Millennials and Gen Z are a crazy bunch. And this crazy bunch makes up for 62.5% of the total world population. 62.5%. That’s more than half of the world’s population. So it is okay to assume that 6 out of 10 of your customers are either millennials or Gen Z. And if your product’s target audience lies between 25-35 demographic, then you have 10 out of 10 millennials or Gen Z on your hands. After constantly fighting with ‘n’ number of competitors, you manage to acquire them as your customers only to lose them for a silly thing like not having a self-service option. And it is not that hard to get customer self service portals right.

And that’s what we are going to talk about in this blog.

- Customer portal features

- Customer portal best practices

But before we get into the features, let’s first try and understand the role of customer self service portals in an organization. Be it a small or medium-sized organization or an enterprise-level, a customer portal acts as a bridge between you and your customers. It gives them a chance to get to know you a little better. As an organization, you will have control over how you want to develop the relationship and to what extent you want it to grow. You can aim at short-term relationships as well as long-term partnerships based on the nature of your business. A customer self service portal fills that long-existing gap that now more than ever needs to be filled.

Apart from that, there are many ways a portal benefits your organization.

- Streamlines client communication by providing a unified interface to your teams as well as clients to communicate. No more messy email threads and calls.

- Proper customer data management as the customers themselves update their personal details from the customer portal.

- No redundant tickets as all the knowledge articles covering basic questions about your products and services will be shared with them through the customer portal.

- Simplifying your ticket generation, monitoring, resolving, and everything related to tickets by giving a proper platform to all the stakeholders.

- Builds your brand and makes sure you are seen in the positive light by all your customers.

To garner these benefits, you have to have the right features in place in your customer portal.

So what are those right features?

Let’s check them out.

- Option suggestion: If your business is clothing or footwear, you can learn from your customer’s purchase history so that when they shop again, the portal can suggest sizing based on past purchases. This is especially helpful if you sell based on brands since they have consistent sizing.

- Cross selling: If you own an estore related to lifestyle products, cross selling is quite easy. You can sell other products, and accessories on it. If you sell electronics, you can cross sell cables or product accessories.

- Quick query reports: If there are similar queries coming in from customers for over a week, your support staff should be able to get that data in a report so they can address it better by publishing a new knowledge article.

- Data Visualization: Customer interaction can teach you a lot. And the portal can collect a lot of data that you can then study. With reports like how many people raised similar questions, the number of people who chose a particular color, etc. can give you deeper insights into your business.

- Feedback: A short feedback regarding the interaction can go a long way in helping you make changes to the portal and training your staff.

The customer portal features mentioned above are some of the advanced features but here’s a list of some basic portal features you can have if you are just starting out:

- Secure login

- Knowledge base

- Case deflection

- Proposal generation

- Interactive and informative dashboard

- Product catalog

- Real-time notifications

- Integrated calendar 

Now, let’s get into the Customer portal best practices that all businesses must follow to get the best out of customer self service portals.

- UI Facilitating UX: The UI of a portal is crucial. It should be inviting, clutter free, and lead customers to the help they may need. While designing the UI of a portal, you should answer “how can I make this easier for a customer?”, rather than “how can I sell them my product?”.

- Categorization: A customer self service portal can have categorized areas of pain points a customer may have so that they can directly look for a solution in a specific place. For anything that cannot be categorized or is common, you can have FAQs and a miscellaneous section.

- Human Transition: Customer portals are great for categorizing various types of tickets, or interactions that customers come for. But for certain queries, a human interaction may be required. One of the best things you can do is have a human take over after a certain point in the interaction.

- Unsubscribe: if your customer doesn’t want to receive promotional emails, give them the option to unsubscribe in the customer portal itself. You can have this option in the profile section from where they are maintaining their personal details. And don’t hide the button. It will lose you the customer permanently.

CRMJetty has been in the portal business for over a decade now, and we have seen a number of things our customers have requested over time to build into their custom portals. It has been humbling to see the requests various businesses have when it comes to making a software that puts their customers at the center.

We take all that and build customer web portals and more. We are learning from our customers just like they are learning from theirs. If you need to make a custom customer portal, we will design a custom one, with a human touch. You can talk to us about it here.

Remember the days when you are not able to decide what to eat or where to eat? Well, we all have those days and what do we do? We directly go online and search for good nearby restaurants or if we are in the mood to explore, we search for must-try cuisines available in local restaurants.

