Why Every Business Needs a Customer Portal

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. When you go online to shop for something, what are the things you are looking for?

• A good-looking website that is trustworthy
• Precise information regarding all the items on the catalog
• Easy to place orders
• A parcel tracking service
• Access to support

Having a website is only the beginning

Plenty of times businesses are too focused on getting the customer to sign up or make a purchase. But that’s not enough. Once the customer chooses to make a purchase or interact with your support channels, you need to give them an experience that adds value. The stage after customer satisfaction is customer delight which is not known to a lot of companies. They focus only on driving customers to take the action that fulfills their bottom lines and forget them after that. In today’s competitive world, working on customer satisfaction is the bare minimum.

This is where a customer portal – specifically, a SugarCRM customer portal – comes into play and can help your business bridge that gap. Below, we'll go into detail about how a customer portal can help improve your customers’ journeys after they have signed up on your website.

Profile Management

The first thing you can offer your customer is a profile-building tool where they can fill in their personal information including contact details. This makes the rest of their journey on the store quick and effortless. Once you have their address, you can display a dynamic shipment availability for their area on each product in your catalog. Additionally, they should be able to add a number of addresses if they need things shipped to these places regularly.

Knowledge Base

Having an exhaustive knowledge base and making it available for your customers can save a lot of your resources and also takes you one step towards customer delight. They can simply type their question in and get all the related material to go through from the knowledge base.

Ticketing System

In case a customer cannot find the solution they are looking for, there's a built-in ticketing system in the customer portal as well. This will enable them to create a ticket of their issue with either your store, order, payment, or anything in general, which gets assigned to your support team automatically. The less you make customers work for the solution, the more delighted they are.

B2B Features

If you are a business selling or partnering with other businesses, then having a customer portal will fit right into your workflow and enable you to have better long-term relationships with features like:

• Proposal management: If you have vendors then this will streamline many aspects of your communication with them as they will be able to generate proposals, manage invoices, etc.
• Calendar module: For your customers/partners/vendors to view and manage calls, tasks, and meetings with your organization
• And many more

Live Chat

Sometimes, there are only a couple of questions standing in the way of a purchase. And it is highly possible that those questions are not covered in the FAQ section. With the option for live chat, you can make it really simple for potential customers to reach out to your support staff in real-time and make a decision. You can also choose to present special offers or discounts to the customer to nudge them to convert if it is possible.

Conclusion

These are only some of the features that can make the customer experience better. A SugarCRM WordPress customer portal for your business is the hidden trick only your precious customers get to see and take advantage of. Maintaining a great website might pull a lead in, but if you want to make them come back and also bring more customers, a portal solution is the necessary key.