Customer Portal for my Business
What can a portal do for my business?
A web accessible customer portal is a great tool to allow customers to help themselves at any time they require. Portals are a customer service gateway to the operations, accounting, and support systems of a business.
Portals take plenty of weight off the shoulders of customer facing staff in your business.
Check out another article of ours to see more interesting benefits we’ve learned about customer portals through our customers.
What should my customer portal look like?
The appearance and user experience of a customer portal is critical to consider. Your customers will be (or already are) accessing your portal to solve a problem and you do not want them to experience confusion or frustration. From our experience of over a decade of building customer portals has shown that simplicity rules.
The exact appearance is really dictated from your business requirements. You’re likely familiar with the most common requests and inquiries from your customers, and those could be considered the most critical workflows to perfect in your customer portal. If you don’t know for sure, begin by having your staff keep a log of the inquiries they handle each day. You can compile that information to make good decisions for your customer portal.
What features should a customer portal have?
The core features of your portal should focus on the tasks that customers rely heavily on staff for, especially those tasks that have real-time requirements.
At a minimum, you should consider the following as part of the core features.
- Management of your contact information.
- Able to take Payments for Products or Services.
- Make appointments, take requests, and place orders.
- Password and Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) management.
How long does it take to get up and running?
There’s a good chance you have many options to choose from when deciding on a portal platform. As long as your business industry isn’t incredibly unique, there’s probably an existing solution for you to plug into. With those solutions, you have to adapt your business to the software. With custom solutions, the software is created around your business’s specific requirements. We assist with both scenarios. For SaaS solutions, we’ve seen onboarding occurring within a few weeks to about 6 months. For custom-built solutions, it can take 3 months to a year or longer depending on the requirements and size of the team developing the portal.
How much does a customer portal cost?
The cost of a customer portal is dependent on several factors including whether it's a SaaS solution or a custom built solution. Whichever decision is made, there will be onboarding costs and ongoing fees. The SasS Solution will have management and hosting fees, most likely grouped into a single fee. The custom solution will have initial development costs and ongoing maintenance costs as well, when updates are required. Both options will have fees associated with taking payments.