When was the last time you visited a travel agency office to book your travel ticket? Or to understand holiday packages to pick from? Well, I am sure it was a long time back when the online travel business was in its nascent stage. This was a time when it wasn’t widely accepted and popular because people had apprehensions about such transactions being fraudulent.

Well, that time has passed and the online travel business is a thriving industry today. Big players like Airbnb, Expedia, Booking.com, etc., have revolutionized the travel industry. They have made online travel services reliable and secure and therefore gained people’s trust and support. 

After a drop in 2020 due to COVID-19, the online travel agency sector worldwide is forecast to snowball again. According to Statista, it is forecast to touch $820.18 bn by 2023. It is clear that the online travel business is a booming industry and will continue to be so. 

Rising to the occasion, even small travel agency owners are also looking to go online. For them, an online travel portal can be an ideal fit. It is because it lets them manage their agents, partners, and customers centrally and efficiently. 

If you also run a travel company or are looking to start one, this post is for you. In this post, you are going to learn about the importance of an online travel portal in detail. You’ll also know the features you must seek in a travel portal. 

Benefits of an Online Travel Portal

A travel portal based on your CRM can help manage your travel business easily. For example, a SuiteCRM customer portal for your travel business would be suitable if you use SuiteCRM. And Salesforce portal for Salesforce-based organization, and so on. 

• Reduced Running Costs

If you run a travel company, hiring several travel agents to explain tour packages and booking tickets may be costly. Instead, a SuiteCRM customer portal or any other portal for your travel business can save you expenses. 

Moreover, you can also cut down the effort of maintaining records of all costumes in spreadsheets. This is because you can view all your customers’ and agents’ details centrally and manage them better with a travel portal. 

• Real-Time Access

A travel portal provides real-time access to all details like prices of tour packages, hotels, rental services, flights, etc. to your customers. Customers can also vet and compare the prices of hotels and packages during peak season and normal times. It helps them make a more informed choice of a tour package, hotel, etc.

• Customer Care Support

A travel portal helps customers communicate and convey issues easily via a chat or call option. This helps customers get quick solutions to their travel-related issues or answers to queries. 

They can also get help in selecting the right package for their tour plan via customer care support. This way, a travel portal eliminates the need to call or visit a travel agency office for every small issue or query. 

• Enhanced Transparency and Convenience

An online travel portal helps display accurate fares with any hidden costs. This helps build customers’ trust in your company and connect with you more. A complete comprehensive breakdown of applicable charges brings more transparency. 

Besides, booking tickets and packages online is convenient. Customers don’t have to visit any office or branch to book their tickets, hotels, or rental services. They can do it all right from within the portal. Using a portal for this also helps get a much clearer view of comparison metrics like pricing, amenities, etc. This saves both their time and money and enhances their experience. Similarly, customers can also easily cancel or reschedule a booking without calling the company’s office or visiting there. 

All this helps takes customers’ convenience, and booking experience, to the next level. 

• Large Variety of Options

An online travel portal helps gain access to a large list of hotels, rental cars, flight or bus tickets, and tour packages. Customers can get numerous options to choose from unlike in the case of an offline travel agency. 

All this is not feasible with a travel agent due to time constraints and limited knowledge available on the internet. 

Features to Look for in a Travel Portal

The travel portal you pick should be easily accessible to the admin, agents, and customers. 

For Admin

As the business owner and admin, you should have control over the complete management of your customers and agents. For that, there are a few admin features below that you must look for when picking a travel portal:

• As an admin, the travel portal should allow you to view, manage, and update customers’ booking details on the fly. 

• You should also be able to manage hotel bookings easily and efficiently from within the travel portal. The portal should provide a centralized view of all bookings to help you get better visibility and avoid any errors.

• There should be a built-in process for the online identification of customers within the portal. It will help you avoid the hassle of manual identity verification after check-ins. 

• The portal should allow you to manage tour packages and their details like prices in real-time. You should offer the best tour package recommendations based on your customers’ preferences and budget. 

For Agents

If you provide an online travel service that supports individual travel agents and associates; your travel portal should have the following features:

• Individual hospitality agents and associates should be able to manage their commission for every booking. The portal should also let them track total bookings and negotiate the commission to pay to you. 

• The portal should let travel and hospitality associates and agents implement the credit systems for customers. It will help increase repeat bookings and expand the customer base. 

• The portal should also facilitate offering discounts on bookings for agents to attract more online bookings. This way, they can also adjust the commission fee according to the overall profitability of your company. 

For Customers

Last but not least, the travel portal you pick should be user-friendly for your customers.

