Happy Support Staff, Happy Customers!

Many companies have Twitter accounts. They use the platform to interact with customers, and sometimes solve their queries.

Customers, in turn use the platform to show their displeasure and to alert others when a company gives them subpar service. Take a look:

@TataSky your salesman has cheated my father, falsely promising 4K channels. My father spent ₹6K on a new set-top box in hope for the same. Now we feel cheated. And the customer care is not ready to process the revert & refund

— Chintan Varma (@chintanvarma) January 28, 2020

No company would like to read this on their Twitter handle.

Would you?

Of course not!

You can check the entire tweet thread and see how the customer is dissatisfied and feels cheated by a DTH connection company named Tata Sky.

You might also have had a similar experience with customer service from one or the other brand and would have gotten annoyed. After a point, you might’ve also reevaluated your decision to purchase from them.

No one in today’s time would prefer or even tolerate bad customer service. Similarly, no company would even want to give bad customer service to their customers.

And now, in fact, customers without giving a second thought directly go online and diss the companies as you saw in the above example.

If companies will not provide immediate support or solve customers’ issues on time, they will go online and directly raise their concerns publicly. This does affect a company’s reputation with its other users and especially with people who are still in the consideration stage. Because nowadays we all judge companies, their product/service quality, etc. on the basis of their online profiles, what their customers have to say, and their Google ratings.

In the middle of all this chaos, there are employees who suffer. Especially the support department which provides 24/7 support to your customers.

Support staff is one of the most important departments yet they get less importance.

As an owner, it can be difficult to do a minute level of monitoring of your support department. Not only that but setting up an entire support staff also requires a lot of investment. An oversight here and there can cost you customers, social reputation, or even money. Moreover, as an owner, you might have seen your support staff getting irritated and exhausted because of the rude behavior of clients. This might have resulted in some leaving the company too.

To overcome such issues and to make sure that your support staff is handling your customers properly, we have a perfect solution for you i.e. “Portals”.

Yes!

A customer portal is a one-stop perfect solution to your support staff’s day-to-day problems.

If I were you, I would be thinking what is it? Why should you use it? Or which companies actually use this solution?

But don’t worry, we’ll be covering all your questions about portals in this blog. Let’s start step by step.

What is a Customer Portal?

According to the world’s biggest customer relationship management company Salesforce, customer portals are:

“Customer service portals are designed to be accessed directly by clients without the need to involve a service agent. Accessible through the company website, these portals operate completely over the internet, and include functions, databases, FAQ pages, etc. that are open to the end user. Clients simply connect via a standard web browser, and are able to perform a variety of self-service tasks.”

Sounds something your customers will love?

Imagine being there for your customers 24*7*365 days without actually having to invest in a huge support team.

Apart from that, there are many other benefits. Let’s explore them.

Why should you use a customer portal?

Your customers might not want to talk with your support staff every now and then for the smallest of issues. Most of them would like to resolve the issues on their own using an FAQ or a knowledge section of your website. Or they would rather choose to live chat with your support staff.

In such scenarios, customer portals will come to your rescue. Customer portal becomes a one-stop destination for your customers to get their queries resolved, talk to your staff if required, manage their profiles, quotes, orders, and much more. Because customers using the portal to get answers, here’s how your support staff will be benefited.

How will it help your support staff?

Less Ticket Generation

Having customer portals means that there will be fewer support tickets to handle. How? Because most of the issues that customers face, they would be able to solve them from the portal itself. This will give space and time to your support staff to attend customers more attentively and provide quality service to them.

Less Staffing

Portals will reduce your hiring costs of the support staff. This directly means less operating and training costs for your company. You can invest the same money in acquiring new customers and the portals along with your support staff will retain them for you.

Increase your Website’s Traffic

These customized portals can redirect the user to your website which in turn will increase the traffic of your website.

You need to make sure that your company’s website and portals have similar and good UI/UX and are user-friendly. When we say similar UI/UX, it means that you need to pay attention to call-to-action buttons, screen transitions, button style, button texts, the actions, etc. Additionally, you have to make sure that you have your company’s logo, graphics, themes are similar across both the channels.

Transaction History:

If the customer has done any online transaction with you, then they can easily check all the details from the online portal without having to call your customer support. They can even opt for live chat if they have any issues with the order or place an exchange or return request right from the portal.

This saves ample time of your support staff and reduces their burden. The same time can be invested in researching and learning something new that can help them enhance your customers’ journey with you.

There are many companies that use portals to handle their customers and decrease the workload of their support staff. Portals help companies to enhance their brand reputation as happy customers always have something good to say about your brand and they become your promoters.

Well, in short, in the end, it makes everyone happy be it customer, support staff and you.

About us:

CRMJetty is home to innovative customer relationship solutions. Our tools ensure that you can render enhanced interactions at each stage of your customer lifecycle. So, if you are searching for a portal development company, we are here to help you in building the right customized portal. We have served in this industry for a decade and have built many custom portals like knowledge sharing portal, self-service portal, web development portals, customer portals, etc. Get in touch with us to create customized portals and we’ll help you kickstart your journey towards growing with portals.

We have specific solutions as well like Dynamics CRM customer portal, SuiteCRM customer portal, SugarCRM customer portal, and many more.