Portals: First Step Towards Having Successful Business

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Portals First Step Towards Having Successful
Business
Being an entrepreneur and running a successful
business is the desire of many people. Everyone
wants to be their own boss. And as an
entrepreneur, you must know ways to make sure
that your business flourishes. The first step
towards making your business successful is
customer interaction. Be it via phone, website,
customer portal or in person.
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Therefore, if these interactions are impressive
your customers will stay with you forever. To
provide better customer service, companies have
a variety of approaches. They setup call
centers, provide toll free numbers so customers
can reach out to them easily, etc. But, now in
the digital era, customer portal replaces the
work of call centers and reduces that of
employees. Yes, you heard it right! Portals play
a vital role in providing better customer
service and building a healthy relationship with
customers. Lets try to understand, why is it
important to have portals? Portals provide
benefits to customers to interact with you
anywhere and anytime. Using this you can share
files, chat, plan, discuss, manage tasks,
organize documents and more. Portals simplify
the flow of data between employees and
customers. Businesses can easily customize it
according to their industry and their
use. Here, I have listed down some of the most
common use cases of portals 1. Collaboration
If you and your client are working remotely then
this feature of portals will help you a lot. A
client portal makes it easy to
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download, upload, edit, preview project documents
and give feedback. 2. File Sharing File
sharing is the most useful feature of a client
portal. Many businesses have to deal with lots
of paperwork and these should sync and be
accessible by clients as well as employees
whenever required. Portals provide a facility
like intranet to clients where they can upload
their files in a structured manner.
3. Knowledge Repository Knowledge base is one
of the most widely used ways of engaging your
customer and expanding your business. Such
portals help you to empower your customers and
employees and find the necessary information in
regards to your business. This helps make your
tasks easy, as you wont need to go around the
office in search of the right person when your
client is waiting to get an answer. There are
many platforms like SugarCRM, DynamicsCRM, etc.
on which you can develop portals but I would
recommend having a Salesforce customer portal.
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• You can use the Salesforce customer portal with
  various content management systems. But, most
  people prefer having a Salesforce WordPress
  portal. This is because WordPress makes it easy
  for you to handle the content and Salesforce is
  one of the leading CRM platforms in enterprise.
  Lets know the benefits of having a Salesforce
  WordPress portal.
• Reduce costs of customer service, software,
  hardware and employees.
• Optimize and enhance customer experience.
• Identifying potential customers.
• Service oriented architecture to enable
  scalability and less maintenance costs.
• Improves return of investment and increases the
  customer value, satisfaction and retention.
• Below mentioned are some of the customer benefits
  of using portals
• Fast solutions.
• Improves customer service.
• Users get support instantly, anytime and
  anywhere.
• Secure access to portals.
• A client portal can help businesses move ahead in
  business in the constantly changing world of
  technology. Client portals provide benefits to
  each and every sector and have

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helped businesses become well managed,
professional and digital.
Consider below given things while integrating
your portals with different CRM
platforms 1. Objective of Customer
Portal Today most of the companies need
portals, but each company has a different
business logic and on the basis of that, they
have different requirements. Suppose, you are an
accountancy firm you will need a customer
portal to share sensitive information with your
clients, securely. Or if you are an ecommerce
business
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• owner then you might need a customer portal to
  handle all your customers and provide customer
  service. So, before customizing or choosing
  portals you need to define your goals and
  objectives of having it.
• Personalized UI
• Personalization is the key in any business. We
  get thousands of messages, emails in a day. And
  how many of them do we actually open? Barely
  any, right?
• Below given are some of the examples
• Lets say you are getting emails with three
  different subjects Hello, we are going for
  lunch!
• Hello, please check out the new products
  launched.
• Hello Abhi, we have curated a special list of TV
  shows you might like.
• It is so obvious you will be opening the third
  email. Why? Because it provides personalization.
  It serves some value and makes you feel special.
  This is the reason personalization is an
  essential part.
• Consistency Across the Portal
• Consistency is the key to anything you do. The
  same applies in business as well. Customers
  expect consistent experience. The portal should
  have the logo of your company and work correctly
  when integrated with other brands. Client
  portals represent your company and you, so

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you should make sure that it looks professional
and at the same time provides personalized
experience. Final words Running a business is
difficult but fun as well. One needs to take
care of thousands of things at a time. You will
need to balance between understanding your
employees as well as clients. Thus, having
software that makes your tasks easy is a must.
It helps your business and makes sure operations
run smoothly.
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-step-towards-having-succes s
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