Customer portals provide protected digital access to an organization’s network, community, files, and other information.
Before we dive into the benefits of customer portals, let’s take a look at their definition. A customer portal is a private network that allows partners, vendors, customers and other interested parties to access part of a company or institution.
Users on an extranet have no more access to the rest of the organization’s network than is granted to them. An extranet is usually a part of a company website that has been spun off. It is restricted to pre-approved users only through user IDs, passwords, and other authentication methods.
Customer portals sit within extranets and act as a service engagement and fulfillment system for an organization’s customers.
What do customer portals do
Customer portals are very useful in various organizations, from banks to tourism companies, universities, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and retail chains. Many businesses and industries use customer portals.
This technology is very useful and manages to make life easier for customers. Imagine how different the world would have been without customer portals during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Benefits of customer portals
There are many benefits that both the service provider and the customer can derive from a customer portal. Here are a few to consider:
Collaboration
You can provide your customers and partners with personalized and specific information that may be useful to them. It could be a transportation company that notifies its customers of truck or plane departure times so that customers can place their orders using this information.
Accessibility
Portals offer customers easy access to relevant information such as FAQs, troubleshooting tips, company details, product details, and much more. With well-managed portals, all of this information is correct and up-to-date.
Present personalized content
Imagine your bank informing you of a specialized interest rate or product offering when you open your banking app. In this case, we have received personalized information.
Without the banking portal, we might not have gotten such useful information at the right time.
Connected devices
Customer portals make life easier for customers by making information available to them on a variety of devices. This keeps them connected wherever they are.
There’s no need to stick to traditional work schedules. In many cases, this flexibility is not an advantage, but a necessity.
Better communication
Customer portals save the time needed to authenticate customers and tell us if the customer is who they say they are. Because the authentication will have been done in advance, now only a successful login is needed for a client to be able to communicate with their service provider. This breaks down any communication barriers that may get in the way of our relationship with the client.
Build customer loyalty
Customer portals can enhance customer experiences by offering additional communication channels.
When accurate and timely information is made available to customers, we can ensure that we are responding to their needs. This gives us a much broader opportunity to retain that customer.
Best customer service
One of the greatest benefits that customer portals have brought is that they allow customers to resolve their own queries.
This is a boost for customers who don’t want to spend endless time on the phone with their service provider. It is also an incentive for the service provider who can save on labor costs.
Increased productivity
Key documents such as contracts, estimates and project plans can be accessed through the customer portal. Both internal staff and customers can access them. This reduces the number of emails related to these topics.
Reducing the margin of error
By centralizing company information, only the latest versions of documents with the correct branding and signers can be shared. With good content management, the possibility of the wrong documents ever being in the customer portal is greatly reduced.