customer relation portals

 Introducing issues that Online Portals Really Addresses

 

At the end of this lesson, readers should be able to:

• Define Online portals
• Talks about employee, customer and partners portals.

 

WHAT ONLINE PORTALS ADDRESS

There are three basic categories of people who can benefit from customer-centric collaboration. These include internal enterprise users, external customers or clients, and external suppliers or partners.

A portal served as an integration point for all other channels. It is also a point of expression of the work how and business processes that defines a particular role.

One of the core benefits of collaborative CRM in any enterprises is that they support portals. Most vendors of partials support, the three scopes of portals which are employees, customer and partners.

Each of these categories has its own portals, performing their own roles. The portals allowed the users to access the organization, it also serves as a means of integrating services, analytics and every other thing that users want to display.

Portals provide operational and analytical information and processes to a broad set of users both inside and outside the enterprise.

Some of the typical ROI benefits that are expected when an organisation opens portals include:

1. Increased Sales
2. Print/Mail Cost Saving
3. Travel Saving
4. HR Benefit Enrollment
5. Customer Contract Management.

The internet allows the organisation to extend business processes to customers and partners in order to collaborate together in order to increase customer experience. This will help in promoting the profitability of customers through an increase in satisfied customers.

The uses of portals also encourage information dissemination among stakeholders. It helps to connect all those departments that deals with customer relations and help the enterprise to achieve the ultimate value of CRM, which is customers satisfaction and profitability.

Note: Portals focus on providing a single point of access to enterprise information assets and aggregates people, information, application and business processes.

EMPLOYEE PORTAL

Employee portals are collaborative CRM components that consolidate customer information gathered by sales, marketing and service departments to deliver a complete view of the customer to the enterprise.

The employee portals help to turn every point of interaction with customers into a revenue opportunity. It gathers information from the front offices about customers and uses that information in formulation products and packages that will satisfy customers interest.

Employee portals facilitate targeted marketing campaigns, Creates account plan strategies, forecast new sales opportunities and rapidly respond to customer services inquiries.

Portals also allow employees to have access to the centralized database of customers which will allow them to maximize products and provide relevant information from other business applications.

This is achievable through the integration of all necessary date from the corporate website, market research and other relevant data about customers and their behaviour. It also incorporates other tools such as web collaboration, product configuration, knowledge bases, expense reporting among others in a unified portal.

You should know that information needs about customers varied from one department to the other. Employees portals can be customized to meet the need of various departments or individuals. This can help in increasing end-user productivity by shirting only that information that is relevant to the job at hand.

 

CUSTOMER PORTAL

The objective of customer portals is to transfer the organization’s website into a sophisticated, intelligent customer interface. They seek to optimize the effectiveness of online interactions and expand customer relationship through a convenient website that can capture customers information.

Note: Customers portals enable customers and prospects to access information and obtain service quickly and independently.

Customers portals help the organisation to reduce the cost of doing business and strengthen their customer relationship efforts through ti, they are able to make CRM application available online and effectively reach out to prospects and customers. They are also able to serve, themselves online.

Through customers’ portals, organisation are able to capture prospects and customers information. It also enables the organisation to conduct targeted marketing in order to increase sales opportunities.

It also gives customers the opportunity to carry out products and services research. They can research and resolve problems online in real time. Above all, customers portals have a very essential role to play in building better customers experience.

 

PARTNER PORTALS

Partner Relationship Management (PRM) is a business strategy that is meant to improve the relationship between companies and their channel partners. Partners, online portals is a business solution for organizations that do rely on an indirect channel such as partners in order to reach their final consumers.

Partner portals allow the organisation to include their partners and suppliers as part of their sales team. It allowed them to share potential leads among their partners. They are able to share lead information about new sales opportunity with their partners using a rules-based routing and escalation.

Note: Sharing sales pipeline information aids in managing and monitoring of channel sales processes for improved planning and forecasting.

Online Portals features such as online catalogues handle partners requests for self-service training, literature, fulfilment enables partners to order sales and marketing collateral from the web, online product configuration empowers partners to configure custom products for customers online and online order processing allows partners to easily place orders with the enterprise over the web.

 

PARTNERS ONLINE PORTALS

Online catalogues

Literature

Online product configuration

Online order processing.

 

Summary

At the end of this lesson, we have able to discover that:

• Portals serve as integration channel for all the touch points in an organization
• Some of the R0I benefits of portals include increased sales, print/mail cost saving, travel savings, customer contact management among others.
• Employee portal consolidates customers information so that employees that relate directly with customers can use it to improve customers profitability
• Customers portal allow the organisation to collaborate and collate customers information which they can use in increasing customers experience.
• Partners portal allow the organization to manage middle channels through which they use to reach old to their final consumers.

 

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