How to Build Better Customer Relationships with Self-Service Portals

Today using self-service portals is a basic need for any company. Here the size of the company and customer base hardly matters as they are need of the hour.

Confused and thinking why do companies need self-service/client portals?

Companies can use such portals to enhance their brand image and provide impeccable customer service. Portals provide instant access to data, personalized dashboards and save time and resources of any organization.

Self-service portals are the first line of support for customers. It empowers them to resolve their issues, request access, etc. on their own. Without having to wait for a reply from customer support.

These portals are one of the best ways to reach out to new customers and to boost and improve existing customer relationships.

Let's dive deep into the benefits of using these self-service portals:

1) Reduces Customer Service Cost

We call them self-service portals for a reason. Your customers can resolve issues on their own from your knowledge base or by reaching out to you through chat support. This decreases customer support tickets, post-sale service costs, and overall support costs.

2) Improves Employee Productivity

Using such a portal decreases ticket generations. This helps the employees to work more productively and resolve other important issues of customers efficiently.

3) Customers Learn New Skills

Portals help to expand the knowledge and skills of your customers by providing them with the tools for solving issues. Client portals provide detailed information about your products and frequently asked questions.

It provides how-to videos, step-by-step guides with images, diagrams, and screenshots. These portals also include tips, hints, descriptions or tricks to use your product effectively and understand them better.

4) Boosts Site Traffic

The customized knowledgebase can redirect traffic from self-service portals to website which results in increased traffic. This also builds trust among customers and shows your industry expertise.

You can open the self-service portal to other voices like writers, bloggers, and clients where they can share information through forums or Q/A functionality. Their articles can contain the solutions to product's problems. This helps your company to increase visibility as such content will attract users looking for similar solutions.

Your self-service portals need to be reliable, responsive and have a good UI/UX so that your customers can access important information easily from one place.

Having high-visibility portals that address customers directly will fetch quality traffic. You can ask third-party customer service experts to contribute to your knowledge base by sharing blog posts or speaking on your forums.

5) Personalize the User Experience

A self-service portal saves time and enables your clients to easily find the necessary information by understanding past problems.

Personalization is the most powerful tool. When your customer login, the portal can address them with their names on their dashboards. These customer portals keep track of the customers' purchase history and display only relevant topics.

But why personalization, right?

Well, personalization helps you to tell your clients you value them. It also ensures that your company learns about the problems they experience and makes sure you take necessary steps to resolve these issues.

6) Increases Positive Customer Recommendation

You need to create a knowledge base that is consistent, simple to understand, capable of utilizing different mediums. You also need to make sure that the data the real-time updation of data and the experience is user-friendly. Research shows that 39% of millennials check the company's FAQ to resolve their issues.

This ratio shows that today users prefer to find the answers on their own. Hence, having a good knowledge base along with an appealing user interface and features like live chat and email is necessary.

7) Enhances Social Media Engagement

Today there are many portals that provide dedicated social media feed to deal with customer queries. Your employees are also a part of this self-service process and they take turns while communicating with your customers and offering solutions to their queries regarding their products or business.

It is necessary for you to provide guidance to your employees which helps them to respond professionally to your users with optimum solutions. Your employees can direct customers with the correct information when customers ask. This helps you improve customer satisfaction and allows your business to get a better understanding of which issues are urgent.

Portals that use social media feed as a knowledge base to distribute the relevant information of products help enhance the user experience.

All these activities help you better your brand voice and build a strong relationship with your clients and get new customers at the same time.

The Salesforce self-service portal has all the above-mentioned features which set it apart.