Why You Need Customer Service Portal?

By Author: Maulik Shah
Total Articles: 157
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When customers purchase products from your company and are not happy with its working or find any problem, it is obvious that they reach out to your support team with a hope of immediate help.

But at times it is difficult for your support staff to handle each and every customer and listen to their problems promptly. As a company it takes a lot of investment, training and resources to tackle your customers skillfully.

Nowadays when customers prefer to go online and resolve issues, customer portal solution can be a boon for!

Let's look at some facts which tell you why companies prefer using portal solutions:

According to the survey it is said that an average person will spend 43 days on hold with automated customer service line. Holding and waiting in long queues adds up even more anger and frustration to any individual.

Let me give you some more examples.

Did you ever wait in the ATM line in spite of no one standing near the teller in the bank? Or did you ever went to airport and went directly to use the kiosks instead of going to the incharge at the desk even if there is no line? But, ...
... why do we do this? Well, a recent study at zendesk shows that 67% of respondents prefer to use self-service portal over interacting with a company representative.

Online self-service portals have become one of the most useful ways for customers who prefer to resolve their problems on their own. Today’s millennials want their problem to be solved immediately and prefer to have support around the clock. Hence, as an organization you need to understand that does your organization fulfil these demands, or any user requirement?

Consumers always prefer to schedule appointments, troubleshoot problems, change a reservation, asking billing questions, get technical support, check FAQs, etc. with less human involvement.

Let’s break down the reasons at why do consumers want portal solutions:

According to the survey done by zendesk, 75% of people who appeared for it said that customer portal solutions are way more easy to use and solve issues immediately.
Your customers use them for efficiency. According to a survey, it is said that 77% of consumers prefers companies to value their time. They do not prefer to have long conversations with your customer support team nor they prefer to wait in long queues to talk with any one. Infact, consumers refer to go online and get the solution.
Last thing customers expect is to have control. Customers are rapidly being empowered to do things on their own. Today, they avoid being reliable on others and find the solution of their problems on their own.

Now let’s look at the other side of the coin and try to understand how these portal solutions help companies in growing their businesses.

Understand how customer portal development help you and your customers.

Online portal services will help you to keep your customers engaged with your website. Additionally, these portals help you to manage the customer relationship in an extensible way.
It helps you to centralize the information resources so your customers can easily know where to find the necessary information.
These customer service portal provides companies with deep insights of their businesses.
Portal solutions easily integrates with the CRM solution of you company which will help you to provide details of your customer’s experience and their requirements.
Such CRM customer portal will help your company to understand what your customer’s requirements and needs are. As a company, it will help you to improve better customer experience and grow your business.
Customer service portal is cost-efficient to deal with your customers. It saves cost for your organization as you will be providing all the important information to your customer online. And in turn this helps you to decrease the ticket generation issue and number of complaint calls coming.

You must consider below mentioned facts while building portal solutions for your company:

90% of customers expects an organization to have self-service portal.
73% of customers want to solve their problems on their own instead of talking with customer support service.
91% of survey respondents said they will use online provided knowledge base to solve their issues.

Final Words:

Many big companies use these portal solutions to provide their customers with the best possible solutions for their problems. These portals prove that having them in your business is definitely worth the investment. They will support the customer’s queries easily and help you to grow your business.

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