What thought/brand crosses your mind when you think about CRM and portals? 

For us, it's always Salesforce. Not because they are in the industry for long and are widely popular. But they understand customers' pain points and needs. They also understand the business requirements and what solution can help them achieve profits. Salesforce knows the market. They launch products that would enhance customers and clients' interaction. They bring in products that complement their CRM. Mostly, those products are portals and communities. 

If you know about Salesforce or have used it, you might know about Salesforce Customer Portal and the other types. You might be aware of their functionalities like that of a Salesforce Client Portal.

However, sometimes they can raise a question like which one to choose? 

Should you go with a customer based or a partner one? 

Hence, in this article, we'll discuss two types of Salesforce Portal, i.e., Customer and Partner. We'll also help you choose one that's right for your organization. 

Salesforce Customer Portal

Salesforce Client Portal is an interface that helps your customers/clients solve their issues about your products/services. 

As an organization, you can create a custom solution for your customers with features like ticket generation, knowledge base, and so on. You can include sections, information, modules based on your requirements.

If you go for this solution, you can provide your customers - omnichannel support, easy integration, and an online forum. Besides, you can provide 24/7 support without any extra resources. Also, it can eliminate the drawback of having customers in multiple time zones. 

Salesforce Partner Portal

Partner portal allows your partners outside the organization to log in to Salesforce. It helps companies create indirect sales. Here, the partners have limited access to the interface and can only view the modules they have access to. 

With the help of PRM, companies can create, manage, and handle sales. They can invite partners to manage, track, and analyze campaigns, sales, and more. 

The benefits of using a partner portal include efficiency in the sales funnel, increased ROI, and data retrieval from anywhere, anytime. It means partners can access the data and insights while on the go. They can share documents, reports, and so on. 

Salesforce Client Portal V/s Partner Portal

Let us see what makes one better over the other. 

• Purpose

A customer portal aims to solve queries and issues without interacting or asking for a representative's help. Partner’ shows partners with leads and sales opportunities. 

• Audience

A customer portal is for end-users whereas partners one are for salespeople or third-parties. 

• Access and Cost

A customer solution is easy to access. They may or may not have advanced features as their basic purpose is to solve queries. Partner solution has access to core CRM features. Besides, it requires additional features to plan sales campaigns. And so it is expensive. 

• Role-based Access

In a partner solution, you can provide your partners with role-based access. For example, they can access sales reports but not invoice reports. This is not the case with the Salesforce customer portal. 

• Knowledge 

Salesforce customer solution has a huge knowledge repository to help customers solve their queries. The partner one may or may not have such a huge knowledge base. 

What You Should Choose? 

A solution that meets your company's requirements. There's a thin line between these two solutions. However, both have their own set of uniqueness and peculiarities. 

If you want a solution to solve your customers' problems, manage their activities, then go for a customer one. But if you want a solution to manage your partners, then go for a partner one.

That's all for now. 

If you still need guidance in choosing one, talk to a portal development team. They will guide you in the right direction. 

Also, you can leave a comment here. We will try to help you in every way possible. 

Not every customer prefers interaction with customer support representatives. Some even wish never to call the team and ask for updates, support, or any other reasons. For them, calls, live chats, texts, and customer support are like stepping out of their comfort zone. And that's not the kind of dissatisfaction you would want for your customers. However, you can't make everyone happy. But you can always try your best by providing better customer service through a customer portal. Even the stats say that 75% of customers prefer a self-service system to be more convenient than talking to a representative. 

Opting for a portal will not only benefit your customers, but even you will be at an advantage. By providing customers with a Salesforce customer portal, you can free your representatives of repetitive, unproductive tasks. Instead, they can focus on pressing services. Also, fewer support requests mean less investment in training the customer support team. Besides, it will help you bring more customers, thereby increasing your page authority. Last but not least, you can give back to your customers by educating them to understand your product and technology at a larger front. 

Portal is the right solution. Yet, there's a far more difference between empowering customers to find their solution and providing them with a tool to track answers. A useful customer portal is a multichannel solution that offers customers detailed information. There are several factors that together build the bridge. Learn what they are, to provide your customers with superior support. 

• Omnichannel Support

As of 2019, 51.5% of customers rely on mobile devices for accessing the internet over a desktop. Based on this number, do you think it would be wise to make customers access the portal via desktop? Certainly, not. 

