It is no longer enough to offer a competitive value on a great product or service, according to Accenture research. The customer experience a company provides is also a necessity for long-term success in the modern consumer marketplace. That means your company’s future depends as much on whether your customers like doing business with you as it does on the value they perceive in what you sell. Developing the necessary strong customer rapport requires customer engagement, which involves positive interactions that help establish trust. That helps build loyalty. Fortunately, advanced customer engagement portal technology is designed to serve this modern consumer business need.
Today’s customers expect their chosen provider to know their needs, interests, and preferences, and not waste their time with offers they don’t want. A customer engagement portal offers users an ideal way to make themselves known and a customized experience beyond the usual modes.
A customer engagement portal (customer experience portal, or customer portal), is a secure centralized online business software platform that provides users with personal access to tools for interacting with a company. The customer portal typically offers an array of options for users to execute transactions, express their impressions, learn more about the company, take advantage of exclusive benefits and special offers, ask general questions, get help for specific issues, access valuable informational content, and more.
Access to customer engagement portals is often made available through a company’s customer service mobile app or webpage link.
A customer engagement portal can fulfill many purposes for customers and the businesses that serve them. Just some of the many benefits that companies and their customers receive from using a customer engagement portal include simplified systems for processing rewards, repeat sales, complaints, refunds, repair and replacement requests, and much more.
A well-functioning customer portal empowers your customers to connect conveniently with your company anytime 24/7, with just a few mouse clicks. Meanwhile, the portal software collects and aggregates customer data and feeds your marketing and service metrics.
1. Increased Customer Loyalty
Companies with loyal customers benefit from as much as 200% higher rates of repeat purchases and reduced likelihood of buyers switching vendors, according to Forrester research. Naturally, that also means more positive word-of-mouth and referrals of friends, family, and acquaintances for businesses that consistently deliver a good customer experience. Further, the research found that 54% of consumers say they are more likely to overlook errors from companies who have provided a positive customer experience.
Those compelling numbers strongly indicate that positive reviews from such well-engaged and satisfied customers help businesses build a good reputation and a strong brand. A client portal provides an exceptional modern tool to facilitate the level of engagement needed for such results.
2. Improved Customer Self-Service
Customer engagement platforms are becoming very popular for managing customer relationships and increasing customer satisfaction rates. They offer customers an exceptionally high value-added direct connection to the heart of a company’s customer service system. They empower customers to manage their expanded service alternatives, featuring a full range of self-service options.
Access to automated customer service features, product self-education materials, and other support tools available around the clock enhance the customer experience and minimize the customer service team’s workload. This new modern arrangement yields much faster response times by live agents and higher customer satisfaction levels overall as well as reduced costs.
3. Reduced Cost of Customer Support
Investing in advanced training for customer support teams can increase efficiency and thereby reduce service costs. Routinely asking customers for feedback uncovers common issues. That information enables management to innovate better solutions.
Digging a little deeper to understand the causes of customers’ pain points enables product developers to create solutions inspired by such insights. An online service portal facilitates all of these customer data collection initiatives more expeditiously and accurately than any other means.
4. Improved Data Management
Beyond efficiently managing customer complaints, feedback, inquiries, and other customer interactions, your customer experience portal should track and report data gathered from these and other engagement activities. Use the data collected through your online service platform to help make the most positive impression for your brand and, thereby, establish relationships of trust with your customers.
In the modern commercial consumer marketplace, personalizing your customer communications is a premium approach to increasing engagement. So, use your customer data to design personalized email messages, SMS notifications, exclusive offers through the portal, and other outreach projects and programs that will appeal to your audience.
Customer engagement tools like an online service platform can provide insights into individual needs and preferences, which you can use to personalize offers. Having a customer portal to help understand your target audience better can bolster your company’s ability to produce the best products and services to meet their needs and preferences. That means, of course, higher rates of customer satisfaction, which translates into stronger loyalty, which means greater long-term sustainability of your business.
To build a custom portal, first, assemble your list of objectives for your online portal. Determine which portal software platform offers the best overall value for everything you need in attractive function features, bandwidth, and security. Choose a feature-rich software package with an appealing and intuitive user interface in the form of an engaging and easy-to-use client portal dashboard.
Unless you have an expert in-house customer web portal designer, outsource the setup and launch of your new customer service platform. Implement as many personalized features as possible to delight and engage your customers and optimize your platform for a reliably seamless experience on any device.
Maximize the opportunities for people through the online customer engagement portal you provide. For example, in your service portal features, include links that connect customers directly to your business social media platform pages. Invite them to interact with other engaged customers and with your social management specialists to build stronger relationships with your brand and keep it top of mind.
1. Evaluate Your Business Needs
Before you embark on purchasing and implementing web portal platform software, determine what you need to accomplish with the platform to pay for and profit from the investment. Which self-service options are best for your customers’ interests and, therefore, for your business’s needs? In addition to messaging, announcements, alerts, push notifications, and other essentials for typical customer engagement portals, what should your platform feature?
Should you emphasize offering industry information? Should you build an online community around your business with exclusive access through the customer portal? Should you implement a loyalty points and rewards program? Would offering prize drawings for participation in in-depth customer satisfaction surveys motivate your customers? What makes the best sense for you to offer your customer experience portal users?
2. Consider the Security of Your Customer Portal
Security is the first fundamental in customer portal design. Prioritizing strong security to protect your customer data management system makes the networked space trustworthy. That’s a basic requirement to make the platform useful to your customers and your company. Employ permissions, identities, customer portal login authentications, any of the gamut of other system security settings, IT system monitoring, and other protections that free you to focus on delivering the positive personalized customer experience you aim to achieve with the portal.
Protect your customers, your brand reputation, and your business’s financial health by choosing appropriate IT architecture, security protocols. Use online portal software technology that integrates into any other business platform seamlessly and offers smooth functioning and maximal protection of your customers’ personal information.
Customer engagement portals are designed to deliver opportunities for interactive experiences that appeal to customers. They’re generally intended to make it as easy and fast as possible for people to get information, obtain self-service solutions, make comments, process purchase and payment transactions, and execute various other options.
So, customer portal software solutions usually feature personalized communications, feedback options, customer support tools, emailing and text messaging systems integrations, billing and customer service histories access, data collection and analytics, and more.
As you can see, customer engagement portals are very powerful software platforms that can provide extensive facilitation to support business goals. A fundamental for success in today’s consumer business environment is, indeed, customer engagement. Therefore, increasing the automated mechanisms in your portal to promote higher levels of engagement can be expected to drive up customer satisfaction rates and, by extension, positively impact revenues.
Some level of customer engagement is essential for a good customer experience, building trust, loyalty, and, thereby, sufficient growth and long-term profitability. Online customer portals are often the most practical means of maximizing service alternatives and engagement opportunities for customers.
You can open a whole world of meaningful opportunities for your customers through an optimized customer engagement portal. Your online service platform can include all the user options discussed above and many others, from surveys to product development input, to special discounts, to prize drawings.
The financial return on the upfront investment in implementing a customer engagement portal platform, in the form of lower service operations costs, can make the proposition well worthwhile for business leaders who are committed to cultivating long-term customer relationships.
Book a free consultation call with EnterBridge today to start enhancing your customers’ experience with a custom portal.