8 Reasons Why a Customer Portal is Essential to Empower Customers

Empower-customer

Still wondering how you can bring more customer centricity in your business? If you look at all the top organizations in the world, their activities revolve around the needs and convenience of their highly valued customers. There is no doubt that customer centric policies is more than capable to give your business a competitive edge, and turn it into a sustainable business model with rapid growth.

Although almost every businessman understands the importance of customers for their business, a lot of them do not know how to serve them well and keep them satisfied. If your organization is growing rapidly, your customer base must also be expanding commensurately. Simultaneously, the customer service requests will also be on the rise. Therefore, overdependence on CTI-based contact centers will not bode well for your business, especially during crucial growth phase.
If you want to keep the costs down, you may not be able to sufficiently expand the telephony-based customer support system. The downside is that it may leave you dealing with disgruntled customers.
So what is the solution?

Have you ever thought about setting up a customer portal ? It has significant benefits for your business. Take a look at 8 of the most immediate benefits.

  1. Self-Service Troubleshoot Websites: Most customer portals share a range of information that helps customers to find a solution to their problems. Often, problems are trivial in nature and can be solved without the intervention of a customer care executive. Companies can easily share ‘how to’ posts and videos, and also have FAQ pages, where common problems can be discussed. Customers can also leave a query through their registered account, which can be answered through a simple email later.
  2. Customer Engagement: Customer portals increase your interaction with your customers, which is a great indicator for a healthy business. It allows you to float your ideas and also receive feedback from your customers. You can also write a blog post, article, or make videos where you can show the current stage of development of a particular product. Having customers onboard is the best way forward for your company. To see that they are in agreement with your business policies and decisions is even more important. Moreover, generating news, assistance, and tips related to a product, and disseminating them to your customers will make them more knowledgeable, and will pave way for strong brand loyalty.
  3. Make Customers Self-Reliant: It is not good enough to troubleshoot a problem faced by your customers on a single occasion. It is also important to teach them some best practices and empower them, so that the next time they face a similar situation, they would know how to tackle it. This makes sense from a business perspective as well. Knowledgeable customers, who regularly engage with the company, feel a part of it and can always offer helpful ideas to develop products, and are also more sympathetic to company woes.
  4. Create Products Addressing Specific Customer Concerns: You are always in the know of what customers feel about issues related to your products, and you can also extrapolate the broad concerns that your product should address. If the above sentence hold true for you, you can develop products which will be useful for a large proportion of your target market. It is very much like a market survey that many companies conduct from time to time, to pick the brains of their customers and understand their pulse better.
  5. Community: The point being made here may sound similar to customer engagement discussed earlier. However, your portal will allow different customers to not only connect with you but also with each other. Peer-to-peer interaction helps in the creation of a closely knit community and a sense of belongingness. The fellow-feeling also makes your customers identify themselves with the brand strongly. Therefore, brand positioning gets a mighty boost.
  6. Reduced Cost: The benefit of keeping a customer portal is that it reduces labor cost. It also increases the productivity of your employees and brings them increased job satisfaction as they would not have the monotonous task of perfunctorily answering the same questions repeatedly. Waiting-time on inbound calls and the number of abandoned calls will also minimize.
  7. Customer Satisfaction:Better service and faster solutions will make customers happy and they will recommend your brand to other people. It is well known that word of mouth publicity is one of the most cost effective and powerful forms of communication and can generate a number of business prospects. Won’t that augur well for your business? Surely, it will.
  8. Boost Web Traffic:A good customer portal will generate a lot of traffic to your website. If your customers find the right information on the resource pages, they will stay on the pages longer. This is a factor which is considered by search engines while determining the rank of your website. Also, a constant buzz about your website will improve its rankings and bring in more business.

A customer portal will perfectly complement your contact center. No business can fully thrive without a customer portal in today’s business context, where one lost customer can push your business several few steps back. It pays to have a dedicated customer portal set up for your business on a priority basis.
 

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