Top 10 benefits using a bespoke Customer Portal
In this overview I will introduce you to the top 10 benefits for evaluating a bespoke customer portal solution over an off-the-shelve system. The decision which solution is right for you and your organization depends very much on your requirements and immediate future plans. If you are unclear about your requirements then this is a good time to discuss it with your colleagues or superiors.
A bespoke solution is by no means a cheaper solution than an off-the-shelve Customer Portal but it doesn’t have to be a large investment either. My company Wildgras Co. Ltd. has built its solution on top of a well-known, popular and flexible solution called OnTime by Axosoft. The OnTime system provides all the major back-office and management functionality while Wildgras has built a web-based Customer Portal that integrates with it. This consolidation provides you with a great and flexible back-office while allowing you to maximize and explore the full potential of the web-based Customer Interface.
1. Adapt the design to match your Corporate Identity (CI)
Undoubtedly one of the most significant benefits of a bespoke solution is complete control over its look and feel. A company that wishes or must interact with its clientele will send a confusing message to its customers if the Customer Portal is branded by someone else or does not provide the same look and feel as the remainder of the companies web assets.
2. Connect and Exchange
Only with a bespoke solution will you be able to connect and exchange 100% of all information – this is also an essential prerequisite to some of the other benefits such as Integrate and Interact. A bespoke solution will allow you to keep networking obstacles at a minimum and allow your various back-office applications and data warehouses to connect to each other and exchange information. Not only can a back-office application, such as an accounting system, pull information from your Customer Portal but the Portal can also pull information from your various other applications and information sources (internet and intranet) to offer a unified user experience to your customers. Don’t send your customers or employees running from one system to another but tie your systems together into one solution – let technology do the work and allow your customers and employees to manage it.
3. Extend and Grow
As your business grows so will your company, its organizational and technological infrastructure. This also means that the demands and requirements by your clientele and partners may grow or change. An off-the-shelve solution may not be able to handle your growth or be flexible enough to adapt to your growing needs. It is important to be able to grow the Customer Portal with new features and functionality to meet tomorrows demands.
4. KYC Analysis
Know-Your-Customers (KYC) – what are your customers doing when they use your Customer Portal? What are they searching for? How much time are they spending on your site? On which pages do they spend how much time? What are your customers interested in?
These are all analytical questions that help optimize the user experience for your customers: faster experience, higher success rate, what features and functionality is effective. Tracking user behavior in combination with poll and feedback options can help sched some light onto a customers perspective and open a whole new world of possibilities.
5. Integrate and Interact
Most companies have a You – Me approach to its customers which means that a Customer is viewed as an external entity that is neither involved nor has insight into the internal workflow and operations of a company. However in some cases it may be beneficial for a company when its stakehoders are directly involved or integrated into the worklow and operations. Any on-demand or just-in-time business will require a highly coordinated system where all stakeholders are aware and have insight into at least a significant amount of processes in each others workflow so as to provide optimal service delivery.
6. Multi-Level Service
What if you want to provide multiple levels of your service such as public, private, managed, free, paid, partner, customer,…. Many off-the-shelf solutions will only provide partial granularity on access control and information – let alone user interface experience – but as we can see from our last benefit the level of service can have quite a wide impact on the Customer Portal. A bespoke solution assures you that no matter what kind or how many levels of service you want to provide – its possible.
7. Lower Cost per Customer
If you think investing € 5,000-20,000 or more in a quality Customer Portal is too much – think again. The more effective a Customer Portal manages your customers the lower is the impact on your resources. A poorly designed or functioning Portal that leaves its users requiring additional live support fails to meet its expectation and the company is therefore unable to provide automated 24/7 support let alone make your customers happy. The primary objective of any Customer facing system is to lower the cost per customer through automation.
8. Customer retention and conversion
The Customer of today is increasingly more educated and aware of what is and what is not possible. The demand for service delivery is growing – especially when the only interaction is a virtual one. Any good product or company review will incorporate its support and service delivery – because that is what the customer can “see” and is able to compare. A poor service or Customer Portal will result in negative reviews or a low value impression that can cost you good business.
A bespoke Customer Portal allows you to design the look and feel and provide the kind of service your Customers require the way they need and understand it.
9. Repeat business
A happy customer will not only recommend and speak highly of you – he is also most likely going to come back for more. Your Customer Portal can provide your customers with a unique mixture of propositions and news tailored to his profile and behavior. Using KYC statistics allows you to provide useful information that is more likely to result in repeat business – see Amazon’s “Customer’s who bought this also bought this….” promotional widget that you can find on all articles.
10. What you need – not – all-you-can-eat
While some of the benefits described here can also be found in many enterprise grade SaaS solutions such as salesForce it must be said that at a cost of 20-250$ per person per month this can quickly be a more costly solution than a bespoke one – especially if you are not using the solution to its full capacity. It all comes down to your requirements and what you really need. Its fantastic to have a great product that is trusted and used by so many – but what’s the point of buying the largest Pizza in the world if you can’t eat half of it.