Nobody wants to wait on hold for a service agent to pick up, or worse, send an email to customer service for an issue only to see the response time is days. Customers want instant answers to their immediate concerns, and it’s important for service teams to address customer expectations.
With customer portals, organizations can help clients help themselves. Providing a self-service hub, customer portals act as a first touchpoint for clients looking for answers. Rather than jumping immediately to calling, emailing, or chatting with a busy support agent, these self-help hubs rely on AI-driven knowledge and personalized resources to offer quick solutions to common issues.
In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the importance and benefits of customer portals, look at the features your portal needs, and give you our suggestions for the best customer portal software like monday service.
Try monday serviceWhat is a customer portal?
A customer portal is a secure hub where a company’s clients can find self-service options and answers to their questions. There are a lot of things customers can accomplish in a customer portal, such as:
- Submitting tickets
- Viewing onboarding guides
- Checking support requests
- Tracking orders
- Accessing knowledge bases
- Scheduling appointments
- Updating account info
With a customer portal, companies can build relationships and offer tailored service management software without having agents directly interact with clients around the clock.
The importance of customer portals
According to research, 88% of customers expect organizations to have some type of online self-service portal, demonstrating how essential it is for businesses to keep up with customer demand.
Customer portals are important because they allow clients to access information at their leisure without having to reach out to an agent.
It gives customers the agency to solve basic issues on their own and access quick answers and simple solutions that they can execute independently. When businesses offer tools and resources to improve the user experience, customers feel more satisfied and loyal, building more customer trust and helping companies retain more clients in the long run.
The benefits of customer portals
Aside from the many benefits to customers themselves, these hubs offer a ton of advantages to companies, too. While customer portals aren’t meant to replace other service channels, like email, chat, and phone, they can alleviate a lot of volume on service agents. Here’s a closer look at some of the key benefits of having an online portal for self-service.
- Increases agent efficiency: When agents feel less pressured to answer a high volume of inquiries and repetitive issues, they can spend more time focusing on solving more complex customer problems
- Reduces support costs: A customer hub can resolve a lot of basic issues while acting as a first and only touchpoint for some clients, reducing the need for a large support team and additional resources
- Provides better visibility and analytics: By offering customers a portal to find information and solve issues, your business can get more insights into customer behavior and understand their most common pain points so that you can make improvements to the customer journey
- Improves customer satisfaction: With 24/7 access to these portals, customers don’t need to wait for a response from your customer service team, offering greater convenience, a smoother client experience, and a boost to customer satisfaction
- Cuts down on wait times: A Gartner survey shows that two-thirds of respondents stated their call volume decreased as a response to self-service options, which indicates that when your company’s support channels are less bogged down by repetitive requests, customers with complex issues can benefit from direct assistants while waiting less time for a response
What main features should you look for in a customer portal solution?
Every company will look for different features in a customer service portal. You know your customers best, and it’s possible that there are a few features that are more important than others when it comes to offering a strong customer self-service experience. Below, we’ll look at some of the key features most companies look for in a customer portal.
- Self-service tools: Self-service resources like knowledge bases, onboarding guides, FAQs, and community forums are essential
- AI-powered features: AI-driven functionalities allow for more accurate automations and can further personalize portals to customer preferences
- Reports and analytics: Companies need to be able to download reports and access insights on customer behavior to inform data-driven decisions
- Secure access to information: Customer portals should include robust security measures to safeguard sensitive customer data and remain compliant with regulatory standards
- AI-powered knowledge bases: AI plays an important role in enhancing knowledge bases by suggesting content based on customer behavior and providing personal article recommendations to clients
- Integrations: Companies should be able to integrate existing tools like chatbots or customer relationship management (CRM) platforms for seamless data syncing
- Multilingual support: For companies that deal internationally, creating unique customer portals that cater to multiple languages is essential
- Customizable interface: Your customer portal should be an extension of your brand’s image, so look for software that can be customized to fit your company’s style
Top 5 customer portals
Choosing the best customer portal for your organization can take some time. It’s important to consider your options and look at what each platform offers in order to find the right fit for your business. Below, we’ve gathered five of the best customer portal software solutions on the market to make your research easier.
1. monday service
Best for: Businesses of any size who want a robust AI-powered customer portal with a simple interface
Built upon the powerful monday.com work OS, monday service is a customer success platform that empowers teams to improve customer service operations. Thanks to smart automations and AI-powered features, agents can work faster and provide a smoother user experience and quicker responses to customer support tickets.
Key monday service features
- Multi-portal support: Create multiple portals for any service team, such as internal and external needs, each with a customizable intuitive design
- AI-powered self-service tools: Generate automatic responses to common issues so that customers can get help instantly while freeing up agents
- My Tickets feature: Seamlessly communicate with all your service teams by quickly accessing open tickets in a dedicated portal
- Advanced analytics: Stay on top of service trends with detailed dashboards, automated reports, and insights to monitor operations and improve performance
monday service pricing
- From $26/seat/month
- Three plans to choose from: Standard, Pro, and Enterprise
- Free trial available
- Read more about monday service plans and pricing here
2. ServiceNow
Best for: Teams looking for comprehensive IT service management with strong AI capabilities
With ServiceNow’s platform, teams can streamline IT service management (ITSM) along with customer service and operations management. As a flexible and scalable platform with a customizable interface, ServiceNow makes it possible for organizations to automate workflows that improve service delivery.
