Why Business Must Integrate Salesforce Customer Portal

Posted by CRMJetty on June 6th, 2024

Portal empowers customers to serve themselves in a way that they prefer. It gives them a better understanding of your products and services, thereby reducing the support queries. 

A Salesforce customer portal can be the right solution. It would let customers access relevant information. They can solve their queries themselves. Your support team can focus on high priority queries rather than spending time answering customers’ repetitive queries.

There are numerous benefits of integrating the Salesforce customer portal. Let us see a few of them. 

1. Reduced Service Cost

Back in 2013, 83 percent of customers asked for support. However, now 88 percent prefer businesses to have a self-service portal. It means more of them are equipped to solve their queries themselves. A Salesforce customer portal ensures they can do so with FAQs and how-to guides. 

With FAQs and how-to guides, they can find answers to their queries such as ‘How to return a product?’ or troubleshoot other problems without contacting a support agent. 

Portal streamlines their return process. This helps reduce the customer support investment and the operational charges. You don’t have to spend extra on the support service when the customer base increases. 

2. Personalized Customer Experience

Portal allows you to provide a personalized experience to your customers. You can provide a separate login space and address them with a name. You can keep a record of their previous data and recommend services and information based on it. With the Salesforce customer portal, you can help them locate their information. The multiple users and record types also help provide a personalized experience. 

Apart from this, the portal offers user experience features like smooth navigation and advanced search. Users can also configure their layouts, decide the type of content they want to view in the feed and change their color schemes. This configuration feature makes customers feel valuable. 

3. Focus on Bigger Issues

Salesforce customer portal provides self-service, ticket generation, knowledge base, community, etc., features that allow customers to address their queries themselves. They can manage their data, tickets, and other queries themselves with self-service. They don’t have to contact a support person to update their contact information. Similarly, they can access the knowledge base to clear their doubts about a product or service. They can refer to the how-to guides and solve their issue themselves. Ticket generation is another feature that allows customers to raise tickets for their issues. They don’t have to contact the support team to ask for it. Plus, they can track its status themselves. For basic queries, you can integrate a chatbot in the Salesforce customer portal. It will answer simple questions or redirect customers to relevant FAQs and articles. 

4. Improved Transparency and Security

This is one of the reasons why you should switch to a portal. It keeps everyone on the same page. For example, customers can update their details, and you, as admin, can view that along with the changelog details like who changed it and when. Similarly, it helps customers keep track of all their information and interactions. It makes their purchase and transaction processes transparent.

Just like customers, you can also keep track of your staff’s interactions and activities. Besides, the portal offers document management with version control. It helps you record changes in files and documents. And then there’s a role-based access feature for an extra layer of security. This limits the user's access to specific modules and grants access based on their user roles.  

5. Immediate Results

When customers are able to solve their problems themselves, your support team can focus on high-priority tasks and get them done quickly. This results in fewer issues and eventually helps you scale your business. 

Bringing in a Salesforce customer portal means bringing in instant solutions and results in terms of management, efficiency, productivity, sales, and customer satisfaction. It also increases the site traffic with the knowledge base. As users can find relevant information, it becomes a hub of information, attracting customers. 

Conclusion

A Salesforce customer portal centralizes operation management and increases efficiency with features like mass user credentials, case deflection, configurable widgets and templates, and single sign-on. You can also integrate third-party plugins in the Salesforce customer portal, which means streamlined payments. Most importantly, the Salesforce portal offers a custom dashboard for better insights. It gives you a clear idea about the entire business process and helps make sound decisions. Plus, the data auto-syncs across CRM and other platforms. 

The best thing is the mobile-friendliness. You and your customers can access the portal from anywhere, anytime, without worrying about device or browser compatibility. Other features include drag and drop builder, multi language support, and smart search. 

Salesforce customer portal is necessary for businesses that are serious about customer support.