Customers as a group, in this day and age, tend to always stay on the go and interlinked with one another. The adoption of smart-phones and the availability of services on demand has resulted in customers looking to find means to cooperate with businesses on their terms of comfort and convenience. So, if a business is not up to these standards, it is likely that it will lose customers. Service and maintenance businesses too are under heavy pressure to offer real-time reportage to their clients.
It is hardly appropriate nowadays to send monthly reports to support the tasks that have been accomplished on the site. Customers are getting more and more accustomed to tracking online deliveries, food items, and so on, in real-time. The same standards are now expected of all businesses. Failing to meet these standards can be seen as a failure in general.
Customer Portals – The All-Encompassing Solution
Customers of the engineering industry are becoming increasingly keen to know the exact details of an engineer’s route to a job. The same goes for other businesses. The educated customer wants to be able to access the asset record and download relevant information pertaining to the business. In fact, customers also want entree to KPIs (key performance indicators). The eminence of data provided to clients has seemingly become as vital as the quality of the jobs or services provided.
Since the production of reports for customers is tremendously tedious and expensive, delivering real-time reportage is virtually impossible without the assistance of a steadfast service management arrangement. Customer portals have become the ultimate and exclusive solution to providing customers access to information at all times. Here are some reasons that make customer portals so important in today’s market.
Self Service
Making customers self-sufficient is a great way of getting them accustomed to the business itself. An obvious benefit of having a customer portal is giving the customers the expediency of self-service. Regardless of the requirement, be it updating of payment info, customer location or address, or a request to access the payment history with the business – customers are given the freedom to take a considerable number of actions as per their convenience. On top of this, these regular actions severely lessen the demands on the customer service, giving those workers the liberty to focus on incidents that actually require immediate personal attention.
Increase Website Traffic
Customer portals are known to attract users. Regularly they generate heavy amounts of traffic to the website. This helps the business to take advantage of the increased number of customers by conducting other functions of marketing such as advertising and promotion of products and services on the website itself.
Gateway for a mobile app
The features provided by an efficient customer portal can prove to be a brilliant gateway for a business to launch its own mobile application. The utilities that a user can attain from a customer portal offer the perfect incentive for a customer to go ahead and download a company’s mobile application.
In fact, having a mobile driven website experience is more of a basic level of expectation a customer can have from a business. However, delivering the info in a custom-made app further offers customers the capability to effortlessly view the info they require, whenever they require it, and from any place via their smartphone or tablet. The need to type in a web URLs or visit a search engine too is eliminated. After establishing the basic standards of utilities, businesses can include extra features to the app that can offer even more help for customers.
Lower Business Costs
The economic advantage of having a customer portal is that it lessens workforce costs. It also entails an upsurge in the productivity levels of workers, bringing them increased job fulfillment as they are no longer required to carry out monotonous tasks of routinely responding to the same customer questions repetitively. Customer portals not only lessen business costs, but they also make the labor force smaller and easier to handle.
Emphasis on specific customer requests
Customer portals allow users to spontaneously comment on any feature or service. Businesses can put to use this constructive criticism to advance the overall customer experience the customer portal offers, by adding new and better features.
Depending too much on contact centers based on Computer Telephony Integration (CTIs) is not the best way for a business to secure noteworthy customer ratings. Ensuring growth of goodwill for a business, chiefly during the pivotal growth phase is vital. Also, if the business desires to keep its costs low, it may not be able to sufficiently increase its customer care scheme based on direct calls. Customer portals may seem a big step for many businesses reluctant to adapt to technology. However, it is a step that is necessary to make a business relevant and customer friendly – the two most important factors that make a business successful in this day and age.