Key ServiceNow features
- AI agents: Complete repetitive work with AI agents to perform simple tasks and make decisions autonomously
- Workflow automation: Teams can build their own multi-step automated workflows with generative AI to increase productivity
- Data analytics: Get visibility into essential data with AI-powered insights that allow for greater personalization and more targeted data-driven decision-making
ServiceNow pricing
- Pricing available on request
- Demo available
3. Zendesk
Best for: Simple customer support and improved ticket management
Zendesk is a widely used customer service platform that can fit businesses of all sizes. The platform offers an intuitive interface and a suite of tools to improve customer support initiatives, including ticket management, chat, and AI and automation functions. Zendesk’s flexibility makes it easy for teams to scale support operations as needed.
Key Zendesk features
- Generative AI: Identify missing help center topics and create entire knowledge base articles just from a few bullet points with generative AI features
- AI agents: Resolve customer issues with AI agents, which can handle common requests and suggest self-service options
- Reports and analytics: Get access to powerful analytics and reporting tools to measure your self-service impact
Zendesk pricing
- From $19/agent/month
- Four plans to choose from: Support Team, Suite Team, Suite Professional, and Suite Enterprise
- Free trial available
4. Salesforce
Best for: Teams that want a robust customer portal along with advanced CRM capabilities
Salesforce is a leading CRM platform that provides adaptable customer portal features. Businesses can access a customer portal that’s built directly into the Salesforce CRM. Powered by AI, Salesforce’s self-service customer portal helps connect customers to your business 24/7.
Key Salesforce features
- Agentforce AI agent: Salesforce’s AI agents can resolve cases over different chat channels using natural language
- Einstein bots: Intelligent chatbots allow teams to launch multi-channel and multilingual bots to automate resolutions to common requests
- Customizable interface: Create your own branded self-service portal in minutes with prebuilt templates and drag-and-drop functionality
Salesforce pricing
- From $25/user/month
- Three plans to choose from: Starter Suite, Pro Suite, and Enterprise
- Free trial available
- Learn more about Salesforce plans and pricing here
5. Zoho Creator
Best for: Small-to-medium-sized businesses using Zoho software
Zoho offers plenty of tools for businesses to enhance operations, and with Zoho Creator, teams can add a customer portal to their offerings. Zoho’s customer portals are customizable, allowing businesses to design their own customer web portals according to their needs.
Key Zoho Creator features
- Multipurpose portal creator: Create multiple portals with different purposes, such as customer service, HR candidate portal, student portal, patient portal, and others
- Personalization features: Add details like a custom domain, business logos, and visual elements that align with your brand
- Advanced customization: Design every element of your customer portal to match your service’s UI and personalize the user experience
Zoho Creator pricing
- From $8/user/month
- Four plans to choose from: Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Flex
- Free trial available
The future of customer portals
Today’s customer portals already rely heavily on cutting-edge AI technologies to alleviate stress on human agents and give customers the answers they need quicker than ever before. As this technology and others continue to evolve, we can expect to see certain advancements in customer portal features and capabilities.
- AI and machine learning in customer portals: AI is already paving the way for speedier customer support in client portals, but in the future, we can expect this technology’s abilities to stretch further into personalized content recommendations, more accurate predictive analytics and forecasting, and advanced intelligent chatbots that can handle more complex issues
- Personalization and customization options: The demand for a tailored user experience will only continue to rise, with customer portals offering even more customizable interfaces and personalized dashboards along with tailored content recommendations based on customer data
- Omnichannel integration: In the future, customer portals will integrate seamlessly with different communication channels, whether it’s social media, email, WhatsApp, or live chat, producing a consistent customer experience where users can interact with a business from multiple touchpoints without losing context
- Enhanced self-service options: Client portals will evolve to include even more advanced self-service tools like interactive guides, AI-powered search engines, and automated troubleshooting, encouraging even more users to find viable solutions independently
How monday service improves support operations
Not only does monday service offer a customizable customer portal that can fit a variety of needs, but the platform itself is a powerful solution for a team’s service needs from start to finish. monday service offers a simple out-of-the-box solution that’s simultaneously easy to use and robust enough to handle complex tasks and customer accounts.
With monday service, teams can improve their SLAs while collaborating seamlessly in a centralized location to help them work more proactively in solving customer inquiries. Aside from the features we covered above, monday service offers a number of other capabilities:
- Use smart ticket routing to reduce manual labor and make sure the relevant agent is assigned the right ticket
- AI-powered knowledge base assistance helps support agents access instant answers to reply to clients quickly
- Choose from 200+ app integrations to continue working with your existing work tools
- Get a visual overview of agent performance and ticket resolution statuses in customizable analytics dashboards
- Communication with clients, agents, and internal stakeholders has never been easier with automated replies, follow-ups, and more
- Automatically classify and prioritize tickets by type, sentiment, urgency, and more
- Automated service processes can be scaled as needed to quickly adapt to growing business needs
- Seamlessly connect an entire organization with enterprise-level service management for data, tools, and people
Improve the customer experience with customer portal software
Customer portals are making it easier for companies to handle common requests without increasing the burden on customer support teams. With software like monday service, businesses can help customers help themselves, giving them more independence, quicker response times, and improved customer satisfaction. By choosing the right customer portal, you can build a single source of truth for customers to access essential information and succeed with your service strategy.
FAQs
Who should use customer portals?
Customer portals are ideal for a wide range of businesses looking to offer customers a self-service option. These portals are especially beneficial for organizations with a high volume of customer interactions, like support services, IT, and subscription-based businesses for software and other products.
How can client portal software improve the customer experience?
Client portal software can improve the user experience with a quick and easy route to resources, answers, and support. Offering 24/7 access and a range of self-help tools like knowledge bases and ticket management, customers can solve their issues without waiting for responses from support agents.
Are client portals secure in terms of sensitive data?
Yes, most client portals are designed with robust security features such as encryption, multi-factor authentication, role-based access controls, and more. These portals ensure sensitive customer data stays protected so that businesses comply with data protection regulations such as GDPR.
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