Your vendors and suppliers are crucial to ensure the proper procurement of products and services for your business. Proper vendor management practices contribute to long-lasting relationships with your vendors. Working in sync with vendors helps you fulfill your goals and achieve success faster. Ideally, effective vendor management aims for a win-win situation for both you and your vendors.

Earlier, vendor management would mostly depend on manual onboarding, and management of vendors’ information. The best companies could do was use phone calls and emails to manage vendor-related operations.

Then came the B2B vendor portal, a pioneering technology that not only simplified but also automated the vendor management process. Almost all the companies today are switching to a B2B vendor management tool to manage vendors and supply chains.

If you too are looking to enhance your vendor management, here’s your post. This post will walk you through the meaning of vendor management, its importance, and its stages. You’ll also learn about the features you must have in your B2B vendor portal.

So, here you go.

Overview of Vendor Management

Vendor Management is a collective term to describe all the processes an organization uses to manage its vendors (or suppliers). It encompasses choosing vendors, negotiating and controlling contract prices, mitigating vendor-related issues and risks, and several other tasks. There can be one or more vendors that can vary according to the nature of your organization. Vendors can also vary in size from sole traders to large organizations.

Importance of Vendor Management

Vendor management holds great importance for your organization. And a B2B vendor portal can help make vendor management more efficient.

Below are the benefits of effective vendor management for your organization:

1. Right Vendor Selection

Implementing suitable vendor management can help you select the right vendors. You can get automated bidding between vendors to get the best vendors at the best prices.

2. Enhanced Contract Management

If you have more than one vendor, the vendor management system helps reduce the issues in contract management, documentation, and other essential information.

Proper vendor management practices can help you manage contracts better. By tracking the current status of all contracts and other useful info with a centralized view, you can accelerate the decision-making process. It saves your time and adds more efficiency to your vendor management.

3. Better Performance Management and Visibility

Implementing a vendor management system like a B2B vendor portal provides a central view of all your vendors’ performance. This integrated view helps you get visibility and understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

Accordingly, you can take action to eliminate roadblocks in supply chain management. This helps boost the overall efficiency of your organization.

4. Improved Vendor Relations

Multi-vendor management can be tedious and challenging. To make the most of vendors and meet your business goals, robust vendor management is indispensable.

Easy access to all the vendor-related info in a single location via a B2B vendor portal can simplify your decision-making process. You can also communicate with them easily, which helps develop stronger bonding with your vendors over time.

5. Better Value for Your Buck

The end goal of vendor management is to achieve value for your investment. So, integrating a B2B vendor portal to manage vendors helps you save money and achieve long-term profitability over time.

If you are looking to manage your vendors seamlessly and enhance efficiency at every stage, our B2B vendor portal can help you out. It is a scalable and ready-to-integrate portal that you can customize to cater to your specific needs.

If you need help customizing it, we are there for you. You can even build a portal from scratch with our development team’s assistance if your specifications are very different.

Let’s make you the best portal for your business.

Stages of Vendor Management System

There are various stages that constitute the vendor management system, as below:

1. Vendor Selection - This is the first step in vendor management and includes picking the right vendors for your organization. For that, you need to research vendors, gather quotes via requests for quotation (RFQs) and requests for proposal (RFPs).

Once you have all the info and quotes, the next step is shortlisting and finalizing vendors. Though pricing will be a valuable factor, there are several other factors you should consider to select the vendors. These factors may be the vendor’s reputation, track record, capacity, communication ability, and more.

2. Negotiate the Contract - Getting the contract right is a must. Ensure that both you and your vendor agree to the terms that are mutually beneficial for both parties. Negotiating a contract may be time-consuming at times but it’s worth it.

This is because contract negotiation consists of defining goods and services to include, start date and end date of arrangements, and confidentiality and non-compete terms and clauses.

3. Vendor Onboarding - Vendor onboarding involves gathering the information and documentation relevant to on-boarding and approving a new vendor to your organization. You may also need to make sure that you collect all the vital contact and payment information. This information can include relevant licenses the vendor has, tax forms, insurance details, etc.