Show them you genuinely care for them by adopting a Salesforce customer portal that's compatible with multiple devices.

Let them log in via a mobile phone or a desktop. Give them the privilege of anywhere anytime with responsive web pages or native apps. 

• Knowledge Base

Often, customers have more questions that a mass email can answer. Consider providing your customers with a pool of knowledge. It can be FAQs, informational blogs, trending topics, how to guides and articles, documentation, or more.

Discussion forums or online groups would also help customers find solutions together. It would help them learn and grow, further reducing the dependency on your support team. Instead, as the business grows, these forums can act as a community of a support team. You won't need to invest in it. 

Coming back, I would suggest going with a Salesforce customer portal. Because it easily integrates with WordPress, the king of CMS. Besides, you can create forums and discussion groups for your customers. 

• Accessibility

The last thing a customer wants to deal with (if unavoidable) is technical complexity. They look for easy to use functions, like a single click to land on the blog page, a few steps to view history. If your customers can't access the knowledge base or other features seamlessly, they may abandon the portal. And it may affect your business directly or indirectly. Because losing even one  customer is a huge loss in the long run.

An effective portal will ensure that you and your customers don't have to deal with complexities. They integrate with different solutions and are easy to use.

• Customization

Every customer is a designer in their own way. They often look to customize their spaces. It can be as easy as turning the app to dark mode, adding custom background wallpapers, or personalizing the screen's look using available templates.

When it comes to portals, many businesses prefer open source. It's not a bad idea. By customizing the code, it's possible to change the layout of the portal window. However, that's more of an advantage for technical people. As a general user, your customer may find it difficult or impossible to create the attractive portal. However, a simple drag and drop with templates would help them customize the portal quickly. 

•  Data Security

Businesses often look for solutions that are safe and secure because it would be catastrophic if customer information and business critical information leaks. A plugin that integrates with CRM and CMS but doesn't store the data of your customers is exactly what you need!

Salesforce Customer Portal is precisely what you want. It doesn't store or fetch the data to the providers' database. It merely integrates and acts as an interface to access the data.

In a Nutshell

Customer behavior has changed, and also the business process. Turning towards portals is not an option anymore. Instead, it's a necessity. Only an effective portal that implies with factors mentioned above can yield you results!

Good customer experience is one of the driving forces behind having a successful business in this competitive market. According to research done by Salesforce, 80% of decision makers think that having a better customer experience is one of the most important things. Today customers are giving equal importance to good experience as they give to products and services.This has made it challenging for businesses to always be on their toes, go one step ahead and serve their customers better. To ease this entire process of making customer experience better technology has helped a lot. One such thing is new in the field of customer service and that is AI.

More than half the work decreased when portals were introduced in the market. And now going one step further, companies have started introducing AI in portals. This has made lots of tasks of customer agents easy and helped them increase their productivity.

Let’s see ways AI is helping your customer agents serve your customers better:

Case Handling:

When your customer is facing issues they are very likely to look up the solution on the portal and solve it on their own. But, if they can’t then they will generate a ticket or live chat with your employees. Followed by a quick Q&A.

Whereas, with the intervention of AI, you can build a Chabot and instill in live chat. Chabots with the help of machine learning can talk with customers in the first phase, gather all the information or problems they are facing and pass it to your customers.

Now, your employees can solve these issues faster and customers too will not have to wait much for response.

Better employee insights:

Continuously checking and micro-managing your customer agent is not the acceptable thing. They are very likely to get disturbed and might not be able to work efficiently. In such cases, AI can help you. You can now get insights into their performance, their problem solving strategies, how they help customers, time taken to solve each problem, and more.

You can gather all this information and understand which points are making your employees slow. So, in turn you can decide which areas your employees need to have more training or define different ways to solve their issues.

Personalized recommendations:

Understanding your customers’ previous purchases and recommending things to them on the basis of it is an important thing. It is also one of the ways to provide better customer service to your customers.

For example, suppose your user has added some item in the cart then during the checkout you can recommend them certain items from their wishlists which will go with the product they are purchasing. Just like Myntra! They always recommend to you other products as well on the basis of your previous purchase, size, location, and many more. This will help you to know your customers better, their choices, and serve them in the right way.

