Discover how you can find champions for your business/organization
Your customers are your greatest weapons to driving new business. How, you may ask? Because these are the people who will one day become the champions of your business.
A champion is a person who advocates for your organization’s, capabilities and publicly shares their approval. These types of customers can be an asset to your marketing and sales strategy. But, how do you get an ordinary customer to become a champion for your business?
You provide value to their business goals and leave them with an unforgettable experience that is worth talking about. Exceptional experience starts with wooing customers/members with the charm of a customer success portal.
What is a Customer Success Portal?
A Customer Success Portal is a platform that brings together and offers tailored and smart service to customers, members, and employees. It allows users to assist themselves and each other by sharing knowledge. This tool is great for giving customers a memorable experience that they will promote. Additionally, some portals can connect with APIs to integrate other platforms used in your business, like Salesforce.
Benefits of Customer Success Portal
Here’s a breakdown of how a customer success portal can help your business organization:
Remove barriers to customers doing business with you.
No matter what you sell or how you sell it, there will be logical touch points where extending your Salesforce CRM can remove significant barriers. Do your customers need to check status of an order? Provide approvals or sign-offs? A Portal can easily and securely integrate into your existing business process. As Melissa Stark, Marketing Manager at Core Scientific, put it in her case study:
“Once we identified our proposed Portal as a key business differentiator and looked through the available options in market, Magentrix stood out for their integration capabilities with Salesforce, ease of configuration and use along with stellar reviews and customer support. It was one of the easiest decisions I’ve made!”
With Magentrix’s Customer Success Portal they were able to quickly deploy a Portal that allowed their customers to check status of their lots, see where they are in the process, access reimbursement information, view articles, and importantly schedule a pickup and request a new collection container – all synced to Salesforce automatically. This was previously handled manually, mostly through phone calls and email to Core Scientific. The Customer Community takes that time-consuming work away from customers and employees and is a major differentiator for Core Scientific.
Give customers a solid experience with your business/organization by providing them with the tools they need to succeed. Engaging with other like-minded customers gives users the opportunity to compare use cases and learn from each other. This also gives users the power to search for the answers they’re looking for via someone who may have had the same question.
Providing great customer service doesn’t have to be time consuming. A seamless support system not only helps provide support in an orderly fashion, but it also enables transparency to the number of support tickets coming in. A support ticketing system also gives valuable insights into trends. The trends of ticketing can help you dictate what your business can do better to improve its customer experience. For example, if you notice users have a tendency to submit support tickets around a particular question, you can leverage this data to develop knowledge base articles or training modules that will not only help and engage users, but will also reduce the number of support cases submitted.
Let your customers be heard and build relationships that will help gain further insight into how you can improve your products and services with an ideation newsfeed.
Being open to new ideas gives your business the opportunity to be innovative. Allowing customers/members to provide you with suggestions for improvement shows that you care and are providing a service that is dedicated to their success.
Serve a variety of users and appease everyone who interacts with your business.
A customer success portal isn’t just for your customers/members, it can be for your employees too! With different user features, employees can have the ability to access valuable data that will help them excel in their respective role and help provide customer/member experiences that are worth talking about.
Varun, a Systems Integrator Engineer at Accellion has this to say about his customer success portal;
“The ability to have a simplified portal for customers to view their open cases and view security advisories; as well as for the partners to go in and register deals is a great advantage.”
Customer Success Portal Customer Support = Success
Leaving customers with a good experience is a stepping stone to building a champion for your business/organization. Combining your customer support with a strong customer success portal is a recipe for success.
As humans, we want to feel valued and special. Customer support can project this feeling on customers by tailoring every customer’s experience to their specific needs.
We spoke to real customers and asked them to define good customer support and here’s a short list that satisfies their service needs:
- Speak to someone who is knowledgeable and understands their issues
- Sense that the person they’re speaking to not only wants to help but actually does help
- Work with support representatives who provide tailored solutions that work best for them
- Quick responses and access to information that will resolve any issues
A customer success portal will not only enable customers to get faster answers via support tickets, but it will also give customers access to a customer community. A customer community can spark customer engagement and create an environment where customers can feel comfortable, ask questions and share experiences outside of support.
We have to remember that our customers are not all the same, and their use for our business/service is not the same. Our customer support needs to provide a 24/7, customized experience, with tools that are as innovative as our customers. It’s time to introduce a customer success portal.