• The portal should make the booking experience seamless for customers. It should let them check for the availability of travel tickets on specific dates and book them. 

• There should be a choice of multiple payment options to book. The portal should also provide the option to save a payment method for future bookings for fast transactions. 
• There should be an exhaustive list of hotels, ratings, charges, and facilities displayed. Comparison and filter options should be there to allow customers to vet and pick a package carefully.

• Your travel portal should let customers view travel booking history and update booking details. They should get to update, cancel, or reschedule their bookings without hassle. 

 Launch Your Travel Portal with CRMJetty

 If you own a travel company and are looking for a travel portal, we’ve got you covered. Our development team can help you develop a travel portal based on your CRM. 

 We provide ready-to-integrate industry-specific SuiteCRM client portal, Salesforce portal, WordPress portal, etc. If you want to expand your existing portal’s capabilities, we can help you with that also. We can discuss your portal requirements, analyze the feasibility of development or customization, test limitations,  and deliver the final portal. 

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We know the importance of portals in a business. The endless self-service options, integrations, and features simplify the business operations and keep the communication with the customers going. 

If you want to give your customers an enhanced experience, integrating a SuiteCRM WordPress Customer Portal would be a good trick. However, it is overwhelming to identify the features of a customer portal. There would be a list of must-have features, whereas the one that might be required but not mandatory. Also, the system would have some standard features. You might choose to customize the standard features or add additional customized features. Overall, you need to consider a lot of things before finalizing a customer portal, or you can go with a SuiteCRM WordPress Plugin that allows easy customization of features along with a set of quality integrated features.  

Below, we have explored a few SuiteCRM WordPress Customer Portal features and why your business needs them.

• Organized Communication Channel

To keep the communication intact, you might have to consider customers, vendors, and partners. Besides, it could be one-to-one and one-to-many. Thus, if you integrate a portal, you will likely have to configure it for relationship settings. It has to be in a way that communication remains seamless. There are customer portals that are dynamic in terms of code. It means you can communicate without configuring the relationships with the contacts. The advantage is you won’t have to invest your time in handling the backend work or in discussion with the tech partner. 

• Custom Module Support

SuiteCRM WordPress Plugin provides numerous modules. You can customize the modules as per your specifications or leave it as it is. Some SuiteCRM customer portals consist of all the required CRM modules. You only need to enable them to use it. To simplify it further, the portal provides an easy configuration method. You can directly configure the modules from the portal without the help of a technical person. The custom module will automatically be in sync with contacts and other data modules in the CRM. It means everything would be effortless. Also, you can update the front-end quicker with the WordPress admin. 

• Case Deflection

Case deflection feature in SuiteCRM WordPress Customer Portal would allow your customers to self handle their queries. It will help customers to look for queries before generating a new ticket or case into the system. On the other side, your support team will be free of repetitive work instead can focus on more productive work. The feature would eliminate the need to solve repetitive questions. As for you, it would be easier to track your team’s performance.

You can enable the case deflection feature from the backend of your SuiteCRM WordPress Plugin. 

• Dynamic User Accessibility

With all the configurable modules, you would want to provide your customers with accessibility. But for that, you would need a feature that allows you to give access rights dynamically to all the modules. It would be required for custom modules too. 

Not only access, but also you will have to restrict the access for specific modules for specific customers. Thus, a role-based access feature would be of more use. It will help you share the data with necessary users by setting the user group. The security will further strengthen the trust in the customer relationship.

Conclusion

These features are a must-have for your customer portal. It gives you the freedom to improve the SuiteCRM customer portal services without any configurations. However, the features of the portal should align with your business requirements. They should be in addition to other features like sign-in, notifications, contacts, etc. 

While choosing your customer portal features, make sure they are in accordance with your customers’ and employees’ needs. The satisfaction of both is mandatory for a successful outcome.

SuiteCRM is a customization boon. You get to set up your CRM as you want it. This includes things that your business flow needs. 

Apart from these customizations, if you want a way to connect with your customers, adding a SuiteCRM WordPress customer portal can do the trick. However, it can often get overwhelming to know what features are must-haves in the portal and how much flexibility you need to manipulate those features easily. Some features are classic must-haves and others you build on top of the ones that SuiteCRM provides. Let’s take a look. 

• Custom relationship

SuiteCRM provides two kinds of relationships. One is one-to-one and the other one is the one-to-many relationship. If you integrate a portal, it is possible that you would have to configure it to work for the relationship settings that you have in place. But some portals can be dynamic in terms of code. No matter what relationship you have established in terms of your contacts, the portal should be able to handle it. The advantage here is that you won’t have to configure the portal especially to reflect this.  

