There is a way to connect with your customers beyond a website, and that is via portals. Business can change the way they interact with their customers with portals. Portals give role-based access to the Dynamics CRM data to the customers. Customers can see their profile and manage it. They can have a view of all the data on a unified dashboard. With a single sign-in, all this information will be with them. If your business deals with suppliers and partners, then you can also add a partner portal. But for now, let us see some major features of the customer portal to fetch data from your Dynamics 365.
Knowledge Base
Knowledge base is one of the main features of the customer portal. You can do a lot of things with the knowledge base. You can add categories based on products, services, and the types of customers. You can have articles, videos, FAQs categorized for them to find it easily. You can also decide whether to keep these categories open for all or give access to only specific users. The knowledge base will give your users access to information. They can quickly find answers to their question without even interacting with the customers. This self-service feature will save a lot of time for the support agent and they can focus on more complex tasks that require their involvement.
Community Forum
Dynamics 365 portals give businesses an opportunity to build a strong community. With the community forums, the customers can interact with other customers and answer each other’s questions. This way they can share their experiences, expectations, and knowledge about the product. Your customers talking about your product or service will increase their engagement with your brand. The issue will be solved internally and your support agents will save a lot of time. At the same time you will know what issues your customers are facing, what updates they expect from you, etc. All this information can be used for making modifications in the product. For better SEO optimizations, you can also add keywords while creating the community forum. Different departments can have a view on the conversation going in the forum and assist the users on the forum itself. This way many others can also have clarity on the same issue.
Feedback and Surveys
Best way to improve your products and services and to know what more your customers expect from you, is feedback. Encouraging customers to share feedback each time a ticket is resolved will give you an idea on how your customers feel about the product and the customer experience. The business will get the suggestions on the products and for any new changes. You can consider this feedback and add the same in the knowledge base so that others do not have to face the same issue. You can conduct surveys on a weekly and monthly basis asking for suggestions. These suggestions will help your business know the pain points of your customers.
Payment Gateway
Digital payments are the new normal. You must add various digital payment options for your customers to choose. Not having enough payment options may stop the customer from purchasing from you. Give all the possibilities you have on the payment options. Then once the payment is completed, you can send them the invoice details. The portal will also show the details in case they want to check it later on.
Submit a Query
This feature helps your customers to get in touch with the support team. If the customers have questions that the knowledge base is unable to solve then they can contact your support team. The portals will allow them to submit the request and manage the same. The customers can also view the ticket history and check their status.
Conclusion
The Dynamics 365 customer portal can benefit your business in many ways. The features like knowledge base, community forum, feedback, etc. help a business connect with their customers. The queries coming in from particular sections after updates or discussion on the forum, after a new launch, or update, surveys and feedback, all these helps you understand what the customer wants. Goal of any business is to provide the best customer service to their customers. Customer portals help a business achieve that.
