How to Slay Customer Loyalty with a Client Portal | Onsharp

Written by Haley Hermanson | March 25, 2024

Customer loyalty has always been critical to your business success. But in recent years, customer demands have shifted, and more and more people are looking for ways to interact with businesses online.

This might seem unfamiliar if you prefer face-to-face meetings and phone calls for re-orders. Those personal touchpoints are valuable opportunities to showcase your superior customer service. While technology can't entirely replace the human touch, it can enhance the customer experience, which remains a crucial factor in building customer loyalty.

So, if you find yourself at this crossroads, here are a few things to consider before diving into building a custom client portal.

What is a Client Portal?

Client portals serve as a bridge between businesses and their customers. These digital gateways help elevate the entire customer experience by providing your customers access to real-time account management, personalized user experiences, and enhanced security measures. A Client portal is meant to help simplify your customer interactions and provide seamless access to essential services and information from your business, at the customers convenience.

But that’s not all; portals offer another benefit for many businesses besides just happy customers. Client portals help reduce the workload on customer support teams and streamline business processes by automating routine tasks, offering self-service options, and making it easier to access information and services. This not only leads to cost savings and reduced errors but also offers valuable insights into your customer behavior and preferences with data analytics.

How Client Portals Can Elevate the Customer Experience

Simply put, client portals make it easier for customers to do business with you, improving their overall experience and ultimately leading to their loyalty.

Here are a few examples of how client portals can help boost your customer experience:

Make bill payments easier: Client portals can provide an easy and accessible way for your customers to view and pay their bills online, leading to faster billing and payment processing overall.
Offer a personalized experience: a client portal allows you to tailor the user experience based on each individual customer’s needs with customized dashboards, notifications, and content recommendations. By meeting customers where they are and providing them with easy access to their information you can better engage with your customers and provide an enhanced user experience.
Enhance security: Because security is the most important feature for any business that deals with sensitive customer information, portals offer security features such as 2-factor authentication (2FA) to give your customers peace of mind that their information is safe.

Our tip:

It’s all about developing a custom portal with customers’ most important needs in mind. When implementing a client portal, you really want to focus on identifying and solving the pain points that are getting in the way of providing an outstanding customer experience.

How Client Portals Can Improve Efficiency

Client portals can help streamline and eliminate many legacy and manual tasks and help customers easily access services, information, and support.

Here are a few examples of how a custom client portal can help you improve efficiency across your business operations:

Streamline Communication: A client portal can significantly reduce response times and improve clarity by being that direct line of communication between you and your customers ensuring messages, documents, and updates are easily accessible for everyone.
Enhancing Document Management: Through the portal, customers can securely upload documents, fill out forms, and access important files anytime. This helps reduce the burden on your support staff and streamline your document management process. Eliminating the inefficiencies of using email or multiple platforms for document storage and sharing.
Self-Service Capabilities: Portals enhance the customer experience, and reduce your support staff workloads, by giving your customers greater control, and convenience. Through the portal you can empower your customers to manage their interactions with your business with self-service options like, the ability to view account details, make payments, or schedule appointments.
Increased Data Security and Compliance: Efficient handling of data security reduces the risk of data breaches, which is critical not only for trust but also for compliance with data protection regulations. Client Portals are typically equipped with advanced security features, such as encryption and 2-factor authentication (2FA), which helps protect sensitive customer information compared to using email.

Proof of the Power of Portals:

In today’s digital landscape “effortless” is the expectation for many customers when interacting with a business. In a recent study, 88% of customers today anticipate brands and businesses to have some kind of self-service portal. They also expect it to be mobile-responsive.

Want more proof of the power of implementing a portal? Here are some stats on Client Portals

Portals Case Study

Learn how Minn-Dak Farmers Co-Op’s grower portal helped them transform collaboration and engagement with their shareholder growers.

Wrapping it Up

The ability to offer seamless, secure, and efficient online interactions is critical in nailing your customer experience and gaining loyalty. Customer expectations continue to rise, and if you are struggling with your customer experience, integrating a client portal into your business operations could be the strategic move for helping transform your customer experience, all while also increasing your business’s operational efficiency.

Are you interested in learning more about client portals? learn more.

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