Customer portals, in a general sense, are hubs for information served uniformly through a web browser. They are comprised of dashboards and modular components, they’re often highly customizable, and consumers and professionals alike rely on them everyday. For printers and marketers, portals can serve very specific purposes, such as for yearbook production. They can also serve grandiose purposes, such as for nationwide retail product and campaign management. This article explores a variety of uses for portals in both print production and multi-channel marketing settings, some of the software available, and how customer portals are evolving.
A shift to self-service
More and more, customer support is shifting to a self-serve model. And it’s not just shipping services and banks that are making the shift – all sorts of service-based companies are letting their customers access data online, rather than having them wait for responses to queries via email or phone. Companies not only benefit from the self-serve model (since less of their employees’ time is spent on low-level support), but a number of studies actually show that customers prefer a self-service approach because of its convenience and instantaneous feedback. A survey by Socious, a U.S. online community software provider, reports that up to 75% of consumers seeking product support prefer looking for answers via self-service methods.
For the graphic communications industries, customer support portals can be useful for a number of day-to-day business needs.
Order management is one of them. Often, customers who are repeat customers will request a job with the same specs, time after time. An order management module in a customer portal can keep order specs and assets archived for future use and eliminate the need to re-key information.
Project status is another business need that portals can be useful for. Customers need to know the status of their job so they can report it to other stakeholders and they also need to know if something is pending action on their side. A project status module can aggregate all projects into view, show customers what needs their attention, and even provide a way to share feedback through annotations and comments.
Project management can also benefit from the use of a portal. Work back schedules are drafted during the project definition phase, but they almost always change as projects progress. A project management portal can host a dynamic view of a project schedule that updates every time a milestone is made or missed; this avoids miscommunication and increases transparency.
Content management is yet another module to tie into a portal. Marketing materials use lots of content, and a lot of the time bits and pieces of content get reused. An asset repository can serve as a hub for information and multimedia assets, reducing the back and forth involved in collecting, transmitting, and verifying everything.
Using a combination of the modules listed here can reduce the amount of coordination required to put a job through, saving time and resources. Portals give clients more transparency and a better feeling of authority. Ultimately, they allow companies to offer a higher level of service to their clients.
Services for business
There are a number of solutions available to help companies create and maintain customer portals. The notion of users, permissions, file sharing, task management, task assignment, and the like are often supported. Most can tie into existing APIs the company has as well, so data can be linked from existing systems. Furthermore, user interfaces are often customizable, so company branding can shine through. HyperOffice, Salesforce, and Clinked are some examples of online cloud services that can help providers serve customers better.
Next level customer portals
Online customer portals are ever evolving. New technologies and ideas are paving the way to better service, more automation, and better consistency across marketing information. As more corporate systems move from being static and proprietary to being dynamic and on the cloud, there are more integration possibilities. The result: greater control and better analysis tools.
The integration of product relationship management (PRM) and point of sale (POS) systems are significant drivers in the evolution of online solutions for retailers and their service providers. PRM systems store attributes like product names, image assets, specifications, marketing copy, and legal. They can also manage relationships with other products using categorization and tagging. POS systems store attributes like UPC codes and pricing, and offers like coupons and bonus reward points. Merging PRM and POS systems with cloud-based customer portals opens new, hierarchical ways to access, modify, and publish data.
By harnessing the APIs of integrated solutions, users can publish information globally and instantly – to the web, to mobile apps, to paper flyer production teams, to eBlasts, to digital signage, and more. This is often referred to as the Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE) philosophy, and for many retail companies, it is becoming a forefront initiative in their marketing strategies.
Online customer portals