4. Tracking Vendor Performance - Once you on-board vendors, you need to continuously track and evaluate their performance. It includes evaluating their performance in terms of various key performance indicators like quality, volume, or delivery dates of goods.

5. Risk Monitoring and Management - There is a need to monitor vendors for any risks that can affect your organization. Some possible risks can be compliance breaches, data security issues, intellectual property loss or stealth, lawsuits, etc.

You should also identify if there is any bottleneck in the supply chain on the vendors’ side and how it can impact your organization’s operations.

6. Payment Management - Last but not least, on-time payment is also a step you can’t afford to avoid. Make sure you are paying your vendors in line with the agreed payment terms to maintain good terms.

B2B Vendor Portal - Your Key to Enhanced Visibility and Efficiency in Supply Chain

A B2B vendor portal enables you to track and view your vendors centrally all in one place. You can view different customized reports that your vendors upload for better insights into individual vendors’ performance.

Central management of all the vendors’ info, sales figures, and more helps you stay on track with respect to supplies and deficits. You can also spot overreliance on a single vendor, non-compliance of terms by a vendor, or other risk factors with everything in your B2B vendor portal.

Besides, automation of several business aspects like vendor onboarding, exchange of notifications like certification expirations, insurance certificates, affidavits, etc. helps expedite processes. They reduce the workload on the admin staff and increase the efficiency of the supply chain processes.

All in all, a B2B vendor portal helps you drive more efficiency and visibility in your vendor management operations.

Features You Must Look Out for In a B2B Vendor Portal

While picking a vendor portal, see to it that the portal has got the following features.

1. Online Registrations

Your vendor portal should allow you to register global vendors and suppliers and make them a part of your network without hassle.

2. Automated Filtering of Vendors

Manual filtering of vendors by certain criteria you decide is a herculean task indeed. Your portal should help you get rid of this by providing auto-filter functionality and enhance transparency in the process.

3. Management of Quotes and Proposals

Your portal should eliminate the need to send manual requests for quotes and proposals. Rather, it should let different vendors share their quotes and proposals directly via a secure login and stay assured of confidentiality.

4. Easy Comparison

There should be a means to evaluate the proposals based on their previous records easily within your portal. The portal should save your time by getting rid of the need for manual comparison and evaluation of proposals every time.

5. Automated Ranking

Your portal should also let you rate your vendors based on your defined comparison index. There can be factors like the history, compliance scores, delivery time, available inventory, etc. that you can rate your vendors on.

6. Invoicing & Payments

There should be the freedom to generate Purchase Orders and Invoices directly from within your vendor portal. It should take away the hassle of generating purchase orders and invoices separately and sharing them via email, fax, or post.

7. Secure CRM Access

Your vendors should be able to view their relevant data fields in the CRM in a secure way. Your portal should provide your vendors and suppliers with role-based access to CRM.

Hire Us - Your A-Team to Amplify Your Vendor Management

Now that you know how important vendor portal management is for your organization, it is time you got it right. If you need help, we’ve got you covered.

Our B2B vendor portal solution can be your ideal match. It features secure CRM access, proposal filter, automated proposal ranking, and more that you seek in an ideal B2B vendor portal. We can discuss your requirements and customize the portal to make it a perfect fit for you. If you want, our development team can take it one step ahead and build a portal from the ground up!

So, let’s connect and build the best vendor portal together!

Portal is a website that provides single-point access to applications and information. It not only helps in selling or ensuring an online presence but with many other purposes. Different websites having different purposes are built with varying approaches. For example, if you need a web portal to help you sort customer queries, you have a support portal. If you want to allow your partners to manage their activities, you have a partner portal. Similarly, the extent and use vary from industry to industry. 

However, the best thing is you can approach a custom web portal development company and customize your portal as per your needs. 

An online portal can be convenient for different industries. 

Let us explore the industries that can benefit from web portal development services. 

• Education

The education industry has a centralized database that holds information on the teaching staff, administrative staff, students, and everything else. A web portal could give them access to the information to carry out their jobs. 