Predict future trends:

Using AI you can predict future trends of the market on the basis of your customers’ pain points. This will help you to serve your customers in the right way but also set a new trend in the market.

With the help of AI you can predict the future trends of your market. This will help you to understand your customers better, serve them in the right way, and change the marketing strategy according to the future preferences.

This will help you to serve your customers better, know their choice and recommend on its basis, stay ahead of competition.

Prioritization of work:

Prioritizing work is a major concern which leads to lethargic work. It helps to serve your customers in the right way. With the help of AI algorithms you can define which thing is in the priority and further it makes the decision on the basis of it.

Wrapping up:

Artificial intelligence is not new but with time people have started using it in business to serve their customers better. There are multiple platforms that provide this solution but the best solution is a portal with salesforce wordpress integration.

Non-Governmental organizations play a vital role in the growth of any society, community, or country. In many cases, they can also bridge the gap between governmental bodies and citizens. They have a huge impact on the lives of youth in a community or a country by encouraging core values of empathy and understanding.

Each NGO has their goal and impact they want to make in the society but there are a lot of hurdles they have to overcome. With the rapid development in technology, there are a lot of companies that are helping NGOs to achieve more with the help of technology.

One such company is Salesforce. Over the years, they have understood the pain points of NGOs and made a dedicated product for them named Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. To know more about this product, read our blog: Your Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)

In this article, we are going to talk about the problems NGOs face and the ways Salesforce’s NPSP is the perfect solution.

Lack of Funds:

No matter how big the NGO is, most of them face this issue either directly or indirectly. To execute any campaign, giveaways, or plan an initiative require funds. The main problem here is finding the source of funding. Constantly seeking out people and organizations other than government bodies for donations becomes tedious and time-consuming.

Solution:

Salesforce Cloud gets the donation management part streamlined.

You can increase your online donations by creating online forms named giving pages in Salesforce. It helps you with one time as well as recurring donations from your supporters. It is integrated with Google Analytics so it becomes easy for your team members to keep track of your donors.

Going one step further, you can also use the power of data and understand the flow in which your donations were made. You can also start an cemail campaign and add links to giving pages so it becomes easy for your users to make donations. Don’t worry about data duplication because with the help of Salesforce’s Platform Data Integrity you can eliminate duplicate contacts and avoid issues of spamming your donor’s email ids.

Additionally, you can use all this data in your organization, collaborate with your employees to brainstorm together in different ways to aware more people and thus increase funds.

Chaos in Managing Programs:

With an everyday increase in the number of people, events, and initiatives it becomes difficult to manage while scaling your operations. Because as you grow, along with you, your donor base, their records, and the amount of data grows as well. Hence, it becomes difficult to manage all this information in a secure way.

Solution:

With the help of Salesforce NPSP’s program management module you can easily manage complex and big programs effortlessly. Your customer support staff can provide your customers with support anytime and anywhere via chat, voice mails, calls, messages, or social media platforms. This allows you to scale your operations while keeping one-on-one relationships with your donors as well as your volunteers.

Lack of Volunteers:

Volunteers are an important part of any NGO. They are the ones who work day and night to make any event successful. But it is not always easy to get volunteers on-board as well as manage each and every volunteer’s schedule.

Solution:

Volunteers for Salesforce app helps you to manage volunteers, you can thank them for their devoted time, help them find any volunteer opportunities matching their skill set, and keep them engaged by posting volunteer opportunities. This way an NGO can easily on-board their volunteers and keep them volunteers engaged.

Difficulty in Managing Donors:

With a growing NGO, there is also an increase in your donor base and managing all of them, along with hosting events and fundraisers is tough.

Solution:

Salesforce case management helps you to attend your donors better. On the case manager home page you can have detailed information about calls, incidents logged, and necessary tasks. This will help you plan your entire day ahead.

With just a few clicks you can know where your donor/volunteer is stuck and with the help of knowledge base, documentation and programs, you can help them move forward. You can create case notes and save them as a draft with some specific topic so you can finish it in near future. In this module, it also becomes easy to search for your donor/volunteer, assess their donations/volunteer work, and understand its impact.

Running an NGO has its own challenges but now with the help of technology, we can come together to solve major issues.

