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!

Have you thought about the outcome of a bad customer experience? It can cost your business and even affect the customer base. A research says that 25% of customers will switch the provider after one negative experience. 33% will share their experience in one way or another. 

In the eCommerce era, where every user prefers an online experience, businesses can’t risk letting their users down. And with digitalization, the traditional way of CX and providing support has changed. Customers now prefer to resolve their queries using online guides rather than waiting for a call or a message from the support team. The new era has brought in the need for a self-service experience. And that’s how Dynamics 365 Customer Portal comes into the picture. 

It helps identify client issues and deliver exceptional service.

A Dynamics CRM Customer Portal provides end-users a dedicated space to track and manage their support tickets. It connects them to the knowledge base and other resources. Overall, it bridges the communication gap between end-users and businesses. 

Here are some indicators that help identify whether your business needs to have a customer portal or not.

• There’s a continuous sharing and exchanging of data and documents
• You want to provide better support without increasing employees
• You are planning to provide your users with an automatic ticket generation system so that they can raise and track the status at their convenience
• You want to give your users the liberty to access their invoices and quotes 
• You want to let customers schedule and arrange their payments

If there’s a yes to even one of it, you must go for it. In fact, a study shows that 67% of end-users prefer a Dynamics 365 Customer Portal over a human representative. And this demand for improved CX is only going to increase. This is why businesses need to adopt portal solutions.

Let us see what are other reasons to go for a customer portal.

• Meets User Experience

Portals make it easy for end-users to find the solutions they are looking for. It gives them relevant information such as articles, new launch announcements, FAQs, promotion and update announcements, etc.

And this is how self-service solutions provide a better customer experience, increased brand loyalty, credibility, and customer retention. 

• Provides Immediate Solution

We know our patience level. We want an immediate solution to our problems. Hence, it is necessary to bring in a portal solution. Because it allows users to access it from any device and round the clock. It curbs the process of going through multiple sales reps to get the answer. 

If you go for Dynamics CRM Portal, you can deliver your end-users with quality, 24-7 support. Your customers won’t have to wait for answers.  

• Helps Build Community

The concept, “Be a helping hand. Let one support another,” is why you must go for Dynamics 365 Customer Portal. It can lead you to build a strong community for your products where users can help one another. A good community, in turn, will reduce your workload. You won’t have to increase your customer support team. In fact, at one stage, you could be free of 80% of support services. 

Besides, it can help you improve loyalty and brand name. Most customers are in the community for a long time and can even pitch for new features they would like to have. 

An effective solution will enable them to ask questions, suggest ideas, share experiences, and engage with other users.

In a Nutshell

Dynamics CRM Portal provides self-service, relevant information, and exceptional service. It makes it easy for customers to interact with businesses. Along with it, it helps build trust and brand loyalty.

Having a portal is directly proportional to the customer experience, and business success. 

Websites are the face of your business but maintaining that face requires a customer portal. Simply having customers be interested in your business is not enough. You have to have a way to be able to solve their issues, assist them and retain them in, long term. 

Dynamics 365 customer portal can do that when you a 1000 customers and when you have 100000 customers. For you to run your business, you need tools that can bring you this much versatility and scale.  

A great website, portal, or business needs much more than just good design. It needs a design that is equally functional. Dynamics 365 customer portal can give you that functionality with features like secure sign-in; roles-based access, drag and drop page builder, entity management, ready to use widgets and more.

What is a Dynamics 365 portal?

Dynamics 365 portal that is built on Dynamics CRM has an advanced content management framework. This framework allows you to surface expose and capture customer data. This tightly integrates with your customer data in Dynamics CRM, a robust, scalable, configurable platform that allows you to automate business processes and manage the entire customer life cycle.

It provides functionalities like customer self-service, community forums, partner engagement, employee self-service, etc. A Dynamics 365 portal can make your support tasks much easier. An often-misunderstood concept of a portal is that it is useful mainly at the end customers' end, but it is equally useful for the business that uses it. Support employees get their work in order and can become extremely efficient in handling customer issues. 

Dynamics 365 portal can be configured with powerful features that especially work for your business requirements. Let's look at a few benefits: 

Benefits

• Improves communication between customers, partners, and other relationships.

• Displays information from different sources in one place.