For instance, teaching staff can 

• Manage various classes
• Mark students attendance 
• Arrange the timetable
• Upload important class
• Upload marks and grades
• Upload documents and details

Students can

• Check attendance
• Submit medical details
• Check marks and grades
• Keep up with notices

Admin staff can

• Keep the fee records
• Consolidate reports
• Manage staff and students details
• Have an overview of the school's operations

• NonProfit

Portals for nonprofits can help you streamline your organization's activities, handle donations, manage volunteers and members, track their tasks and schedules, and provide a hassle-free experience so that you can focus on changing the world. 

A web portal development services will provide you with features like:

• Donation Module
• Automated Fund Transfer Module
• On-Boarding Volunteers
• Volunteers Timesheet Management
• Knowledgebase
• Live chat
• Smart Dashboard

And help you interact, and scale at your own pace.

• Medical 

A medical portal means doctors would have all the information about the patient. They would have details of patients' history of diseases and treatments, allergies, and others. Administrative staff would know about the patients' demographic details along with payments. Patients would be able to contact doctors and the team anytime they need support. They can access their individual files and see their progress. 

In addition to this, a medical portal could help streamline the transplant and transfusion process. As hospitals would have all the details of the patients, they can match the recipients' blood group and match organs promptly.

• Pharma

In the pharmaceutical industry, a portal could be a great way for pharmacists to track a patient's history. A patient can request medicines according to the prescription, and pharmacists can fill them accordingly. Pharmacists can know about the patient's drug intake and can regulate it. They can even avoid misuse of a particular drug. 

A portal will also connect the pharmacist with the patient's doctor. So they can verify the prescription before approving a patient's request. 

They can also keep track of patient's allergies and avoid medicines that can cause reactions.   

• Real-Estate

A real estate industry consists of many stakeholders such as admin, realtor, agent, member, etc. Up of that, agents and admin require streamlined communication and a 360-degree overview to close the deals.

Managing it manually can be tedious, time-consuming, and unorganized. A web portal, on the other hand, can simplify it. It can help you

• Manage properties along with your stakeholders
• List properties on the website
• Enable buyers and sellers to manage their listings, selling, renting
• Build transparency by showing details to everyone involved
•  Generate leads for your properties

And more. 

A web portal development company can help you develop a real-estate portal with features like

• Broker management
• Property management
• Seller management
• User-centric features
• Geo-location
• Media

With a real-estate portal, you can automate your tasks and can serve customers in a better way.

Conclusion

Web portals are important for all B2B and B2C businesses. However, choosing the secure one is essential. So, make sure that your portal development company provides a secure gateway and doesn't store anything on the server.

Until a few years back, companies would hire a big workforce to handle their business aspects. Be it finance, customer service, sales or any other department; most of the tasks and processes would be manual.

With technological advancement, the landscape of the corporate world has changed dramatically now. A corporate web portal is among those few path-breaking digital advancements.

If you are also a business owner looking to integrate a corporate portal, this post has it all that you need to know. Learn what a corporate web portal is in detail, its types, objectives, and more.

First things first, here is the detailed concept of a corporate portal.

What is a Corporate Web Portal?

Before understanding what a corporate web portal is, there is a need to understand what a web portal is in detail.

A web portal is a web-based gateway that provides authenticated access to an organization’s data to different parties. In other words, a web portal is a web application that you embed into your website to serve as a gateway to your organization’s data repositories.

A web portal can be of different types based on the portal users. There are three major types of a web portal as below.

• B2B portal - It provides vendors, associates, etc. with access to the company’s relevant data. People typically refer to it as Extranet.

• B2C portal - It provides end customers (or clients) with access to their relevant data. People typically refer to it as a client or customer portal.

• Internal Portal - It provides the company’s personnel with access to various data fields. People typically refer to it as Intranet.

If you combine the functionalities of all these portals into one, you get what you can call a corporate web portal. You can also call this portal a hybrid of all the three major portal types that encompasses the functions and features of all of them.

Providing various parties in a business right from clients or customers to business partners, associates, or vendors to internal personnel with access to relevant data benefits a lot.

