Online portals aren’t just for employees anymore. At many organizations, especially professional services firms, there’s a more pressing need to collaborate with clients and customers than to collaborate internally via a corporate intranet. That’s just the nature of business for professional services, whether you’re in management consulting, IT consulting or government contracting.
If your firm specializes in accounting, law, architecture or construction, the deliverables tend to be document-based. To produce these work products, you need to collaborate with your customers, making sure they’re able to share the right material and background information.
For your company to collaborate with customers on this level, you need to meet in a common place that is secure, easy to find and organized. A well-designed customer portal should support workflow processes for both your business and your customer.
3 Benefits Of Using Online Portals
Here are three ways that a portal could help your firm to improve customer satisfaction and engagement:
- Streamlined document delivery: Exchanging documents and information in a customer portal reduces the number of files sent as attachments in email and other communication tools. With many professional services verticals, the deliverables produced are too large to be sent via email, which would require additional inefficient workarounds.
- Fewer embarrassing errors: It’s a common mistake: You email a document to a customer, thinking it’s the most recent version, only to realize later that you sent the wrong version. When you’re just attaching files from your email client, it’s easy to send the wrong file version, or even a document intended for someone else entirely. If you’re using a portal with a full-featured collaboration platform, such as SharePoint, you have tools for managing your versions and tracking edits and feedback. This helps reduce the likelihood of mistakes when collaborating with clients and customers.
- Better customer engagement: Your customer portal could offer more than document delivery. Think of it as a gateway to a variety of services that you are providing to improve their customer experience. Customers log into this one-stop-shop when they need to understand a project’s exact status: Is it running behind? Where is it from a budget perspective? What was the most recent deliverable? Giving your customers a dashboard with project key performance indicators (KPIs) is a great way to keep them up to date and engaged.
Using SharePoint To Make Portals For Your Customer
You could use a variety of platforms to create online portals for your customers and partners, but SharePoint lends itself particularly well to this context. In a sense, think of customer portals as SharePoint project sites that you provide to customers or partners to improve your ability to collaborate.
Security is a common concern with these customer portals or extranets. Your customers are not part of your network, so you have to ensure a secure environment that prevents one customer from accessing another customer’s information.
With SharePoint, creating and managing customer logins is quite manageable, and the environment is also user-friendly for customers. Having a very simple, interactive design makes it easy to exchange data and content while improving customer satisfaction.