• Helps users to access information when they need it in a secure manner.

• Increases the revenue opportunities.

It helps external customers to view and create data on the company's environment, regarding their details, etc. The Dynamics 365 customer portal can give a customer access to their entire profile that your company has for them. This means they have access to their contact information, and they can easily update it, as well as access to their purchase history, knowledge base, and more.  

Who can use the customer portal?

• The company that wants to communicate order processing information like order status or accounts information from their Supply Chain Management system to enterprise customers.

Online stores that want to scale up and bring a more coherent experience to their customers can opt for a portal. The customer portal is the right complement to a website as it helps address things that a website or webstore cannot accommodate.  

The best part about a customer portal is that the Dynamics CRM customer portal can synchronize right with the CRM, making your management tasks a breeze! 

Role-based access makes the portal simple to use, no matter who is using it. Customers can get their individual profiles; employees can get a neat dashboard to keep up with their tasks and customer queries. The portal aims to simplify and streamline the interaction between employees and customers, and it does so by helping you employees put their best foot forward.  

End Words

Dynamics CRM customer portal can help make your management tasks simple, whether it is customer management or backend functions. You can also get easy to configure portal solutions for your partners and suppliers that can help you streamline all your communication and work with them. Portal solutions give a unique platform where all your business needs can come together to function cohesively so you can focus on things beyond management. 

Summary

This article provides details about the dynamics 365 portals. This also gives information about the customer portal on how it works and which organizations can use it.

What is the world’s leading CRM?

The answer we get is Salesforce

And when they get something huge for their customers, it gets even better!

Salesforce is expected to launch its long term pilot feature named “Dynamics Form” first demonstrated in Dreamforce 2018. Let’s see what is Dynamics Form and ways it can help our users.

Winter 2020 is here and last year Salesforce announced five anticipated releases which they rolled out this year.

• Recycle bin is coming in Lightning App Builder

• The all new Lightning mobile app

• Now you can print the lists from the Lightning app. Additionally, the printable view gives you the only parts of the screen you need

• Give away the plethora of counting unique opportunities now with Power of One filter
• Easily run schedule flows

 But, Dynamic Forms is the major release in the market. Let’s see it in brief:

What are Salesforce Dynamic Forms?

Dynamic forms are to create user centric, intuitive page layouts which will display proper information at the right time. With it, developers can put each field wherever they want on the Lightning page. No more classic page layouts, and combine layouts such that you can display the needed section on the screen.

Benefits of Dynamics Forms: 

• Upgrade to your page layout immediately so you can have a field and section wherever you want.

• Better page performance. You can put page and section headings in a way that it requires less page load time.

• It provides dynamic layouts to show or hide fields in section

• Reduce the number of page layout

A quick glimpse into how Salesforce Dynamics Form works:

Currently it is working only on custom objects and support for standard objects will be available later.

Salesforce Dynamic form brings out several new features:

• Fields Tab:

It is a left hand component pane and it contains fields associated with your custom object and field section component.

• Record Detail Component:

After you create the record page, you can simply drag and drop field section components and fields on the page. As dynamic forums are flexible you can easily organize, rearrange and even place sections in the tab.

If there are any existing record pages then too you can easily drag and drop the sections in an easier way. Just click on the Record Detail component and you can see on the top of Record Details properties pane.

Once you click on Upgrade Now the Salesforce Dynamic Form migration wizard starts. Go through the wizard and select the page layout which has fields that you want to migrate.

• Separate Marketing and System Tabs:

Marketing campaigns will show you the lead source and primary campaign source field whereas; system information will be available under system tab.

• Component Visibility:

Once you add the component to the page you can see component visibility on the side panel. It will provide you with multiple filter options.

Wrapping it up:

Salesforce Dynamic Forms is making it easier for developers to create Lightning page objects. This will lessen the workload of developers and instead helps to focus on more critical parts. If you have tried then do let us know your inputs for Salesforce Dynamic Forms.

About Us:

CRMJetty is a hub of innovative customer relationship solutions. Our tools ensure that you can render enhanced interactions at each stage of your customer lifecycle. So, if you are searching for the right customer portal solution for your company, then we can help you. We have served in this industry for over a decade and have built many portals that have helped our customers. So, get in touch with us and we will help you develop custom web portal solutions.