Now that you are familiar with the ABC’s of a corporate web portal, it’s time to discuss the business objectives and purposes it helps fulfil.

Business Objectives of a Corporate Web Portal

A corporate portal serves various key purposes of almost all businesses. It enables remote and authenticated access to crucial data to both business associates and customers as per their needs. It also helps eliminate the need to rely on physical mail, faxing, email, or call to access any information you urgently require.

Various types of B2B and B2C portals including a client portal, staff portal, sales portal, customer service portal, project management portal, partner portal, etc. are a part of a corporate web portal.

Let’s discuss in detail the benefits of a corporate portal you can avail of.

1. Easy Integration and Centralization - A corporate web portal helps integrate and bring all customers and corporate data on one platform. This integration of CRM data and customers together via a portal helps carry out administrative operations faster.

With all the crucial data in one place, you can get an eagle-eye view of your business aspects and manage them efficiently.

2. Consistency - Uniting back-end data across different portals remotely enables companies to store and depend on consistent data that you can share and collaborate upon.

3. Personalization - Providing personalized access to particular users helps you enhance the experiences of your internal staff as well as external customers or clients.

You can engineer your corporate web portal to personalize it according to the user. It helps all the parties involved have a unique view of the critical company data to make their work easier.

4. Security Benefit - As the owner or the chief admin of your company, you can fully control who can view what in your portal. You can decide on which parties to provide secure authenticated access to which data of your company. This secured access to different individual users or parties based on their roles or needs helps keep your company’s data secured.

5. Enhanced Customer Service - You can provide your customers and clients with secured access to the relevant information like purchase history, knowledge base, FAQs, from within a portal.

You can also let them generate tickets, track orders, or perform other customer-facing operations easily via your portal. This contributes to enhancing your experience and saves you overhead costs.

Also empowering your marketing managers will help you automate marketing campaigns with a corporate portal. All this helps you bring down the churn rate and boost your overall profitability and bottom line.

6. Reduced Load on Internal Staff - With a corporate web portal in place, the load on your customer service staff goes down. The automation of customer service workflows takes place which results in a drastic decline in internal communication requirements.

When your staff doesn’t have to handle redundant queries, they can focus more on solving bigger issues.

Also, the service hours that go into handling repetitive queries goes down. This significant reduction in manual handling of queries helps save the costs on time-intensive queries for basic operations.

Coming to the internal communication within your employees, it also improves a lot. Your company personnel can communicate, share, and update critical data directly on the portal for everyone to see. This reduces the need to arrange meetings and conferences to discuss small things every now and then. The efficiency, increases and benefits your company.

7. Enhanced Communication with Business Partners/Associates/Vendor

When your business associates, partners, or vendors view data relevant to them in the portal, it streamlines the communication with them.

For instance, a vendor portal makes viewing orders, documents, invoices, etc. easier for your vendors. Besides, it also makes viewing, managing, or updating your vendors’ details hassle-free for you. Similarly, a partner portal helps you engage your partners better by letting them view details like sales figures, project’s progress, or other things.

Steps to Build a Corporate Web Portal

1. Decide Who Will Build It - In-House or Outsourced Partners

Decide whether you want to build your corporate web portal by deploying your in-house engineers’ expertise or outsourcing portal development to trusted partners. For a start-up, outsourcing may be a better option as it helps you save time and costs on creating and maintaining the portal. This helps your internal staff focus more on the other critical roles.

2. Aim for Foolproof Security

Ensuring security of the portal is one of the critical aspects to consider. Robust security controls, secure coding methodologies, and various vulnerability and penetration tests can help you test the security of your portal before launch. You should also integrate authentication-based secure access mechanisms to retain security after launch also.

3. Decide How to Build It

There are two ways you can build your portal. The first typical way involves deploying an in-house or outsourced developer team to build your portal from the scratch. While this portal may give you an additional advantage of having full control over each functionality, there is a downside also.

