Maintaining high customer service levels is not an easy task. Customers now base their loyalty on their customer service experience, so brands face more pressure to excel.

With an effective customer portal, your team can take on more challenging and interesting tasks while improving customer service.

 

What are customer portals and how do they work?

If you have used a knowledge base or discussion forum for customers already, you have probably already used a self-service resource for them. While customer portals and these systems share many similarities, they are not identical.

Self-help resources that you provide to your customers can be accessed through it. Should they not find the answer there, they can submit a support ticket or chat with an agent.

Let’s first define its characteristics and benefits.

Relevant information about the topic

Using a customer portal, your customers can view information about their interactions with your company. Additionally, they can track the status of an order, find an invoice, or search the history of their interactions.

Engaging peers in collaboration

Whatever service you provide, from software to coffee grinders, there will always be some users who are more knowledgeable about the product than others. You could provide a platform for them to share tips, clarify doubts, or solve problems.

Creating a customer community can be done through a customer portal. This is advantageous for both parties:

  • New users can get help from existing users
  • For members of your community, having a place where experts can interact and share knowledge can be a lot of fun
  • By allowing your agents to focus on more complex inquiries, your product development team can improve the most troublesome features

As a result, you are able to obtain valuable insights and data otherwise difficult to obtain. To achieve the same results, extensive and thorough market research would be required, which would take time and resources.

Communities flourish when forums are present. Every forum entry in LiveAgent becomes a ticket, so your agents can keep track of customer activity.

Aiding people by providing resources

Many of your clients already have access to a wealth of resources that you have compiled in a knowledge base. By using a customer portal, you can make it easy and intuitive for your customers to access these articles and tutorials.

You can reduce the number of incoming tickets by making your materials easily accessible to customers.

Making sure everything runs smoothly

Through a customer portal, you can easily provide your customers with all the helpful resources you offer. 

With LiveAgent, you can customize the appearance of your portal to fit your business style and provide seamless customer service. The HTML and CSS styles can be customized using logos and chat widgets or ready-to-use templates.

 

How does your customer benefit from it?

Your customers will have a much better experience if your client portal is efficient. If you provide your customers with instant support instead of having them wait for an agent to respond, their satisfaction will certainly increase.

24/7 access to information

Customer portals run continuously. The information your clients need can always be provided, even on holidays and after business hours.

The possibility of empowerment

If your customers can submit their own support tickets, they will feel more in control. When they have to call an agent just to get some basic information, such as the status of their order, you can bet they won’t feel the same.

There is an immediate live chat available

Your customer support team should be able to help your clients when they cannot resolve their issues on their own. A live chat widget can make your website more accessible.

 

What are the benefits of a customer portal?

Your business can also be more efficient by using customer portals.

Perform better than expected

A customer portal is today considered more of a necessity than a desire by customers. It is important to live up to customers’ expectations if you wish to build long-term relationships and build brand loyalty.

Feedback is essential

Customers have a lot of insights into what works and what doesn’t. Provide them with a way to share their opinions and concerns via forums and feedback widgets.

Customer feedback widgets allow customers to vote on what features they’d like to see in your service, or to submit their own ideas. By communicating the status of the implementation, you can reassure your users how much you value their suggestions.

Learn about yourself

In order to meet customer expectations, your customer portal can provide valuable information about the quality of your knowledge base and other self-service resources.

Analyzing metrics such as views, up- and down-votes, and forum threads related to a topic can help determine which issues need further attention. Your support team can use all of these pieces of information in the future to provide better explanations.

Reduction of agents’ workload

By focusing on self-service resources, you’ll be able to make your agents more efficient. Instead of dealing with minor, repetitive questions, they will be able to focus on more pressing matters. 

Despite this, you should take into consideration that metrics like time spent on ticket resolution can rise when you implement such changes. As a result, tickets will be harder to resolve and less automatable. It is important to adjust the performance targets in order to measure your agents’ performance effectively.

Briefly

A customer portal should be included in your support resources. Why?

  • Your customers will love it because it’s fast, empowering, and efficient.
  • By providing effective support, getting insights into how customers use your products, and having an engaged community of customers, you will benefit your business.

How do you feel about that? Wouldn’t it be worth a try? Each LiveAgent plan includes a customer portal.