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!

 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.