It may be too cost-intensive for you to afford - especially when you’ve your business in its nascent stage. This is where a ready-to-integrate portal solution comes to rescue. Yes, there are several portal solutions by different portal companies that you can just buy, integrate with your CRM, and start off! You can also customize their features to cater to your specific business needs.

Looking for a ready-to-launch corporate web portal solution for your business? Our next-gen web portal can be your ideal fit to take care of your requirements. This portal can get your business off the ground instantly and easily. It is a ready-to-integrate and scalable solution that you can integrate and start off. If you want, we can customize it for you too.

So, let’s connect to get your portal ready!

4. Compliance with Data Laws

It is important that the portal you develop complies with data security standards - especially when you are building it from scratch. It’s because all the seasoned portal development companies typically follow standard data laws and regulations.

However, while building a corporate web portal; you may need to take extra care. This is because there may be loopholes in complying with security and data laws as you are new to this. Make it a point to keep privacy of all your parties intact and breach-proof. Don’t fail to comply with the local legislation of the country you are based in. As of now, 128 out of 194 countries have put in legislation to protect data and privacy as per the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

Get Your Corporate Web Portal Ready Now

A corporate portal is the key to optimized business operations, streamlined internal and external communication, and good profits. If you are all set to integrate a corporate portal, your search for the best portal development solution ends here.

We, at CRMJetty, can be your ideal portal development partner. We have our own web portal solution that’s got dedicated space, custom business logic, product/service integration, accounts and invoicing, and all the features that you seek for in your corporate web portal. Be your business B2B or B2C, stay assured you’ll get the best for both. You can manage all the parties - customers, partners, vendors, affiliates, and more.

Besides offering a launch-ready web portal, we also offer custom portal development services. There is a typical process that our company follows to get your feature-rich portal.

Our development team first collects your requirements. Our certified developers then analyze them first and determine if our launch-ready portal caters to them all. If there is a need to customize one or more functionalities to make it suit your requirements, they do it for you.

In case there is a large gap between your requirements and our portal’s features, we can help you build your unique portal from scratch too. We aim to make your portal development journey with us unforgettable and we promise that we shall!

So, let us help you build your best corporate web portal with synergy between you and us!

Customer experience is a crucial aspect that you can not afford to take lightly. Customer service is also among the factors that constitute customer experience. In fact, 89% of customers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.

Although there are some differences in the processes and types of clients in the B2B sector, the clients are ultimately “customers” and customer experience matters for them too.

With a B2B portal, the process of providing a better customer experience becomes easier than the regular support system that you may provide via calls and emails. Ticket system, knowledge base, etc. are some of the most important aspects that can take your customer service experience to the next level. So, let’s understand what B2B portals can do for you B2B business in detail.

Benefits of B2B Portal Development

1. Cost-Effective Ownership - Highly Valuable for Startups and Small Businesses

One of the biggest reasons to consider B2B portal development is the cost. For small businesses and startups, budgeting is a crucial deciding factor for them in all their operations. A big MNC may be able to afford to hire a large pool of support agents to manage costumes’ queries, inventory, and more but a small startup may not. The reason is simple - they may not have thousands of dollars to spend on hiring a pool of support staff.

This is where a B2B portal can fill the gap. The cost of setting up a B2B portal is comparatively much less than that of hiring a support team. Even if on an hourly basis or outsourcing basis, a support staff may cost you more than a B2B portal.

Hence, picking B2B portal development over hiring a support staff is an ideal and budget-friendly choice. In fact, even big companies like DHgate, TradeWheel, Alibaba, etc. also provide a B2B portal.

2. Speedier Initial Setup

Everything like creating a catalog, handling queries, promoting every promotional sale manually will neither be feasible nor time-saving. If you hire staff, you may also need to train them to finish time-bound customer support tasks like consultation or client onboarding. You may also have to stay abreast of the daily progress by having them reporting to you every now and then.

Do you really want all this “mess” - that too when your business has just started? Of course NOT.

Ideally, your first goal is to get your business off the ground fast and without any hassle. And a B2B portal development can do it for you. This is because it enables you to automate every manual task and kickstart your business instantly. Right from creating a catalog, integrating your new system or functionality with your existing software, changing product listings, running a promotional sale, etc.; it makes everything a matter of minutes.