Portals are a one stop solution for companies to cater to their customers. The ease that companies get in handling and providing support to customers is commendable. Additionally, portals have also changed the way businesses interact with customers and vice versa.Today looking at the market potential of portals and CRMs many big and medium size companies are trying their hand at it. One such famous CRM is Microsoft’s Dynamics 365.

Microsoft Dynamics provides different types of portals like customer portal, partner portal, knowledge portal, etc. and each of them fulfills a different requirement. The main function of a portal is to bridge the gap between companies and customers.

Going further, let’s see Dynamics customer portal and partner portal in brief:

What is Dynamics 365 Customer Portal?

Dynamics customer portal bridges the gap between customers and companies. It provides access to exclusive content, chat, support, knowledge base, and many more things.

Here are the top three benefits of using customer portal:

Easy problem solving:

Efficiently solving problems is one of the major features of any customer portal. With Dynamics 365 customer portal you can use a ticket management system. You can use this feature and start solving your customers’ problems right from the portal. You don’t need to send them long emails or ask them to hold long call lines.

Power BI Integration:

Dynamics portal comes with an easy integration with Power BI. Now you can get the data from Power BI directly in your portal dashboard. Get the needed data insights in your dashboard and use it in decision making for your business.

Easy Configuration:

With Dynamics CRM customer portal companies can go one step further by providing the basic configuration. This will provide you with compact layouts and stacked elements so users can navigate the portal easily.

What is Dynamics 365 Partner Portal?

Dynamics Partner Portal provides your partners a login to aportal to get exclusive access to knowledge banks, opportunity management tools, customers’ data, account management activities, and more.

Here are the top three benefits of having Dynamics 365 Partner Portal:

Multi-partner collaboration:

This multi partner collaboration will make it easy for you to manage multiple partners and streamline work with each of them.

 Partner Lifecycle Management:

This allows them to onboard and manage  partners if needed to strengthen the partnership channel and increase selling. It streamlines all interactions with partners from giving them inventory updates, managing contracts, sales reports and more.

Deal registrations:

It allows vendors to gain early pipeline visibility to provide better deals, discounts, and benefits if and where needed.

Now, comes the main question: which type of portal should you go for? I would say this completely depends on your company’s requirements and user base. If you are planning to develop a portal for customers then you can opt for Dynamics customer portal. But, if you want your partners to use it then you require a Dynamics partner portal. Apart from this, if your requirement is for both of them, then you can go with both portals.

Once you decide the type of portal you need, you can go for customization to add or remove any particular feature. To do so you can reach out to any IT company like us which can help you to customize your Dynamics portal.

There are various third party Dynamics portals available in the market today which can easily integrate with your CRM. But our Dynamics 365 portal has some of the major benefits which help us to stand ahead of competitors.

Below are some of the important features of our portal:

Role based accessibility:

Admin can easily assign roles to each user and depending on the roles, assigned users can access the portal. Admin can create multiple groups, add contacts, and select relationships between contacts and entities.

Generate mass credentials:

Generating credentials can often be a tardy task for admin. But, not anymore with our portal solution. Admin can easily sync CRM contacts with the portal  and it can automatically generate credentials in bulk. Once credentials are generated they are sent to each user via mail. This ensures security and easy generation of credentials.

Custom module support:

Customizing a product till some extent is important to use it to its full potential. With our portal, customization becomes an easy task. No need to pay extra money for adding single modules. Easily create custom modules according to your business needs and carry out operations easily.

Case deflection:

This feature will let your end users search answers or solve their issues easily from within the portal itself. They can enter some specific keywords and find needed solutions. If they are unable to do so then they can create a case right from within the portal and you  can reply to these queries instead of repeatedly answering the same queries. .

SharePoint Add-on:

Sharepoint is an add-on supported by Dynamics which makes adding, editing, deleting of documents easy. Using SharePoint add-on you can easily make changes and sync those documents between Dynamics 365 portal, customer portal, and SharePoint in real time. Your customers can create, edit, delete, and even structure files according to their usage and put all data from all three platforms in sync.

Conclusion:

Portals have some of the major benefits for companies and when it comes to Dynamics customer portal and partner portal you can easily give it a chance. Take your business to the next level with the help of portals and bring the next big change in your business.