5 Tips for Your Self-service Customer Portal

The customer portal is needed for every kind of business, whether small, medium, or huge. Also, just having a customer portal is not required. You need to make sure that it has some basic and necessary features and unique features to make it stand out in the marketplace. It helps you customers get all the help and information they need. The portal also enables you to provide round-the-clock support. So, keep reading further to know the tips for your self-service customer portal.

• Create a Proper Self-service Customer Content:

To make your customer portal useful, you need to provide full answers to your customer’s questions and help them figure out the solutions. You need to create content that can help the customers so that it reduces the number of calls that your support team receives on a daily basis. This information helps create articles and other self-help content that address some common set of support requests.

Customer content includes FAQs, an informative knowledge base, and brief information, including step-by-step instructions, for resolving certain queries and issues.

• Keep Your Knowledge Base Updated:

Keeping your knowledge base updated is needed for having a strong knowledge base. A knowledge base is never finished. You need to update it every now and then when required. As a company, you should always add self-improving articles, images, videos, and everything else that can help customers to solve their queries and issues on their own. You should also make sure that your FAQs and other articles are updated with each updated version of the website or the application.

It also provides the customers to rate your brand and this way you can figure out what needs to be improved or tracked in a better way and which all services and products need an upgrade. If you receive queries over a particular topic repeatedly, you can add it to the knowledge base, making it easy for your customers to look for.

• Make Your Portal Easy to Navigate:

It is not only necessary to make your portal easy to navigate, but you also need to make sure that you have a scrollable navigation bar. You need to make sure that your application has a search bar so that it can search in brief about every topic. Crawlable content makes it up to the google search results, so you need to make sure that your application has one to rank on the google search results.

You can add links to your customer portal so that the customers can contact you as in when needed. You can also add a contact number at the end in the footer of your portal. This helps build trust among the customers and also helps escalate their requests for solving their queries through chats, emails, or even through a simple phone call.

• Optimize Your Support Center for All Devices:

67% of the customers opt for a self-service over speaking to a support team member of your company. Though the majority of the users use phones, but you need to make sure that your customer portal works in the same manner through all the devices, and the customers need not face any challenges while using it.

• Maintain Uniformity Across the Portal:

Uniformity reflects professionalism. It not only helps value the company image, but customers find it easy that way. It helps to connect with your customers and engage them by giving them the same experience across different devices. Maintaining uniformity across the portal includes the same logo size, dimensions, and the position of the basic elements. The header and footer should not change. The body and the color scheme should match the brand and not be random. This not only helps gain trust of your customers but also helps you gain more positive feedback from them.

Conclusion:

You need to remember these tips and make sure it is followed if you want to grow fast among your customers and competitors. A customer portal, like a salesforce customer portal, has all these features, where you can modify it according to your own needs and brands. It is important to ensure it has a knowledge base and works uniformly across all devices. Also, creating a proper self-help guide to help the customers to find solutions to their own problems is needed. Keep these tips in mind and support your customers in a better way.

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