This way, B2B portal development proves to be a great time-saver for your business - especially in its initial phase.

3. Real-Time Analytics - Speedy Insights

Tracking everything manually right from queries to complaints or sales can be a tough job. Not with a B2B portal though. With a centralized view of every business aspect, you can analyze your business requirements in real time.

You can view the customers’ demographics, common queries or grievances, etc. with a B2B portal. You can also get insights into your clients’ requirements and customize your products (or services) accordingly with a B2B portal.

You can manage your inventory efficiently by finding out which products are in high demand and which aren’t. Accordingly, you can decide on reordering certain products and holding a sale on the others.

You can also update your FAQs or content according to your most common questions or queries by your customers. This helps you align your brand with customers’ expectations and get better results in the long run.

4. Enhanced Security

Security is a crucial aspect to consider for both small and big businesses alike. If you are the admin, you can’t allow anyone to access anything from your CRM. Instead, to upkeep security of your CRM database security, you should enable different portal users to view only what their defined roles allow them to.

With a B2B portal, you can define user-roles and grant access to different CRM entities based on their user roles. You can document the roles and implement them well right within a B2B portal and keep your security tight.

Looking for the best B2B portal development services for your B2B organization? Our customer portal can be your best portal to start with. This portal can get your business off the ground fast and easily. It is a ready-to-integrate and scalable solution that you can integrate and start off. If you want, we can customize it for you too.

So, let’s connect to discuss your portal requirements to proceed!

5. Boost in the Overall Speed of Business Processes

As we discussed above, initial setup becomes much faster with a B2B portal than without it. Even if you may still dare to manually manage business processes at the start, you can’t continue it forever. Simply because the processes and operations grow more and complex as the size of the business grows.

With too much on plate to manage manually, you may not keep up with retaining efficiency. As a result, it may lead to a sluggishness in your business operations and of course hamper your business productivity.

Consider a real-life scenario. You set up your business and within one year, your customers increase in count to become 10000. Great. But what’s next? The number of daily queries and tickets that you have to handle now is 1000 on an average.

You had started with a support team of around 5 agents in the beginning but what would you do now? Would you keep making them overwork and wear out or hire more support agents to expand your team?

In either way, you might end up losing more than you invested and expected in return. Here’s how.

If you make your small support team over-work and incentivize them, they’re still likely to make more errors. Afterall, they are humans and not machines! With this rise in human errors, your customer satisfaction rate may drop and deprive you of some high-value customers over time.

If you hire more support agents, you may succeed in keeping the customer satisfaction rate intact but at a huge cost. A team of say 30 agents will force you to shell out a much bigger amount as salary than a team of just 5. Simple Maths! This will lead to a drop in your ROI and profitability margins which you won’t want.

6. Convenient Service, More Efficiency

With a reduction in the redundant tasks through B2B portal development, your support team gets more time to focus on the big picture. They can focus more on big issues and queries instead of answering redundant questions and handling repetitive tasks manually. This helps manage customers better and handle tasks more efficiently.

Besides, when customers get what they want without much hassle, they welcome it. Thus, with B2B portal development; you can also enrich your customer experience with easy and speedy self-service.

Features to Consider During B2B Portal Development

There are a number of ready-to-integrate B2B portal development solutions available in the market. While they may fit some organizations, they may not fit others. This is where a custom B2B portal comes into the picture. A custom portal caters to your exact business needs and helps you optimize your business operations.

However, there are a few common features that you may consider while developing a custom portal or picking a ready-to-integrate portal.

1. Easily Navigable Product Catalog & Services Display

The portal should make it easy to display your products and services to your current and new customers. It should be available and running 24x7 for customers to check out the available products and services with easy navigation.

2. Hassle-Free Communication

Your portal should facilitate an easy communication between your customers and your organization. There should be varied ways to connect including chat bots, tickets, etc.

3. Multiple Payment Gateways

There should be the freedom to make payments directly from within the portal when they log in. Further, there should be a choice between multiple payment options to pick from.