• Custom module support

SuiteCRM provides a bunch of modules. But you may want to add more depending on your business logic. However, wouldn’t it be convenient if you could handle the configuration of this on the portal side as well?

Certain SuiteCRM customer portals come with all the modules that SuiteCRM provides. You can enable or disable them according to your business logic. You don’t have to go through any special configuration to view the module you actually need to see in your portal. A simple toggle can give you all the modules you need.

This makes your update cycles fast and your customers can get your new modules quicker.  

• Dynamic user accessibility

Once you configure all your modules in the portal, the next thing you would want is to provide access of these modules to the users. For that, it is imperative that your portal has the functionality that allows you to dynamically provide access to different types of users. Even for the custom modules added in the portal, you need this functionality.

This feature allows you to securely share data with only necessary people. It also builds a sense of trust among your customers.

Lastly,

These features are a must-have for when you want to get things done without special configuration cycles. They enhance a regular SuiteCRM customer portal and give you a little something extra. Your portal should reflect your business requirements and logic. These features go in addition to the usual features like secure sign in, unlimited sign-ins, etc.  

When you are looking for a customer portal, keeping your customers in the center is important. But keeping your staff in mind is equally important so that they can take care of your customers effectively.

Put yourself in the shoes of a customer. Have you tweeted out to the company when you experienced bad service? Have you told about the bad experience to anyone who would listen? Lastly, have you ever gone back to that business? Now think about all the reasons why you were not satisfied with a product or service.

Was it because the product was faulty? Was it because it didn't deliver ahead of time as things usually do? Or was it because you think you deserve a better experience for the price you are paying?

All customers have one or the other problem. None of them is ever a hundred percent happy with what they are getting. Your customers will want to contact you and tell you that you are wrong and that your product was not up to the mark. However, you can minimize this by providing them with some control over a few things.

For instance, you can make your customer's experience much better by giving them the freedom to solve small things by themselves.

For your staff, this will be very helpful. They won't have to constantly interact with a customer's whims and complaints.

One customer can want to place a return order, sometimes more than once; another may want a refund for a product that is perfectly fine, and some customers may want a product that is out of stock! The problems are multifold and never-ending. The irritated staff makes nothing better in this situation.

But since the technology exists to make things better for us, we can use that to our advantage. The one software that can handle all these kinds of issues is a customer portal. And the one built on SuiteCRM with WordPress gives you the best of both worlds. This excellent combination of CRM platform and CMS platform gives you a SuiteCRM WordPress customer portal.

This portal is all you need to solve your customers' problems without having to overburden your support staff with work.

Here's How Customer Portal Features Benefit Support Staff:

Live Chat: The live chat option in the customer portal lets your customers chat with your support staff instead of making phone calls about every little thing. Many queries are small and don't need a phone call or email. They can simply solve them by forwarding a pre-written message (in case of usual queries).

Organized Communication: Another way that it can help your staff is to keep track of all transactions with customers. While your staff can always see that in the CRM, the SuiteCRM WordPress customer portal enables the feature for the customer as well. With this, they can track each transaction whether it is a purchase order, a return request or an exchange process. They can also see their payments, product details, order details, etc.

Secure Sign-in: With a SuiteCRM customer portal, your customers will always have a secure single sign-in access to your CRM. They will be able to get all the details regarding themselves wherever they want.

Knowledge Base: The customer portal also comes equipped with a knowledge base. This is handy if your product is complicated to understand. With the knowledge base, your customers can take full advantage of your product features and they can get their answers without even having to contact you. And the best part, they can access a knowledge base 24/7. It removes the time boundation you have with the support teams and also helps you cater to your global customer base.

Conclusion:

With this portal, your support staff will be grateful to you because dealing with unsatisfied customers every day can be taxing. Your SuiteCRM customer portal will help you in two ways: by making your customers happy and by making your staff enjoy their work a little bit more.

While customers are of course the most important element of your business, think about your staff, without whom you wouldn't have been able to build a business in the first place.

Mr. Maulik Shah is the founder & CEO of CRMJetty, hub of innovative customer relationship solutions, provides ready to CMS integrate portal solutions for various CRM, including SuiteCRM Customer Portal and WordPress Customer Portal. Maulik is a tech enthusiast and writes about the various aspects of ecommerce technology.

Source - https://www.sooperarticles.com/technology-articles/software-articles/4-ways-customer-portal-becomes-boon-support-staff-1731795.html