Your Website Development Process: Creating an Online Customer Portal

Creating a website of any kind can be a stressful ordeal. The website development process has multiple facets to it in order to create a functioning, serviceable site. Many people, though, forget about customer service when creating their site.

In today's digital world, customer service is quickly moving towards customer self-service. Allowing for customers to use self-service on your website greatly reduces your support costs, as well as bolsters your online presence. Recent polls have indicated that nearly 75% of customers would rather use an online self-service than call into a customer help line. However, this also means that any online portal created must be easy to use, completely accurate and incredibly reliable.

Creating an effective and reliable online portal is easily done with some of these suggestions.

• Use peer-to-peer interactions and/or forums. Allowing the customers to speak among themselves lets the customer become more involved in your webpage and product. Human interaction is also important when one takes out the element of customer call-lines. Peer-to-peer interactions allows for that human interaction without the need to call into a line and speak in person to a stranger.
• Have an excellent search engine. This search engine will be the backbone of your online portal, connecting the customer with every answer they need. The engine needs to be capable of collecting data from every available source that coincides with the search it is performing.
• Organize your portal by topic. If you are selling more than one product, organize your portal to allow for easy access to information about each product. If your company's different locations have a factor on someone's search, separate by that. Anything that would make it easier for a customer to locate what it is they are looking for, have a specific area for.
• Communicate through the portal. Customers having issues with your website will look to your portal for information. Communicate any updates, errors or significant changes through this portal, and allow for a way for the customer to communicate back. An effective online portal gains its knowledge from its users, and a customer will only use the portal if they feel they can find what they need from it.

If you would like help with your online customer portal or any other part of your website development, feel free to contact us, and we will be happy to help you along.