Technology when used for good can change the world.

With the help of Salesforce NPSP together we are changing the world.

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 technology partner to help you deploy your Salesforce NPSP, then you are in the right space. We have served in this industry for a decade and have helped many NGOs deploy NPSP along with a good portal solution. Get in touch with us and we’ll help you kick start your journey towards making this world a better place.

 In Salesforce’s own words, Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack or NPSP is the nonprofit technology built on the world’s number one CRM i.e. Salesforce. It was built by Salesforce’s nonprofit community of 47,000 nonprofits which makes this solution perfect for any nonprofit organization that is looking to streamline their operations including donor management, donation management, as well as volunteer management.

Let’s first try and understand the offering of Salesforce’s NPSP.

Salesforce provides this success pack for nonprofits for free. But, there’s a catch. It is only free up to 10 users which seems reasonable and doable but to get it properly configured and get started with it, you’ll have to seek out a consultation or a development firm which makes it not so free a solution.

What comes in this Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack?

Well, for starters, it has the general Salesforce tech and nonprofit success pack making it just the right solution for a nonprofit to get started. It is built with the relationship-first ideology to help you with constituent relationship management.

What is Salesforce NPSP?

Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack or NPSP is essentially a free solution to get a nonprofit organization started with the help of Salesforce NPSP.

Salesforce uses a standard data model to organize data and their NPSP uses a similar data model for its functions as well as expansion. This model is created in such a way that it is easier for any layperson to understand how data is organized in context to a spreadsheet or database. To know more about Salesforce’s data model, check out their piece on NPSP basics from here. After reading their piece, you’ll have a clear understanding of some of Salesforce terminology like objects, fields, records, etc. which will make it easier to understand NPSP.

NPSP Features: Explained in Details

NPSP’s focus being on nonprofit organizations, it is packed with features that are specially made for it. Let’s go through them:

- Donor management
- Donation management
- Engagement management
- Volunteer management
- Campaign management
- Analytics

Donor management

The most important part of a nonprofit organization is their donors. In order to keep track of them, you need a good donor management system. This enables you to know details like their age group, their varying or consistent interests in your campaigns, the cause they want to support, etc.

Donor management also gives donors a simple way to make donations, claim charity related items, like from auction campaigns, etc.

With donor information and analysis, you can easily build and curate campaigns, send out event invites, etc. that will have better turnout and help you raise more funds.

Donation management

With donors, come donations. Managing these can be a herculean task. Donation management tools can help you bifurcate monetary donations to causes, art to auction campaigns, etc. It can also be used to get a view of recurring donations such that happens via brand tie-ups.

Engagement management

Running a nonprofit organization is nothing more than building long-lasting relationships with your donors, volunteers, program participants, constituents, and more. And how would you do that? By monitoring, tracking, and managing their engagement with your nonprofit.

Salesforce’s nonprofit pack equips you with just the right tools for engagement management like:

You can set up campaigns to track and manage engagement of your constituents
Craft, track, and manage the onboarding process of your volunteers
Understand how your donors are engaging with your nonprofit
Or you can even track any program participants you might have and their engagement with you

Insights into how your stakeholders or audience is interacting with your organization is the key to any business’ growth.

Volunteer management

When it comes to a large nonprofit organization, volunteers make or break their success. Volunteer management features provide a smooth onboarding process for them, lets them select their schedule, and pick up tasks based on their skillset. This enables smooth operation. While this is crucial during campaigns and events, it is even more important to keep things running smoothly when not much is happening.

Campaign management

You can build and manage entire campaigns from the NPSP portal. Run email campaigns, carry out a detailed social media campaign, and even run ones that are outside Salesforce. New member sign-ups can happen automatically in response to these campaigns, requiring a single effort to start the onboarding process.

Analytics

Data is great. But it means nothing without analytics. That’s why NPSP gives you built-in reports for various things. You can keep a track of donations based on defined criteria, see the consistency of campaigns, and more. A dashboard lets you glance at all these reports on a daily basis, which can prove effective during an active campaign in order to strategize in run time.

What NPSP offers is much greater than this blog. So, it will be followed by two more detailed blogs about:

- How to use Salesforce NPSP features
- How to maximize the outcome with Salesforce NPSP

to provide you with further information on Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack.