As all businesses will know, it costs far less to please a customer than it does to lose them.
This may be why over a third of customer service leaders say their top priority in the immediate future is to boost customer retention and loyalty.
Of course, making improvements in these areas isn’t always as easy as it may seem – especially for smaller businesses with fewer resources.
In order to satisfy customers without spiralling into burnout, you’ll need to lean on technology wherever possible. This means creating a customer portal that meets your customers’ expectations, optimises your workflows, and augments your teams.
In the following article, we’ll help you do just that.
What do customers expect from your support services?
In today’s digital world, consumers no longer have the patience to sit by the telephone, waiting for the hold music to end and a voice to emerge. They want accessible, 24/7 support on the channels that are most convenient to them.
Consider the following statistics:
- 81% of customers actively want more self-service options.
- By 2025, 60% of customers will try to find support via unofficial third-party sources (such as Reddit or YouTube).
- 41% of consumers will abandon a brand after two bad digital interactions.
- 95% of consumers say customer service has an impact on brand loyalty. The top three factors influencing brand loyalty are: professional agents, online self service, and the ability to access service options using the digital channel of their choice.
How to create a customer support portal: 10 practical tips
Now that you’re more familiar with your customers’ changing expectations, you can begin to build a portal that actually boosts retention and loyalty.
To get started, follow these 10 tips:
1. Design a brand-aligned extranet portal
Brand consistency doesn’t just enhance trust and loyalty. It can directly impact your bottom line, too. So much so, that over two-thirds of businesses say that brand consistency contributes anywhere from 10% to more than 20% of their revenue growth.
So, when building a customer portal, make sure to embellish it with your logo, brand colours, imagery, fonts and messaging. Your platform should look and feel like an extension of your company, not just a generic template.
2. Create an intuitive navigation menu
If your customers can’t find answers to their specific questions, they’ll either give up trying or look elsewhere. In some cases, this frustration could even snowball into a customer leaving you for another competitor.
To avoid this, ensure your portal is as user friendly as possible:
- Create a navigation menu that’s clear, clean and free from any clutter.
- Use phrases in your menu that everyone can easily understand, such as ‘get help’ and ‘knowledge base’.
- Design a homepage that links to the most useful pages and forms.
Ideally, your extranet should be as easy to navigate as a well-laid-out airport; every customer should be able to get to their destination without having to ask for assistance.
3. Build an automated ticketing system
Ticketing systems are the cornerstone of any online support portal. They’re a simple way for your customers to report a problem and follow its resolution without having to chase your support agents.
Your secure extranet portal should enable you to construct a bespoke ticketing system that includes:
- Custom e-forms with visible and hidden fields (for your customer and agents’ convenience).
- Status workflows to allow customers to track their issues through to resolution.
- Service level agreements (SLAs).
- Configurable user permissions (so customers only see the tickets that are relevant to them).
- Ticket notifications.
To improve the efficiency of your ticketing system, we’d recommend adopting customer support automation wherever possible. Our integrated BPA platform, InfoCapture, empowers you to automate any process – no matter how complex.
For ticketing, this may include:
- Assigning tickets to a relevant support agent.
- Notifying agents when a ticket breaches its SLA.
- Merging repeat tickets/requests to avoid duplication.
4. Integrate convenient customer-facing processes
With a solution like Claromentis, you can extend your e-form and automation capabilities beyond ticketing. In our own customer support portal, Discover, we’ve built slick workflows for requesting licences and upgrades, as well as submitting product ideas. But, really, the possibilities are endless!
5. Develop an evergreen knowledge base
Satisfy your customers’ desire for self-servicing information with a knowledge base full of relevant step-by-step articles. This content should be informative, to-the-point and easy to follow.
To improve the customer experience, we’d recommend:
- Embedding images or videos to illustrate your point (if relevant).
- Tagging each article to improve searchability.
- Adding ‘follow’ buttons to allow customers to subscribe to article updates.
- Updating your articles whenever you have new information to add.
- Offering download options so users can share PDF advice with their colleagues.
6. Provide e-learning courses to upskill customers and clients
To provide a more encompassing learning experience, develop tailored courses that guide your users, customers, clients or stakeholders through your product or services.
Unlike most customer portals and ticketing systems on the market, Claromentis comes ready made with an integrated learning management system. This gives your customer service teams – or portal administrators – the ability to build and deliver interactive courses to your customer or client base.
This can be great for:
- Onboarding new customers onto your SaaS platform.
- Providing health and safety training to your contract workers.
- Delivering new product information to your global franchisees.
7. Generate engaging news articles to keep customers in the know
Releasing a new product update? Promoting an exclusive customer discount? Pushing a new service offering? Instead of sending out a chain of emails – which your customers may not even open, never mind read – create engaging, hard-to-miss news updates instead.
Customers can read these updates when they log into your support portal and share their thoughts directly in the comment section.
8. Aid searchability with Elasticsearch and AI-powered chatbots
Your customers want to find answers to their questions as fast and conveniently as possible – the fewer clicks the better. So, to help them on their quest for information, adopt a customer portal that boasts Elasticsearch functionality.
In short, this enhances the likelihood of your customers finding the right answer to their query. This is because Elasticsearch scours the entirety of your customer portal, finding matches in titles, tags, body text, and metadata.
You can also aid information retention and searching with an AI-powered chatbot assistant. Our own AI assistant, CLAIR, surfaces relevant information, summarises articles and links users to applicable resources.
9. Encourage one-to-one interactions
Although customers increasingly prefer self-servicing information, there’s no denying that one-to-one interactions are still important.
The chances are you already have other systems for communicating with your customers directly – such as VoIP software or company social media accounts. However, you can use your customer portal to augment these efforts.
Here are some ideas to consider:
- Adding comment threads on news or knowledge base articles.
- Enabling customers to ask questions in your knowledge base to create an ever-growing list of relevant FAQs.
- Providing an idea or ‘suggestion’ box to show customers that you value their feedback.
- Creating polls and surveys to gather customer or client feedback to help improve your customer success initiatives.
10. Add a reporting dashboard
To ensure the continued success of your customer portal, you’ll need to keep an eye on key metrics, including: daily ticket submissions, ticket statuses, and the number of open issues.
A reporting dashboard that consolidates this data will help you measure your average resolution time, flag any inactive or unresolved tickets, and identify recurring issues. You can then harness this data to continuously optimise your support initiatives.
The benefits of a 24/7 customer service desk
With the right customer portal software, automations, and content, your service teams will be able to:
Provide always-on customer support
Many small to medium businesses struggle to implement round-the-clock live agent support. If this is a familiar problem for your company, a customer portal can provide much needed assistance.
Available 24/7/365, your support portal is a one-stop-shop for your customers. They can submit tickets and source helpful information whenever an issue arises – even if it falls outside of your normal business hours.
Boost customer satisfaction with self-service options
As we’ve already established, your customers want more self-service options. A customer support portal empowers your customers, clients and other third parties to solve problems quickly, enrol in training, and track tickets autonomously.
Develop better customer relationships
Comment sections, user profiles and discussion threads allow your agents to get to know your customers and develop stronger relationships. This can help to increase loyalty, trust and satisfaction.
Ensure customers make the most of your services or software
Customers can only get the most out of your service or product when they fully understand everything you have to offer. By communicating your new features, providing training and developing step-by-step knowledge base articles, you can make sure your customers maximise their investment.
Gain valuable insights into customer expectations
You can use the insights gathered via comments, tickets, polls, and suggestion boxes as part of your Voice of Customer (VoC) efforts. This feedback can uncover how customers perceive your brand, highlight any common pain points, and reveal any potential product/service improvements.
Implementing this feedback can help you stay competitive and keep pace with your customers’ expectations.
Increase productivity and reduce busywork
The more queries customers can answer autonomously, the less tickets your agents will have to sift through. This means your success teams can dedicate more time to resolving more complex issues.
Streamline ticket assignment and speed-up resolution times
Manually assigning, tracking and updating tickets is tedious and inefficient. Deploying an automated help desk workflow will enable your agents to focus on high-value tasks and can streamline your resolution times.
Enhance customer onboarding
Did you know that 55% of people return a product because they don’t know how to use it?
A customer portal, equipped with a useful knowledge base and learning management system, can help you curate a smooth, straightforward onboarding process. This not only boosts customer retention but can actually help you win new customers too. In fact, 63% of customers say that the quality of post-sales onboarding is a key consideration when making purchasing decisions.
Upskill new employees quickly
When hiring new customer success representatives, you can harness your knowledge base articles and e-learning courses to speed-up the onboarding. This reduces the amount of time your senior employees need to spend on 1-1 training.
Building a bespoke solution with Claromentis
As the inimitable poet Maya Angelou once said: ‘I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’
We think this perfectly summarises the impact of a good customer service portal. Beyond filling resource gaps and improving operational efficiency, the right platform can make a significant difference to your customers’ lives. And that’s what will keep them loyal to your business for years to come.
The question now is: which software is the best foundation for your portal?
This is where Claromentis can help.
For the majority of our customers, our digital workplace solution functions as a comprehensive intranet, powered by automated workflows, tailored e-learning courses, and project management capabilities.
However, its functionality can extend far beyond this use case – and creating a user friendly customer portal is one such example. Some of our clients use the solution exclusively as an IT help desk, ticketing system and knowledge base. Others, like Boost.ai, harness the solution as a secure extranet platform for upskilling and onboarding external delivery partners.
With its diverse suite of content management, business process automation, knowledge base, and e-learning capabilities, Claromentis empowers you to build a one-of-a-kind customer portal that delivers a truly exceptional experience.
To find out more about how you can build the best extranet and support portal for your use case, book a no-obligation demo with our team.
