A Customer Portal is a great way to develop relationships with your current customers. If you have an online business and you are not using a Portal then you might be seriously missing out as far as marketing is concerned. 

• Do you own a business where developing a relationship with your customers can be beneficial?
• Do customers need to re-order your product?
• Do you release new products your customer base would be interested in? 
• Do you want your customers to know more about your business than just the product they ordered? 
• Would it be beneficial if your customers could interact and share their experiences with each other about using your product? 
• Does your business need to dedicate staff and resources to supporting your customers with information in your CRM that if they had access to would free up resources? 

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions then you are an excellent candidate for a customer portal. 

What Is a Customer Portal

A Customer Portal is really a custom landing page or group of pages of specialized content where you can disseminate important information either specifically for that client or in general. Yes, you read that correctly. A portal can allow you to personally communicate with your customers in a fast and effective manner. 

What Businesses Can Benefit from a Customer Portal?

About the only business that can’t directly benefit from a Customer Portal are businesses that sell a one and done product. Where you have basically no chance of ever selling to that client again. An example would be online driver’s licenses. Once a person has it, you’re not selling them another one or anything related really. Pretty much everyone else that can sell more product to a client should use one. 

What Benefits Can a Portal Offer My Business? 

Portals are a great way to build relationships with your clients. From there, the sky is the limit. 

Portals allow you to directly communicate to your clients. Does your business have a project that has a long turnaround? Like home construction or remodeling. Or maybe custom boat building or custom furniture manufacturer? How about something like Health & beauty products? Wouldn’t it benefit you to be able to keep your customers up to date in a better, more comprehensive way than emailing them a long email they don’t read? Portals fix that. If you make them interesting enough. 

Portals help you save time and increase productivity. The reason the construction company benefited most from the portal is that customer calls about projects stifled the business. Receptionists spent a large part of their day dealing with angry customers. Department managers spent time personally dealing with the irate customers. All of that is solved with a customer portal. 

Portals Help Build Client to Client Relationships. If you’re in a business like selling bikes or boats or really anything recreational where people could enjoy them with other like minded people then a portal is a win, win for everyone. 

What Kind of Information Can I Communicate? 

Anything you want. The last portal I set up was for a construction company so that they could keep their clients up to date on their project. This eliminated dozens of calls every day from customers wanting to get updated on their project freeing employees time. It also eliminated the need to hire additional staff to call and or email customers to keep them informed. 

Most companies use some kind of a CRM to track all of this. When your staff makes and update in your system that info can be used to update the portal. For the construction business it would be things like material delivery, inspection dates and other info pertinent to the customer. When the portal is updated they get an email eliminating the need for back and forth phone calls. 

If you sell products or product lines where keeping your clients informed can help lead to additional sales? Then you need a portal. 

What Does A Portal Look Like and How Do Customers Use It? 

What it looks like really depends on the website you have for your company and where you want to put it. In most cases we will want it to use the theme of the website so that is pretty much settled when you built your website. We just have some things like what content you wish to display. Content can even be secured and can be customer specific. 

Customers use it by logging into your site and then it is set so they land on a specific page when they do. You choose what you want on that page. Typically you’d want to encourage customers to provide reviews and latest products. 

Here is an example of a customer portal:

How Much Is A Customer Portal?

That all depends on what you have and what you need. That is like asking “How much is a car”? What kind of car? What model of car? You get the idea. 

The best way to develop one of these for your business is using a WordPress website. If you have one already I have to look at it to see how it was built and what was used in it. So that has to be a custom price. 

If you do not already have a website or are interested in a new site then I can give you a basic price. This would be what I call in my Website Services the “Elite Business Package” and starts at $7,899.00