Deciding about the restaurant was just a small example. Today, because of the internet, everyone can access any information easily. And we make so many decisions based on the available information, reviews, and feedback.

Almost all our decisions like purchasing clothes, gadgets, booking hotels, tickets, etc. are based on the information, reviews, feedback, etc. available online.

Our decisions are largely affected by what we see on social media or the Internet as a whole.

Because of these changes in the customer behavior landscape and the excessive amount of data generation, it has become mandatory for companies to share the right knowledge with their customers, partners, and employees directly. What knowledge you have to share with whom might vary but the means remain the same.

“Knowledge Sharing Portals”

First, let’s explore what a knowledge portal is.

“A knowledge portal is an Internet-based computer program that constitutes a single point of access to organizational knowledge, integrating knowledge repositories, expert directories, collaboration tools, and other knowledge-intensive applications”.

In simple terms: Knowledge sharing portals work as a gateway between you and your customers, employees or any other parties you interact with. It is a perfect medium to share organizational knowledge, product knowledge, technical knowledge, etc.

Now let’s see what’s the importance of knowledge sharing and knowledge portal that makes a must-have for every company.

Currently, millennials are the biggest target group for any tech company if not for any company and according to research done by Salesforce, 89% of millennials are using search engines to search for answers to their customer service questions. Additionally, 84% use self-service portals to find answers to their queries.

Pre-portal, it is possible that your employees were facing issues in handling customer requests, sharing documents, user manuals, handbooks, guides, etc. And to answer a single customer query, they had to go through the long email trails to provide the right support.

Additionally, being in touch with the customers through multiple channels like calls, emails, messages, etc. can be straining for employees as well as your customers.

And this is where a knowledge portal plays a vital role by providing your customers with a unified space to explore everything about your organization. It also automates the process of sharing data, information, etc. with your clients, partners, teams and any other people who need to have the knowledge of your organization. These people can log in to portals and get the information as and when they need it.

Not only this, but they can access user manuals, handbooks easily to find the solution to their technical queries.

We can easily say that with the help of portals, knowledge sharing is just a few taps away.

These are not the only benefits of knowledge sharing or knowledge sharing portal. Let's look at some more:

This is one of the key features of knowledge sharing portals. They make sharing documents with your customers, partners, and teams effortless and efficient. This is one of the most secure ways to share important documents like invoices, contracts, NDAs, user manuals, product updates, analysis reports, etc.

Now, they can access these documents easily from anywhere at any time in a secure manner. Additionally, it also maintains the logs for the documents uploaded, shared, edited, etc.

Knowledge portals let you send the marketing content directly to customers and portal users. This allows you to successfully run marketing campaigns and understand your customer base. You can even send notifications about new product launches or any new updates in product features.

It becomes easy for your customers to know about your work through case studies on the knowledge portal. Your employees can upload case studies, FAQs, etc. in the knowledge portals making it easier for them to understand your products and services.

Apart from all these benefits, knowledge portals also lessen ticket generation. As you will be providing almost all the necessary information about your products and services, your customers won’t need to contact you as much.

But before you go on investing in a knowledge portal, here are a few knowledge sharing practices you need to follow.

Every company has a different way of operating and business logic. Of course, you can purchase a knowledge portal online. But, we would recommend you reach out to companies that can create a custom knowledge portal for you. This will save you those extra resources otherwise spent on customizing the original portal. Having custom portals gives you the freedom over the features, workflow, and logic of the solution too.

With a custom portal, you can decide who should have what level of access. You can make your knowledge portal public or login mandatory. Not only this but you can even add extra security measures like two-step authentication if needed.

Nowadays, customers want to have in-depth knowledge of the product before purchasing it and so it becomes very obvious that they’ll do detailed research. And while doing so, they will have lots of queries.

In such scenarios, the pre-sales queries section comes to your rescue. Here, you can add all the answers to frequently asked pre-purchasing queries making it easy for your customers to make a decision. This will also help in building confidence and trust among your customers.

The integration of the knowledge portal with your CRM makes it easy for you to know more about your customers and business partners. Additionally, if any query raises, you can see it in the CRM and assign it a salesperson to resolve. This integration streamlines your operations. So, make sure to integrate your knowledge portal with CRM.

Knowledge and data are the new oil that can take your organization to the next level. And sharing the right pieces of information with your customers can help build rapport with them giving you the upper hand of your competitors.