Modern technology requires faster communication with clients during more demanding hours than ever before. With these increasing demands not appearing to taper off any time soon, communication through a Client Portal is essential. A customer web portal is a way for clients to access pertinent information. It can automate transparency, grant clients much-needed information and decrease support costs for your organization. Here are three elements you need in your customer web portal.
1.) FAQs
An effective customer web portal provides accessibility to information.
An effective customer web portal provides accessibility to information. Ideally, a search function would index all content and enable a search across all blogs posts, support documentation and other information in your web portal.
To generate an accessible, robust customer web portal solution, our Summa architects will explore the right complementary technical solution based on user and business information and needs.
2.) Customization
Your clients may also be from different geological locations or have different interests.
You have clients at different stages of service, using different products or with varying levels of expertise. Your clients may also be from different geographic locations or have different interests (a CFO, for instance, would want to access different information than the VP of Marketing). Different clients will need different information. Segmenting your information to make it more relevant helps to make the customer web portal a more user-friendly and robust tool.
To build a complete, feasible customer web portal, our team will first try to understand business objectives or goals. That way, we can envision potential solutions more thoughtfully. This often means walking a mile in the customer’s shoes and looking at what they would want from a customer web portal. We create user stories to understand each of the segmentations’ needs and what drives them. Our developers utilize years of technical expertise and human design skills to build a user-friendly experience that also meets all business needs.
3.) Communication
Building a relationship with these champions is critical for building and understanding the information that should be included within the customer web portal.
Companies with effective online customer portals make the portal the center of the customer communication strategy. People generally will avoid using the portal to access information if they can get the information elsewhere. Your customer web portal should be frequently updated and contain information that cannot be accessed on blogs, newsletters or elsewhere on the customer website.
Yet communication included in an effective customer web portal is not limited in one-way communication from the business to the consumer. Sharing customer communication across the customer web portal enhances customer adoption. It also helps companies identify their brand champions, the leaders of the organic, online communities who other users go to for peer to peer customer service and recommendations. Building a relationship with these champions is critical for building and understanding the information that should be included within the customer web portal.
In Summary
Engaging client experiences stem from our unique combination of human-centered design and agile software development. Joint Summa-client teams apply these capabilities, including robust and effective customer web portals, to create meaningful experiences for your customers. As a result, you have more repeat and engaged customers whose loyalty equates to your business success.
Complemented by our partners' cutting-edge solutions, Summa’s customer engagement solutions sit at the intersection of technology, design and business strategy. For more information, contact us here.
