Blog by Roshni Saraf
Client portals form a major part of the customer onboarding and implementation process in any enterprise SaaS company. Read to know about customer portals.
According to the survey done by Wyzowl, over 90% of customers feel that the companies they buy from could do better when it comes to onboarding new users or customers.
Customer success is one of the principal aspects of business operations in the enterprise SaaS space. Companies are focusing on customer-centricity due to the extreme shift from an on-premise to a subscription-based model. This has also led to a drastic shift from “product-centric” business models to a more “customer-centric” model in the enterprise SaaS market.
Covid-19 turned the world upside down and with every company going virtual, the demand for SaaS software rose to a peak. This forced companies to change their overall strategies to achieve customer success and retention.
If we look at how SaaS companies functioned 10 years ago, we are bound to see a dramatic shift in priorities from
- New Customer Acquisitions to Customer Retention
- Evolution of a customer success function to adopting customer centricity on an organizational level.
- Tools that were specific to certain functions in the organizations to adopt tools that are acting as a “single source of truth” for cross-functional collaboration
The use of customer portals has increased rapidly in recent years, and there is a higher level of engagement. It has become the need of the hour, especially when customers constantly need an update about what’s been the progress on their requirements.
It helps businesses avoid data loss in cross-functional teams while delivering or communicating with the team members or clients which leads to better customer loyalty and satisfaction.
A customer portal builds a centralized platform where tasks and project progress are accessible through a self-service help center, FAQs, task status, deliveries, report visualization, and much more.
In a recent survey by Statista, 88% of respondents indicated that they expect a company or brand to provide an online customer service portal.
What is a Customer Portal?
A customer portal is an online platform designed to make customers independent with a centralized information center that provides customers with real-time access to critical information right when they need it.
- It is a library with access to information such as FAQs, knowledge base, community forums, support requests, basically everything they need to solve issues and stay updated.
- It provides one-click access to where customers can check the status of their tasks and track previous task details.
- It also helps track payments, deliveries, product updates, or refunds.
Why Is It Necessary To Have A Customer Portal For Customer Success?
Customer onboarding and SaaS implementation strategies can play a crucial role in the long-term retention of customers. It is about understanding the customer’s concerns and providing them with solutions.
The way you onboard your new customers leave an everlasting impression on your customers’ minds. It is also the most crucial stage of your customer’s life cycle. It increases customer lifetime value (LTV), reduces churn, and turns new users into loyal users.
A customer portal is a bridge between you and your customer. It strengthens your customer support system. The stronger this bridge is, the seamless the customer experience will be. One of the great benefits of having a customer portal is to tailor content information relevant to each customer.
The main objective of any SaaS enterprise is to reduce effort, money, and time to achieve business goals faster and more efficiently. The goal is to build lasting satisfaction & strong customer relationships with the help of the onboarding and implementation platform.
Data exists in various systems across an organization where most systems are in silos. Information scattered in silos creates challenges for businesses to make data-driven decisions. Modern companies are now opting for a single source of truth to overcome customer success challenges.
A single source of truth platform consists of all the data systems within organizations in a single source. It ensures that businesses are operating across the company based on standardized and relevant data.
Benefits of customer portal in onboarding and implementation platform :
Now that the meaning & importance of client portals have been established, let’s have a look at some of the benefits of having a customer portal for your business.
Customer Support
Having a customer portal proactively assists your customers, reducing the need to approach your support team now and then.
The evolution of technologies has brought DIY culture, customers like solving issues on their own and want to be independent. Being a customer ourselves, we can understand how tiresome it can be to wait for the simplest solution.
It is an all-in-one platform that teaches customers to solve issues independently and keeps them updated about their pending and resolved requests.
Customer Engagement
Companies increase engagement with their products and brands by providing helpful resources. Client engagement is the need of the hour in customer success. It becomes difficult for organizations to achieve client engagement through legacy tools or project management tools.
Customer portals generate feedback through surveys, scores, product reviews, and customer commentary. Consistent customer engagement will help you monitor the platform adoption and also take care of the queries right from the beginning.
Customer Insight
The Onboarding and implementation platform captures customer feedback and performance insights that help enterprises make data-driven decisions to manage tracking time to value visualization of revenue and delivery.
Customer insight is all about analyzing customer data and tracking the current status of the use cases, tasks, revenue risks, prioritization plan, and delivery.
Monitoring these metrics is an excellent way to maintain the platform and keep it relevant for your customers.
Customer Forecast
The customer portal provides your company data about what works and can improve your plans, giving you the insights to enable your business to make more logical and informed decisions.
The onboarding and implementation platform provide features to automate these processes with intuitive metrics, models, and analyses, saving your precious time.
Customer forecasting delivers accurate, data-based forecasts to minimize the risks.
Customer Transparency
Customer transparency means honesty and integrity in all customer communications that establish brand loyalty and strengthens the bond of trust between the company and customers.
It also means keeping the customer updated by taking their feedback and notifying them of developments to products and services, treating the customer’s data as sacred, and making policies clear.
A company proves transparency with customers by getting order fulfillment, problem resolution, and quality of customer contacts and experiences right.
Customer Protection
An onboarding Platform has sensitive information meant only for your clients and is not for the public eye.
It can be documents related to your internal support process, confidential information about your offerings, pricing of specific products, etc.
Features like encryption enable customers to safely upload and access sensitive information or set page or folder level restrictions. You can also set conditions to hide or display specific content from specific users or groups.
It is crucial to safeguard such sensitive content from any potential misuse.
Conclusion:
A good onboarding and implementation platform is a must for your customers as it will be your client’s first hands-on experience with your products or services.
An entirely new set of expectations came with that new breed of consumers. Today’s consumers have a do-it-yourself mentality that caters to every aspect of the customer journey, including customer service.
The only thing that can guarantee consistent growth and success for companies is customer experience, and nothing can help you better than a customer portal that is combined with your customer-centric onboarding and implementation tool.
