.
- Design the portal so that the interface is clean and clutter-free to simplify navigation. Use clearly marked sections and organize content logically to help customers quickly find what they need.
- Make sure that the portal has cross-platform accessibility so that customers can log into the portal at their convenience from any device. Ensure a consistent user experience across website and mobile.
- Add a search functionality to your customer portal and use filters to help customers locate specific information.
- Use clear CTAs wherever customers need to take a particular action. For instance, submitting a form, accessing a help resource, or reaching out to support.
Capture feedback by testing the portal with customers and make adjustments wherever users face challenges. For instance, if customers find it difficult to navigate the portal, you might want to consider simplifying the layout and the menu structure.
2. Provide comprehensive self-service resources
The aim of the customer portal is to reduce the volume of support tickets and calls handled by your agents. Add exhaustive resources within your portal so that customers can troubleshoot issues on their own.
Include detailed FAQs, video tutorials, how-to guides, and articles that can be useful for customers.
Airbnb has a great help center that features a search bar at the top of the page. A list of popular topics appear as suggestions as soon as you start typing into the search bar. Interestingly, these topics will change based on whether you’re a guest, host, or travel admin using Airbnb.
You will also find that Airbnb offers a list of guides below the search bar followed by some of the top articles related to cancellations, bookings, payments, and more. At the very end of the page you will find an option to contact the support team or even leave feedback about your experience with Airbnb.
Talk about an intuitive knowledge base.
3. Ensure security and privacy
Customer portals often store and manage sensitive user information. Portals used on banking and financial services platforms in particular may deal with confidential data such as account information, credit card details, and financial records. This makes data security and privacy non-negotiable.
Here are some tips to protect and secure your customer portal,
- Multifactor Authentication and passwords: Ensure customers login only with a strong password to avoid any hacking attempts. Implement multi factor authentication so that there are different ways to confirm if the person logging in is indeed the customer.
- Role based access control: For businesses dealing with sensitive information, try to use role based access control to limit how data is managed and improve security. For instance, in a healthcare setting, you can enable customers to access their health records, edit their personal information, and add or view test results. But, only doctors can add prescriptions and update a patient’s health records.
- Data encryption: Encrypt data using the right encryption protocols. Ensure that any data transmitted between the portal and a customer’s device is carried out only across secure transmission channels.
- Compliance: Ensure that customer portals adhere to standard data protection protocols such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA.
4. Monitor and optimize
Once you implement the customer portal, track its effectiveness by monitoring usage metrics by week, month, or year.
This will give you an idea of how well customers are able to use the portal to resolve queries and find information. If you see consistent deterioration in any of the key metrics, you can immediately go back and trace the root cause. Use these insights to make necessary changes and improve the portal’s functionality.
For instance, let’s take portal traffic as a metric. It indicates how many users are visiting your portal. High traffic indicates customers are frequently using the portal.
Now, say the traffic tot he portal is dropping by 20% on a monthly basis, you’d want to find out why. Maybe customers aren’t finding the portal to be of use? Or maybe it’s very difficult to use and navigate? Use data from your customer portal software to find out where customers are clicking in the portal, and at the points they’re dropping off.
Here are some key metrics to track the effectiveness of your portal.
- First Contact Resolution (FCR)
- User engagement rate
- Portal traffic
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- Support ticket deflection rate
- Bounce rate
- Average session duration
- Search effectiveness
A Well Designed Customer Portal Can Improve User Experience
A customer portal is clearly a powerful tool that can elevate your support strategy. It empowers customers with the convenience to resolve queries on their own and access personalized resources whenever they need.
Customer support portals can streamline communication and also help you build stronger relationships with customers. A well-structured customer portal can improve the efficiency of your support team and cut unnecessary costs, leading to better business growth and revenue.
