Solutions for industry: customer portal

A customer portal is a great tool to offer a higher degree of service to your customers. You can organise your sales and service processes a lot more efficiently via a customer portal. Appronto knows how to build customer portals. On this page, we will explain what a customer portal is and how you can effectively utilise it within your organisation.

What is a customer portal?

A customer portal is a digital environment that enables interaction between customers and your organisation. We are not talking about a public webshop that can be accessed by anyone, but about a closed web environment that is only accessible to customers who possess the correct login credentials. Where the main goal of a website or webshop is marketing and branding, a customer portal is intended for service and sales. Traditionally, a customer portal was mainly used as a self-service tool, but nowadays, it is much more than just that.

B2B customer portals

More and more B2B organisations are also discovering the potential benefits of customer portals. In a secure digital environment, customers can view their contracts, outstanding invoices and the status of orders or services. The customer portal is also an environment where you can place new orders or start service requests. Instead of your telephone ringing off the hook with questions from customers, the request load is now collected in the customer portal. This provides many benefits for both the customer and the organisation!

Keys to success

Customer portals come in many forms and variations. A generic standard solution is seldom the right fit. Only a portal that can address your specific requests and business needs can really offer added value to customers. Do your processes and services require a customised approach? Then building your own customer portal with low-code might be an excellent idea. Even though every customer portal is different, there are a couple of general keys to success. We will discuss four important ones.

1. User experience is king

A successful customer portal first and foremost focuses on the needs and wishes of the customer. Analyse and prioritise the needs of the user. Major players have set high standards for digital solutions, so customers expect to get the same experience from you!

2. Make it personal

In this day and age, a successful customer portal is much more than just an online sales and/or service counter. Personalisation is an absolute must. A customer portal should state your contact details and show the customer who you are and what your company stands for.

3. Provide an intuitive design

A successful customer portal should be based on best practices in the UX field, user testing and user interviews. With an intuitive design, you ensure that customers can use your portal without having to read a bulky manual first.

4. Create an integrated system

Your web environment might already contain different data streams that allow you to combine payment data, customer data and orders. A successful customer portal effortlessly connects these data streams and brings them together in one integrated system. Would you like to know more about our integration options? Click here for additional details.