With a rising demand for self-service tools, it becomes an urgent need for companies to adapt and review their strategies. Whether you run a small or large business, you need solutions to meet customer expectations, increase employee productivity, and ensure high performance.
A way to extend your business possibilities is through customer relationship management portals. This article will explore what a CRM portal is and how you can benefit from implementing one.
What Is a CRM Portal
A CRM or client portal is an online place where clients can interact with your business. Here, they can access resources, services, and information on their own.
Today, customers want to receive readily available support in the form of guides and how-to manuals quickly, update their profile information, submit support requests, and interact with a website/app at their convenience. CRM portals are the gateways that can make all these possible.
Customer self service portals can assist you in enhancing customer experience, organizing tasks, and keeping up to date with internal conversations.
Why Your Business Needs a CRM Portal
A CRM portal improves the way businesses work by providing a direct communication channel.
The benefits of implementing a CRM portal differ for every business. Here are 5 reasons why your business requires a CRM portal:
Greater Productivity
Managing communication manually through email and other platforms can cause a lot of headaches. First, you'll need to track all the activities, save progress, check updates, and plan new tasks. Meanwhile, a client portal will allow better collaboration at work, improve interaction with clients, and save you time. This means working with team members and clients on multiple documents, sharing files, and having group discussions easily.
Secure File Exchange
A client portal offers a reliable environment for storing and sharing information. This ensures maximum protection for both internally and externally shared files since the information remains accessible only to the portal provider. By implementing a client portal, you can be sure that your data's integrity and confidentiality are safeguarded.
24/7 Accessibility
A customer portal makes data accessible for clients wherever and whenever they want. Gone are the days when one side is annoyed with waiting for replies to perform basic actions, and the other side is struggling with all the email chains and task management. With a CRM portal, users can get the documents they want regardless of the time zone and the day of the week.
More Sales
You can boost your brand awareness and build long-term trust with CRM portals that have features for marketing and sales. By getting feedback easily, you'll be able to identify customer buying patterns, tailor your offerings to customer needs,
refine your services, and find cross-selling opportunities. With the use of the tools, you'll keep your customers happy and drive more sales.
Operational Scalability
At the very start of their business, most companies manage their client base through emails and various documents. However, as the customer base grows and the volume of tasks increases, customer portal software becomes necessary. With the software providing self-service features, there’s less need for in-person assistance.
6 Best CRM (Client Portals) for Your Business
The choice of a CRM portal requires careful consideration. Here is our list of the 6 best client portals according to their key features that you might find helpful:
Jet Admin
Great for building custom client portals from scratch quickly
Jet Admin is a no-code builder using which you can create a custom client portal really fast. The tool is simple to use and doesn't require coding skills. Jet provides ready-to-use UI components to build the functionality you want. Just drag and drop templates to create a tool for internal project management, client onboarding, payments gateway, or something else. You can collect business data in one place and provide users with interactive experiences through integrations and custom APIs. Consider Jet Admin if you're looking for quick prototyping and custom logic creation.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Great for automation and client lifecycle management
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a suite of applications for sales, customer service, finance, marketing, and supply chain management. Selecting the applications for your business needs, you can improve operations, provide personalized customer experience, track order processing, and more. Service functionalities allow users to easily manage their accounts and get accurate data reports. Consider Microsoft Dynamics 365 if you want a CRM portal to easily integrate with other Microsoft products and unify different business apps.
Salesforce
Great for sales automation
Salesforce can help you enhance communication and resource exchange between sales, marketing, and tech teams. The software offers different products to connect with customers. You can choose apps that fit your sales process goals. Salesforce offers automated self-service tools and real-time data management. Using the product may require team training. Check out Salesforce if you're looking for efficient management of sales pipelines.
Zoho
Great for low-code app building
Zoho Creator by the tech company Zoho allows you to develop self-service portals with little coding. With the software, you can build client and business portals to improve document management and easy access to the needed information. By installing and customizing app templates, you can create tools for process automation. App deployment is available on the web and mobile. Give Zoho a try if you want to build custom apps with minimal coding.
Suitedash
Great for a client portal with lots of features
Suitedash provides businesses with a place to communicate with clients, track projects, and manage finances without switching channels. The software offers various functionalities, including client onboarding, appointment scheduling, invoicing, and outreach. Suitedash may be a good choice if you are looking for a tool that allows managing a large number of activities.
Zendesk
Great for customer support management
Zendesk's help desk management solution offers customizable tools for customer service portal and community building. It has a user-friendly interface, which allows customers to find answers to their questions quickly. Zendesk offers live chat features and operability with other apps. It significantly increases the efficiency of customer support due to automation, analytics, and reporting features. Check out the Zendesk Support Service suite if you're looking for easy query management and real-time communication with clients.
Features You Should Look For in a CRM Customer Portal
With different client portal solutions available today, it may be overwhelming to decide which one to select. When making a decision about software implementation that covers your requirements, there are some basic features to pay attention to:
Integration possibilities: The interoperability of a client portal software with other tools you're using will improve your overall business processes, from data analytics to customer support. You can create custom automation based on your needs.
Scalability: Your business needs will probably change over time. With a scalable solution that allows you to cover both immediate and long-term goals, you would be able to respond to changes quickly.
User Experience: Software simplicity and ease of use will save a lot of time for you and your clients. Consider client portal solutions that are easy to set up, access, and navigate to achieve better results.
Resource sharing: File sharing with multiple clients and team members is a top feature to look for. It will improve project management and file exchange between parties, allowing easy access to documents, tasks, and events.
Security: Every business aims to provide maximum security of files and avoid data breaches. To protect data, choose a client portal solution that doesn't collect private data and follows security best practices.
How to Implement Customer Portals
The first question about a client portal implementation is probably whether to build a solution or purchase one. Traditionally, you would need to choose between quick availability but less customization of ready-to-use systems and flexibility in creating your customer portal, which could take a lot of time.
We built a no-code builder to allow you to use the benefits of both by getting started with your custom CRM client portal in minutes.
Here are a few steps to implement your customer portal in Jet Admin:
Decide on the functionalities of your CRM portal
Start with clearly defining the purpose and features of your portal: file storage size, customer onboarding, communication channels, doing reports, etc.
Connect your data
Select the resources from which you want to connect your data. You can sync data from multiple sources: Google Sheets, HubSpot, Stripe, etc.
Build the app interface
Next, Drag and drop UI components to build an interface. You can customize customer details by rearranging the templates and changing the design.
Set authorization and access rights
Choose how you want to invite new users to the customer portal. New members will be able to join automatically.
Start collaborating
Once you finalized the building, you're all set up to collaborate with others and automate your workflow.
Check out our YouTube tutorial on how to create a client portal in 5 minutes.
Conclusion
Client portal needs to be an easy-to-use, flexible, and secure solution without complex technical barriers for users and team members. Building software tailored to your needs will simplify communication and optimize workflow.
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