You might be asking yourself: "How can a piece of software improve customer experience? Isn't customer experience more about my actual services and the people who deliver it?"
And you're right. It is. But client portal software enables your clients to access what they need quickly and allows your techs to spend less time gathering information and more time resolving tickets.
So, your customers save time, have the peace of mind to know that their ticket is being worked on, and receive faster results. Great, right?
Let's break down how to leverage your customer portal to enhance your customer experience.
When faced with problem, the first instinct for most of us is to turn to a keyboard and try to find the answer to our question in less than 60 seconds.
This is true of your customers as well.
By providing users with a library of self-help resources, such as frequently asked questions and how-to instructional documents or videos, you'll allow them to find what they are looking for quickly and efficiently.
Equipping your customers with as much of this information as possible in an organized, searchable resource library is a great way to improve the overall customer experience.
Bonus side effect: When most easy questions can be answered through the Knowledge Base, ticket queues get less cluttered, meaning your techs can solve more technical tickets faster.
Clients want their issues to be solved quickly, but they don't always know what information your tech needs to resolve their specific problem.
If you leave it up to your clients to choose what information to give you in the first place, they will likely be confused, send too little information, and your tech will have to email back and forth with them until they have what they need to solve the ticket. This type of asynchronous conversation can take hours, and no one can begin work on the ticket until all necessary information has been collected.
With a client portal, you can provide clients a service catalog and specific information requests for the issues they are encountering, routing their ticket to be resolved as soon as they submit it.
For requests that do require live discussions, client portals often offer a live chat feature. This is one of the most popular ways for customers to talk to IT, as they can work through their issue without having to pick up the phone.
It's no secret that clients like to be kept in the loop about the status of their tickets. And it's also no secret that frequently emailing back and forth about ticket statuses can be tiresome, as well as unproductive. Which leads us to our next point... Analytic dashboards and reports native to a client portal can provide your clients with all the transparency they desire.
They can simply login to the portal and instantly see: the status of all open tickets, how long certain ticket types are taking to be resolved, where specific tickets may be getting stuck and what information is still outstanding to allow tickets to be worked.
This data provides all users, clients and techs alike, with a holistic view as to which processes are working well and which may be running inefficiently. Together with your client, you can then use this data and analyses to optimize existing processes with new automations to reduce ticket response time and prevent delays in information collection.
Granting increased transparency into your team's processes and progress builds trust with your clients and fosters a relationship of collaboration and innovation to constantly improve on your service.
Client portals that allow you to customize the user interface help you develop a portal that feels more personal to your customers' businesses. Creating custom menu items specific to each client's needs will help users feel more confident and comfortable when navigating the portal, as they'll know what to expect to find in each section. Their portal won't be filled with unnecessary tabs and pages, and each user can have customized access permissions to ensure they're only seeing the tickets and data that are relevant to their role, creating a pristine, uncluttered environment.
Adding customers' logos, colors and a custom domain name can help create a more familiar space, reminding your customers that this portal was built for them and their objectives.
Want to take it one step further? Some client portals even let you add avatars for client profiles and tech profiles – making the whole experience a little more "human" and personal!
Delivering these customizable features allows your clients to take more ownership over the space, ultimately creating greater satisfaction and a more comfortable, user-friendly experience that keeps them excited about working with you.
In creating your client portal, we always recommend taking a customer-centric approach, considering all of the features that are most likely to deliver an outstanding customer experience. After all, it's this gold standard customer service that will help you keep customers long-term and close more business.
DeskDirector offers an advanced, customizable customer portal software with numerous benefits for both the provider and the customer. Start your free trial today and explore how you can start delivering "wow factor" customer service to your clients.