Benefits of Customer Portals

Elemental Systems has been building and maintaining customer portals (or extranets) for over a decade and have learned about the direct benefits of the systems to our clients and their customers. Having a portal for your customers to access means that the business has focused on supplying the customers with the capabilities to serve themselves.

Customers want to help themselves

Microsoft has done significant research on the impact and importance of customer service, and specifically self-service. According to their 2017 study on the Global State of Customer Service, 75% of respondents attempt to find answers to their questions or concerns through simple web searches. 90% expect that companies have a customer portal.

Customers are helping themselves with our portals. Since deployment of several customer-based portals, our clients have experienced significantly fewer calls, live chats, and emails because the customers have more and better access to information. A few tasks that customers have been able to complete entirely on their own include:

• reviewing and exporting payment history and schedules
• status of services and orders
• requesting services
• changing of contact methods or account transfers

To motivate and get clients’ customers to begin using these systems, we helped our clients set up marketing materials and changed pre existing communication language/copy to inform customers of these new portals.

Sales are boosted

A company that uses a portal has a lot of options to collect revenue within the portal. We’ve implemented simple features for revenue streams such as, reminders, pop ups, alerts, feature locking, plenty of A/B testing of information placement, and a few others. Our clients have also been able to offer additional services and products to their customers within the portals, that the specific customer may not have purchased. We’re able to focus on the needs of not only our customers, but their customers as well. We have implemented several service and product recommendation platforms in portals, and they’ve had great success.

Other benefits

Customer accounts within portals offer benefits that might not immediately come to mind. Firstly, as new governmental and agency regulations are established, the importance of a streamlined customer identity or address verification process is critical to some businesses. No longer does your business have to request PII and documentation over email, this can be done within a portal and with third party tools designed to handle such tasks, securely. Second, by enabling customers to help themselves, the daily responsibilities and requirements become lighter. By shifting weight off their shoulders, the staff can focus on the quality of their work and even pick up other tasks. Finally, a customer portal is online 24/7 365 days a year, even when your office is not. When customers are redirected from calls, emails, and chat services into a portal, they can have their requests handled by themselves quickly, efficiently, and most importantly, on their own time.

Elemental Systems can assist your business with creating a customer portal

We have had the opportunity to help our clients with the exploratory, design, development, and management of portals for over a decade. We can help you ensure your customers are able to assist themselves when they need it and with the tools they need.