Business leaders are constantly searching for strategies they can employ to maintain or improve their business’s margins. Through strategic automation of specific processes and tasks, your company stands to become more efficient and more profitable.
A top-notch customer portal presents plenty of opportunities for you to set up automation to save your company time, boost your overall productivity and ensure long-term relationships with your clients.
Ready to take your automation to the next level? Read on for some simple strategies you can employ within your client portal to accomplish your goals.
Implementing Approval Chains
Approval chains are an efficient means of ensuring a project, process or step is approved by all required parties before the relevant task can move forward.
In an approval chain, the approvals must happen in a specific order. The chain might require clearances from every level (or at least multiple levels) of management within a particular department. When one person marks an approval, the next person up the chain will receive a notification to review and approve as well. This continues up the chain through as many levels as the task requires.
Using automated approval chains makes it significantly easier to track the process of a task.
But the most significant benefit here is that with these automated approval chains, techs no longer have to work through the cumbersome process of manually performing all of those approval steps. If approvers delay, they’ll get reminder notifications, so techs don’t have to follow up via email or phone. What’s more, notifications are customizable for every client.
Automated and Customized Email Updates
There are various ways businesses can automate email updates in a manner that is fully customized for the recipient.
For example, you can send personalized emails with deep links whenever a ticket is opened, worked on or closed to ensure constant, accurate status updates.
Client portal software doesn’t eliminate the need for emails; it just empowers MSPs to send more strategic, valuable emails that prompt recipients to take a specific action or that move a project forward in some way. Embracing automation with your email updates will significantly cut down on the amount of time you have to spend on them and will still allow you to customize your messages to deliver a more personalized experience to your customers or targets.
Inline Forms
Inline forms placed directly into emails provide you with an easy and centralized method of collecting information from customers.
When you have open tickets, these forms collect specific information from emails to prevent you from opening a new ticket and merging them, which saves your MSP a lot of time.
Using inline forms in this way is highly efficient, as you can automate the email messages themselves and have the responses collected and easily sorted for you. You’ll be able to get important feedback quickly with little time investment. In addition, your customers will have the chance to share their thoughts and feedback, making them feel valued and strengthening your relationship.
Automated Onboarding Processes
When clients hire new employees, it’s essential to complete the onboarding process promptly to ensure clients do not lose productivity and all assets are in place for the new hire’s start date.
Automating the onboarding process enables your client to get new employees up to speed quickly and empowers your team to provide consistent, prompt service every time a client brings in a new team member.
Take the time to map out every step of the onboarding process (setting rules to create tickets automatically, creating reminder notifications, etc.). You’ll be able to cut down on the amount of time your techs spend on individual onboarding tasks.
With finely tuned automated onboarding processes in place, your company can save thousands of hours (and dollars!) per year, which will do wonders for your margins.
A user-friendly customer portal and automation features are vital to sustaining strong margins and a healthy business.
DeskDirector provides customizable client portal software and numerous opportunities for automation to help you transform your business. Start your free trial today to experience the benefits yourself. 
