With the versatility of Dynamics 365, there cannot be just one portal for all as different industries have different requirements, and to fulfill them, we need a tailored solution. Thus, the has various types of portals to offer operations for different industries. Every portal has its unique feature and purpose. You need to choose a type of portal that addresses your challenges and provides solutions to resolve them.
Here I have listed some of the popular and most used types of portals that you can use for improving customer experience, streamlining business operations, and increasing overall sales for your business:
Customer Self-Service Portal
In this digital age, no one has time to wait until the answers to their questions are provided by an agent who shows up after two days. People want prompt replies and solutions to their queries; otherwise, you as a business will lose customers. Here, offering self-service through knowledge base articles, videos, FAQs, and the chatbot will assist customers to the portal and help you properly guide your customers even when you are not in your office or desk.
With a streamlined knowledge base, your users can get the answers to their queries and will not have to wait for them to get answered when they cannot reach your support staff. In the customer’s opinion, if the website is accessible 24/7, assistance should also be provided 24/7.
You can also have forums and build a community of your brand where people can ask questions publicly and get answers from a user or an expert. This will help to build trust and brand awareness.
A self-service portal enables self-problem-solving by providing relevant sources to find a solution without the need for the presence of your staff.
For providing seamless self-service, your portal must have:
- A knowledge base including a collection of articles, FAQs, diagrams, videos, how-to guides, etc.
- Easy password reset abilities
- Automatically saving a log of a service request
- Collaborative spaces such as community forums
How Can Self-service Portal Benefit Your Business?
- Provide Quick Solutions to Customer’s Queries
Dynamics 365 customer portal for self-service provides precise and detailed answers to commonly-asked questions by customers. You can convey information about your store’s offering by presenting step-by-step guides, how-to videos, diagrams, etc. You can include tips, hints, or different practices to assist customers in understanding your offerings clearly. - Higher Satisfactory Rate
Customers can access all the information they need from one place through self-service portals, so the satisfaction rate gets higher. You can also get some word-of-mouth marketing if the customer experience is smooth. All this will increase brand awareness and bring you more sales eventually. - Personalize Customer Experiences
With a self-service portal, you can provide customers with a personalized experience by addressing each customer by name from any device they log in to. You can keep a record of the products or services they purchased previously and their recent searches, which will help you to send them relevant shopping options as per their interest to increase the possibility of buying. - Adds Productivity to Agent’s Job
With Dynamics 365 self-service customer portal, customers can easily solve their queries from self-service options like FAQs, KB articles, videos, etc. Due to this, agents don’t have to invest their time in solving common queries of customers like resetting passwords. So, agents can focus on other tasks which are more important for the company and to enhance customer experience. - Host Your Online Community
You can create an online community of users, experts, writers, bloggers, etc., who can share valuable solutions and information on your company’s offering and for customers’ questions. You can use this community to discuss products, and offers, answer queries, etc. - Make a Social Media Presence
Social media presence is necessary for every business, and the self-service portal has provided a dedicated social media feed for all customer queries containing experts’ general and product information. It contains some specific queries that can occur to a social media user or buyer. - Results in More Sales
If a customer is satisfied with your services, the sales will increase automatically as they will spread word-of-mouth in their circle and bring you more customers. For this, you can rely on self-service portals. With the help of this portal, you can let customers find the solution of their own queries. This will give them the comfort of finding a solution at any time from any device, which will enhance their experience for your brand. - Employee Self-Service Portal
After a self-service portal for customers, we now have an employee self-service portal on our list. This portal can be useful as an internal space for employees where they can share knowledge, and documents, manage tasks, interact, etc. They can have answers to their queries like how to reset passwords or who is responsible for which task or the list of POCs, company policies, leave approval cycle, appraisal forms, etc.The makes the HR work more efficient and organized. From the portal, employees have the autonomy to manage their work with the HR department concerning leave applications, travel expenses, activities, etc. Apart from these benefits, employees can exchange personal information like bank details or contact details.
This portal gives managers the ease of performing their managerial tasks. They can summarize their team’s tasks, leave details, deadlines, salary, certification, etc. This way, the managers can analyze the team member more accurately.
Community Portal
A community portal is useful for organizing and sending invites for discussions, blogs, articles, and polls, showing ratings, and enabling a section for comments or any feedback. The community portal is responsible and can be used to encourage users to promote the organization by becoming unofficial influencers and ambassadors.Partner Portal
Partner portal, as the name suggests, it is helpful to manage partners and invite them to your business. You can give them limited or full access to various departments of your business, depending on their share percentage. Invoices, orders, payment history, etc., can be shared easily with a partner portal. This enables partners to get every insight related to lead distribution, ongoing or closed deals, etc. With account management accessibility, partners can update details when they are given access to a particular component. Multi-partner collaboration promotes several partners to work together for a single brand. The partner lifecycle management is useful for recruiting and streamlining partner channels’ operations. Dynamics 365 partner portal maximizes authorizations and deals protection for benefits and discounts to give visibility to vendors in the customer pipeline with deal registration.Project Service Automation and Field Service Portal
The field service portal provides an all-around view of invoices, assets, agreements, and work orders. It is available when customers purchase an Enterprise plan, Field Service, or Project Service Automation.
On the other hand, the Project Service Automation portal provides partners with project information such as quotes, bookable resources, and invoices.Final Words
Dynamics 365 has a variety of portals that serve a variety of requirements for a business. You can find a company that aces at providing software solutions to develop the desired portal for your business. You can customize the portal that covers all the requirements to match your company’s goals.
