Just as there isn’t a single best way to provide customer service, there’s also no single extranet strategy or design for improving the customer experience. This relationship works differently for product and service industries, for instance. One thing does hold true across industries, however: Almost no one wants to sit on hold with a call center just to learn basic information that could be easily delivered with a few keystrokes.
To develop effective extranets, you need to understand who your customers are, how they access information and what information they want.
Here are four tips for improving the customer experience using portals.
- Make it easy for consumers to access relevant information: Today’s consumers have grown accustomed to having easy and instant access to a tremendous amount of information. They want to be able to locate their package or see if their car is ready to be picked up from the mechanic while waiting in line at the grocery store. They don’t want to call a number and be walked through a long, complicated set of voice-prompts before getting to a person who may or may not have the answer to their question. Well-designed extranets help consumers to access self-service information and tools.
- Make information available on a variety of devices: Consumers want the ability to access information across PCs, tablets and various types of smartphones. If your portal doesn’t support all of these platforms seamlessly, you’re going to have very frustrated consumers on your hands. Creating design flexibility while maintaining cohesive branding and a familiar interface is challenging, but essential. It’s also important to understand how your consumer interacts with your portal on different devices. This helps you tailor the user experience for each platform, making it as helpful and intuitive as possible.
- Understand how to use your portals in a one-on-one setting: In a retail environment, having associates with tablets on the sales floor is an easy way to improve the consumer experience and help secure sales that might otherwise be lost. It allows you to show consumers the full product line, even if an item isn’t currently in your store. It also allows you to locate specific products at other stores and ship them to the consumer’s preferred location, and helps maintain a high level of employee education about product lines.
- Service industries should start mimicking product companies: An extranet doesn’t devalue the relationships that foster positive interactions and customer loyalty in high-touch service industries like consulting. Instead, it provides ways to deliver information that increases customer confidence in the content they are receiving. The central idea is that a well-designed portal augments the personal relationship by making that person more knowledgeable and responsive. It’s not that you’re eliminating that person; you’re just making them better able to serve the customer with the information they need right when they need it.
The models for how people access personal, business, technical and billing information have not evolved as quickly as the tools that facilitate the process. It’s time for organizations to rethink how they offer access to information to customers, saving everyone time and money in the process.
Learn more about creating the right extranet for your organization by contacting Portal Solutions.
