Customer expectations have been on the rise in the last few years, especially with the on-set of digital transformation and building secured, faster, sustainable, and economical self-service portals. These self-service portals are expected to deliver exceptional customer services with the help of new and advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality, augmented reality, and other automated solutions.
Gone are those days when companies could simply create customer support portals with just some FAQs, relevant documents, and contact information. Today’s market demands organizations to build websites and customer service portals to help customers become more self-reliant with more features to unlock. Such advanced customer support portals can help customers find the right information, look for the exact product or service that they are looking for, interact with other customers, and create and manage their concerns. With the right blend of customer support features, organizations can now build their self-service portals, optimize ROI, and increase their portals’ efficacy.
Let us dive right into some of the most essential capabilities every customer portal should possess.
Keyword Search
Several customer portals still use the same old way of dealing with keyword searches on their portals. As customers need to get information faster and easier, it is important to look beyond just the internal searches through specific keywords. Customers should be able to look for answers, on internal and external sites as well with better availability of relevant content, context, and value. With the content updated regularly, optimizing the most commonly used keywords and key phrases that everyone can easily understand.
The content and website pages should be optimized for external sites; considering search engine optimization (SEO) is the key here.
User-Friendliness
No one likes to visit or stay on a website or a portal that looks or feels distorted and chaotic. Customers like to visit portals often only if they are provided with a unique look and feel that includes appealing design and layout through all the pages on the portal. Considering the brand and logo helps the designer to understand the design, layout, and color code better. The portal should also be easy to navigate from one page to another without needing the customers to wait for a long time. The page loading time matters the most for the quality of the user interface.
The easier the menu options, navigation bar, footer, or any call-to-actions (CTAs), the easier and more convenient the navigation and user experience will be for the customers.
Improved Personalization
Users should be given opportunities to set their preferences such as language, checking out their previous purchases, real-time user behavior, updating their personal information, etc. Customers like to enjoy personalized experiences throughout their purchasing or post-purchasing journey, and it can be possible with tailored content such as promotions, specific CTAs, segmented data, etc.
Quality Content
Users like to see refreshing ideas with high-quality content that helps them understand the products or services better. With the help of innovative videos, infographics, and fun and easy language, the customer support portal can perform exceptionally well.