4. Better Insights

If you don’t analyze your user data, you can better your products or services. The portal you pick should give an exhaustive view of users’ data like preferences, demands, common queries, etc. This information will help you upsell your products as well as tailor them according to the changing customers’ demand.

5. Security

Whether you create a B2B web portal development as an extension of your CRM or keep it independent of your CRM, it should be secure. The database should remain on your servers to ensure the security is intact.

If you are looking to enhance security with B2B portal development, our customer portal can help you out. If you want, you can also customize it to fit your business needs.

CRMJetty - Avail of the Best B2B Portal Development Services

Now that you know how B2B portal development can give wings to your B2B business, it’s time to get one ready. If you are looking for a B2B web portal solution, you are at the right place. We, at CRMJetty, provide a ready-to-integrate customer portal solution that you can integrate and start off.

Our developer team can also customize the portal to fit your business needs better. Even if you have completely different portal requirements, we’ve got you covered. Our developer team can render B2B web portal development services to get you a portal from ground up exclusively for your organization.

Let’s join hands to build the best B2B portal for your business!

When was the last time you called a customer support agent for a trivial issue with your mobile or laptop? Or when did you call a customer support agent to cancel or track an order you placed on any e-store? I bet it must have been a long time back! Thanks to the revolutionary concept of self-service, there were dramatic changes in traditional customer support. The number of organizations providing the option of self-service is increasing day by day.

Rising to the occasion, Dynamics 365 also launched Dynamics 365 Portal or Power Apps Portals two years ago. Power Apps are external-facing websites that enable access to CRM data for various users outside the organization.

Earlier, a Dynamics 365 portal was separate and came as a licensed add-on to Dynamics 365 apps, or the licenses would include a default portal add-on. After October 1, 2019, a Dynamics 365 portal no longer comes as a separate licensed add-on. Instead, it is licensed based on usage and extends a particular functionality of a Dynamics 365 app.

The caching mechanism of Power App portals is different from that of the add-on-based licensed Dynamics 365 portal. There is also a difference in the provision method between usage-based PowerApp portals and add-on-based Dynamics 365 portal licenses.

In short, PowerApps portals are the next generation of Dynamics 365 portal’s licensed add-ons.

If you are looking for a cost-effective way to integrate one or more capacity-based portals with your Dynamics 365, PortalXpand can help you out. It is a highly customizable and scalable Dynamics 365 portal solution that you can use to manage portals for vendors, partners, customers, and other entities right from a single dashboard.

Types of Dynamics 365 Portals

1. Customer Self-Service Portal

A customer self-service portal, as the name suggests, helps customers serve themselves without any manual support. You can include knowledge articles to help them find answers to their queries. There are also other options like live chat, FAQs, online community forums, how-to guides, videos, user manuals, etc., that you can offer. Besides, you can also enable customers to comment, review, and provide their feedback to help you analyze their satisfaction.

2. Employee self-service Portal

An employee self-service portal can help an organization provide employees with a place to share knowledge, manage tasks, and interact with each other within the CRM. They should be able to use it to view answers to FAQs, submit feedback, and develop their community.

HR for Dynamics is a self-service portal for employees that helps simplify tasks - especially for HR and managers. Using this portal, employees can manage their interaction with the HR department regarding leaves, activities, reimbursements, etc. They can also update their info like bank details or contact details easily from within the portal.

Managers can perform their managerial tasks more efficiently with this portal. They can access the team’s summary, leave details, deadlines of projects, certification details, etc., in real-time. This quick access of information helps in accurate and timely analysis of the team’s performance.

3. Community Portal

A community portal is basically like a virtual community. A community portal of any organization or company invites people to collaborate, discuss, write blogs and articles, poll and review products, etc. This type of portal encourages users to promote the brand as they also feel that they have a say in the brand and are indirect contributors to the brand's popularity.

4. Partner Portal

A partner portal lends a helping hand to your partners to manage their work better. It provides access to various components like orders, invoices, payment, history, and other organizational entities relevant to them.

