With an abundance of small and medium size businesses in the world, it is important to keep your customers in mind by providing them with the best experience possible. Customers are the ones who drive your business to success. In order to keep them and acquire new customers, you need to differentiate yourself from competitors by using different tools. Customer Relationship Management tools (CRMs) have been the backbone of businesses looking to effectively create and maintain relationships with customers. CRMs are great at keeping track of customers, but it has evolved into much more than a one-way track for managing data.
Customer Self-Service
In order to succeed in any environment in a modern business, your environment needs to be social. Customer service has become easier than ever thanks to evolution of technology and the digital world, which has opened up communications line between businesses and customers. Customers are able to reach businesses for support through many means, such as social media, online help tickets, instant live chat, and more! A positive self-service interaction can make customers feel more engaged with the company, even though they are not directly dealing with any person in particular.
In addition to being a customer support channel, customers have more autonomy in self-service actions. Businesses are able to share documents with their customers through online capabilities, customers are able to access their personal information on their own, and communities are built of customers helping other customers out. This fosters a new sense of collaboration and a new type of customer that didn’t exist before. These customers don’t want to engage in prolonged conversations about their problems because they are capable of solving their problems themselves with the right information provided to them.
Most companies believe that self-service is important to a customer’s experience, but few have made efforts to implement it because they don’t have the resources. There are many factors to consider that would impact the decision-making process for implementing a solution that would solve the want for customers to become autonomous. Fortunately, there are solutions that are cost effective and will meet all of your customer self-service needs.
The Rise of Customer Communities
Over recent years, customer communities and portals have grown in popularity because of the benefits that they provide businesses for managing customer relationships. A CRM-integrated portal allows you to centralize all of your customer data in a single place, where you can track customers accordingly. Customer communities give your customers the ability to access important business data in a secure and mobile-friendly environment. Portals have shifted from solely providing support, to giving the customer an engaging experience where they can interact with communities and build relationships. The most common use cases for customer portals include:
● Customer support
● Customer training
● Customer feedback, ideas, social collaboration
No matter what your use case for your customer portal, the bottom line is that it is providing some sort of service for your customers, which will ultimately benefit both relationships.
In-house development vs. Third-party cloud solution
You have two choices when it comes to the type of portal you want: should you build it yourself or buy it from a third-party vendor?
In-house developed portals are designed and developed by their own IT team from the ground-up. Building a custom product requires time, energy, and resources from the team in order to ensure that the portal meets all of the businesses needs, which could take away from the work that needs to be done for the business itself. In this case, businesses are able to tailor their portal’s features to fit exactly with their business processes.
The second option, cloud-based products operated by third party vendors, are usually licensed as a subscription-based pricing model but the functionalities are taken care of by the vendors themselves. With cloud-based portals, vendors manage the upgrades and maintenance, and insuring constant availability of your services. They are prepared and have pre-built portals ready and designed for future scalability needs.
Scalability
As a business grows, it is important to consider how products will scale alongside your business needs. With a growing business comes responsibility to manage all relationships, and your customer portal must be designed to meet these increasing demands. Customer portals are continually evolving as a result of new technology. With every update made to the system, it needs to be done by someone with knowledge on the software, whether this team is within the company or is a third party vendor.
With in-house developed portals, the biggest roadblock to updating portals within a reasonable time is the transfer of knowledge and coding practices from old to new development teams, or between consulting companies. New teams would need to undergo weeks, or even months, of training and orientation in order to learn the software, which can result in long delays to planning and executing. Scaling the customer portal to meet the demands of growth could put a pause on production because the development team would need to access what needs to be changed and organize a plan to execute it.
With cloud-based portals, vendors will take care of all of the upgrades and maintenance because that is what their specialty is. Their solutions are designed specifically for businesses looking to grow and scale without prolonged downtime of the servers. Third party portal vendors allow businesses to rapidly add capacity and features to meet increased usage. There is clear communication between the business and the third part vendor in order to voice any concerns or questions they may have, and the vendor will take care of everything. The tasks for businesses in this case is to fully understand what their business needs to move forward, and any hidden costs that may arise.
Hidden Costs
The most important factor to consider when implementing a customer portal is how much it is going to cost your business. Cost can fall into many variables, such as the amount of time it will take to implement the portal, the human resources required to operate the portal, a designated support team, and more. These upfront costs are what your business needs to map out before the customer portal is implemented, but the costs associated with building an in-house solution versus a third party solution are very different.
Typically with in-house solutions, the amount of time it takes to deploy the customer portal is longer than one that is handled by a third party SaaS vendor. This is because portals that are developed within the company need to run through many tests before deployment or for major upgrades to ensure that the portal runs smoothly. Meanwhile with third party portal vendors, they are able to do this within a shorter time period because they are prepared. They specialize in being the support behind the portal, and they are able to take care of all your portal needs. For in-house developed portals, the development team would need to handle all the upgrades and maintenance in addition to their daily tasks.
Aside from the upfront costs that are associated with customer portals, there are some hidden costs that you might not have thought about. Hidden costs are difficult to estimate during the planning and development stages because business needs and technology are continuously evolving. With in-house developed portals, small hiccups in the system and extra fees could lead to extended delays. This might cause delays in time for systems to scale to meet increasing workloads, or it may cause a backlog of redesigning, reviewing, and revision cycles. On the other hand, SaaS portals are priced according to a subscription model, which means that the portal comes with pre-built functionalities that are designed to meet your business needs at every step of the process without prolonged delays.
Summary
By leveraging this new era of customer self-service, businesses are giving customers the autonomy to control what they want, when they want. Customer portals have become essential for businesses looking to take their customer experiences to a new level in order to build and maintain strong relationships. The digital age has changed the way that customers interact with businesses. Many use cases that are related to customer service, community building, and collaboration fall under what customer portals are able to offer businesses. Deciding to include a customer portal in their customer experience efforts is one step, but choosing the right solution is another. As discussed in this blog post, developing an in-house customer portal vs. buying one from a third party portal vendor comes with their own costs and benefits. While choosing the right portal to integrate with your system, it is crucial to map out a blueprint of requirements needed, plan for future scalability, and evaluate both current and hidden costs associated with both the in-house development and third party portal options.
So the final question is, are you going to build or buy your customer portal?
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