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!

Salesforce is a well-known name in the world of CRMs, portals, and communities. We can’t deny that their products are world-class and provide organizations like yours an upper hand. And sometimes that can raise further questions like which portal to invest in? Should you be going with a portal or a community?

What is Salesforce Partner Portal?

 

Increased efficiency of your channel sales funnel

Increased ROI

Access to data from anywhere anytime

What is Salesforce Customer Portal?

Omnichannel support

Easy integration

Online forum

Salesforce Customer Portal Vs Partner Portal

When we talk about CRMs or portals the first thing which comes to our mind is Salesforce. They are and have been ruling the industry for more than a decade now. The reason for their success is that they understand their market deeply and have been known to launch products that complement their CRM creating a perfect flow for customer communication for their clients.

The complimentary products that we are talking about here are portals and communities. If you’ve been following Salesforce or have been using it for a long time now, then you might be aware of what they are, their functionalities, and how they benefit organizations.

In this blog, we are going to discuss:

- Types of Salesforce portals and their functionalities

- Salesforce communities

- Difference between Salesforce Portals and Communities

- Which one to choose?

Today almost every organization we interact with is through Portals. Believe it or not, it’s true.

These portals have taken up the market and revolutionized the ways people interact with companies and vice versa. According to research done by Nuance, 67% of people prefer to use self-service portals instead of getting on a call or emailing with company employees.

Portals not only changed the way users interact with the companies but they also gave users a chance to learn and explore things on their own.

And these portals are not limited to customer interactions. They go beyond.

Three major types of Salesforce portals:

Self-service portal:

Nowadays customers prefer to solve their problems even the technical ones on their own. Self-service portals help them by redirecting them to the right FAQs, blog posts, technical documents, videos, etc. so that they can resolve the issue on their own. This reduces the communication between your customers and customer support while creating a win-win situation for both. Your support can work more productively and customers don't need to wait to get their answers.

Customer portal:

Salesforce.com Customer Portal provides customers with an online channel to communicate with customer executives and solve their issues. They help to streamline communication and provide easy and fast solutions. Portals are also helping companies to provide 24/7 support to their customers regardless of time zones and geographic shortcomings.

Their customer portal is somewhat similar to the self-service portal except that you’ll be providing your customers with a different interface to interact with you rather than doing it directly from your website or web app.

Partner portal:

Salesforce partner portal is for your sales and channel partners. They have access to the core features of Salesforce CRM. The partner portal also provides partners with leads and customer conversion opportunities.

Portal is a neat way to communicate with different entities associated with your business. But, this is not all where Salesforce stopped. They wanted to make portals more branded, collaborative, and bring a change in the way users and companies interact with each other.

Hence in 2013, Salesforce introduced Community Cloud with an aim to share information and collaborate with people more effectively. It provides companies with the tools to create online communities by connecting with customers, external partners, and employees.

Salesforce Community Cloud is available in three tiers. They are:

- Customer Community

- Customer Community Plus

- Partner Community

Depending on your company’s requirements you can purchase any one of the licenses. The customer community is useful for support and feedback. For online collaboration, handling internal employee communities, HR, or IT teams, the customer community plus is useful. Lastly, the partner community is useful to B2B businesses as you can create a flow for qualifying leads, tracking revenue, and providing product training.

Community clouds are taking over the market due to its high scalability, no coding requirements, libraries filled with rich scalable templates, easy third party integrations, and custom made components, and more.

You can build communities based on the entities you interact for different purposes.

Now let’s look at the differences between Salesforce customer portal and Communities:

Portals and community clouds have the same structural features but differ in the way people interact with them.

- Portals provide external users the ability to access Salesforce whereas community clouds connect the internal users together in Salesforce.

- External users like partners or customers can communicate via Chatter in Communities. While on the other hand, portals don't support Chatter.

- Communities are visually appealing and have easy to navigate user interfaces while portals’ user interface might look a little outdated.

- Cost-wise portals are reasonable as compared to Salesforce community cloud.

- Portal is an extension of your CRM and users can access or view information limited to their account. Whereas, communities reside inside your organization and can be accessed globally.

- Various portals like knowledge portal, self-service portal, customer portal, partner portal, etc. are used for different purposes. Whereas, communities provide one platform to share knowledge with users, easy communication between users, employees, and partners, drive more sales by connecting with distributors and resellers, enhance user engagement, workflow, and content all from one place.

- Community cloud comes with the integration of site.com for content management, android and iOS version, integration of Salesforce Einstein, Chatter, enhanced security, and many more.

Now, comes the main question, what should you use: Salesforce Customer Portal or Communities?

Even today Salesforce portals are the most searched and most used products. But, over the course, they will soon be replaced with Community Cloud. So if you are a company using a customer portal for a few years now, then it might be time to start looking to switch to community cloud.

But if you are a company that’s just starting out or is just starting to scale then the Salesforce portal is the right option.

Portals and communities are the same in some ways and a lot different in others. The right decision lies with knowing your requirements, the stage your company’s at, and especially, what your customers expect from you.