Easy access to this information helps partners get insights into leads, deals, opportunities, and more. Accordingly, they figure out a strategy to enhance their operations and eliminate any bottlenecks or issues with proper feedback. Partners can also manage their relevant details like contract or contact details and update them easily. Multiple partners can collaborate on a single opportunity to get good sales and experience with a partner portal.

5. Field Service and Project Service Automation Portal

A field service portal gives a 360-degree view of entities like assets, invoices, work orders, and agreements. When customers purchase the Field Service, Project Service Automation, or an Enterprise plan, it is available. The Project Service Automation portal provides partners with project information like quotes, bookable resources, invoices, etc.

Consider Portal Customization - To Smarten Your Portal

A legacy portal that you used for your organization may need customization to make it relevant. CRMJetty can provide customization for any Dynamics 365 portal type to suit your business requirements.

We typically help our clients customize their portals in one of the following ways:

• Technology/Platform Upgrades

If you want to upgrade to any technology or platform for your portal, our developer team can get it done for you.

• Repair and Maintenance

If you use an ancient solution and it gives problems often enough, we offer bug-fixing services to help protect your data from bugs, zero-days, and more.

• Technology Migration

If you are looking to migrate to new or modern technology, we have got you covered. For instance, you can get help moving your solution with a non-CMS backend to a modern and CMS-backed platform.

• Re-development of Your Current Solution

If you want changes in your current solution’s architecture to remove development roadblocks, we can provide you with the best possible solution as per your requirements.

Avail of the best customization services now!

Integrate PortalXpand - Your Ultimate Solution to Create a Next-Gen Portal

If you want to create a next-gen portal or upgrade your existing portal with the latest features, here are a few functionalities of PortalXpand that can interest you.

• Enhanced Security - PortalXpand lets you provide access to different entities in your Dynamics 365 portal to different users based on their roles. You can create different user groups first, define their roles, and then provide them with access to entities based on their roles. It will help you secure your CRM data better.

• 360-Degree Entity Management - With PortalXpand Dynamics CRM Portal, you can control the entities in both CRM and your portal. It also allows you to use all the default CRM entities and configure additional custom entities to suit your business needs in Dynamics CRM.

• Custom Dashboard - You can also customize your dashboard to make it easy-to-navigate with PortalXpand. It lets you set and configure multiple widgets like Recent Activity, Counter Block, etc., for one or more entities you want.

Integrate Knowledge Base - Your Easiest Way to Launch a self-service Portal

One of the key elements you should include in your self-service portal is Knowledge Base. By providing access to a knowledge base in your Dynamics 365 portal, you can stay in constant touch with your customers.

An exhaustive library of documents, white papers, and tools to explain everything about your products and services helps serve your customers more efficiently. It also helps you shift from passive customer service to proactive customer service. Instead of having customers call you every time, you can proactively address most of their concerns and queries with your knowledge base.

Consider SharePoint - A Valuable Add-On for Your Portal

There are different add-ons that you can integrate with your portal to streamline your business operations more. One of the best add-ons you can consider is SharePoint. With our portal solution, you can integrate SharePoint in your Dynamics 365 easily.

With this integration, both you (as the admin) and portal users can manage and store the documents like quotes, proposals, etc., associated with specific records. After installing the SharePoint integration plugin in Dynamics 365, users can create folders, documents, files and delete records.

Build a Dynamics CRM Portal Now - With CRMJetty By Your Side

If you seek to build a Dynamics 365 Portal for your organization, CRMJetty can be your right team for that. We can discuss your business requirements, analyze them, and provide you with a ready-to-integrate portal solution if it’s an exact fit. Our developer team can also gauge the scale of customization our ready-made portal solution would require to fit your business requirements.

Once the developers test the feasibility, they start the required customizations after your consent. We also ensure that you keep getting updates on the progress on a regular basis. Once the final product is ready, our QA team comes into action and tests it for limitations and glitches. Once your product is ready and glitch-free, we hand it over to you. We can also provide you with support for a limited period to help you understand portal features and get familiar with it.

All set to kickstart your portal development journey? Your alpha team is just a click away!