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The Power of the Customer Portal

by | Customer Service & Support

On any given day – your business may be getting calls from your customers with a range of questions that your support teams or account managers need to handle. A lot of this can be easily stripped back with a customer portal.

Getting Hands-on with Catalyst Connect

On any given day – your business may be getting calls from your customers with a range of questions that your support teams or account managers need to handle. A lot of this can be easily stripped back with a customer portal. A customer portal can give your customers a centralised point to get access to their information and give them some control over their data.
 
We have recently teamed up with Catalyst Connect who are the creators of an incredible customer portal plugin that can be used directly with any wordpress website to connect to your Zoho cloud software. It comes complete with templates and a drag-and-drop interface so that you can quickly and easily customise the information that you want your customers to be able to see and interact with.

Updating Details

These days, self-service is important. People have busy lives and they often don’t want to sit on the phone to speak with someone to update their details. Equally so, businesses that spend time and have dedicated support people who fill this function are potentially missing out. With a customer portal, users are able to log on at their leisure to update their contact information.

Invoices & Quotes

Another common query from customers is for copies of historic or current quotes. With a customer portal, users will be able to log on and simply download these at their convenience. This can save teams a lot of time – especially around important tax dates when there may be an increased demand. This ‘self-service’ style of documentation is becoming increasingly popular with customers.

Historic documents and files

Being able to download historic documents and contracts is another area that is useful for customers. Some customer portals like Catalyst Connect take it a step further by allowing users to access a shared file-storage area. This way they they can download and upload files to an online drive that is shared with the business. There are lots of powerful use-cases for this; Sharing example documents, data files, scope documents, logo files – and so on.
 
Being able to access this directly through the customer portal cuts down on that email-chain problem where customers can be met with things like file-size limits, security concerns and things just getting buried down in email chains.

Support

Catalyst Connect’s customer portal integration for WordPress allows a direct connection into Zoho Desk – so rather than having to go to yet another area on your network, the user is able to review all the tickets related to their company directly from their portal. This includes opening and tracking ongoing issues. Another feather in the cap of this unified front-end.

Seeing the status of a deal

With a feed into the CRM, users are able to view the status of their deals – this is going to cut down on queries into the sales team or account administrators. As the deals progress through the pipeline, this will be reflected on the portal allowing the customer to always be upto date on where they are in the process.

Project Status and Updates

If you’re a business that runs projects, the customer portal can provide a window into the progress of a project. The users will be able to see the status of the project and get important updates. This can cut down on back-and-fourth with the client and free up valuable coordination time.
 
Many projects are often a two-way street with projects requiring input from the client, too. This means that when you’re waiting on something from your customers, you’re also going to be able to reflect that in the projects section in the portal.

Summary

A client portal gives your customers a window into the data that you hold on them. You get to set what they can see and the level of interaction that they can have with that data. But the bottom line is that a lot of common questions and requests can easily be covered with the introduction of a customer portal that can save your business a lot of time in man-hours when it’s all added up.
 
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