A customer portal is a website where supplier and customer collaborate and exchange information with each other. It contributes to strengthening the customer relationship and provides a transparent, secure and unambiguous surface for information exchange.
Most companies want to exist for their customers and for the customers to experience a benefit and a value with the company's services and products. If they don't, it's only a matter of time before they're no longer customers.
It may sound like a cocky claim that customers benefit greatly from a customer portal. How can you say something like that? One way to implicitly interpret benefit is to look at what customers actually expect. "In fact, surveys have shown that 70% of customers expect self-service applications on a company's website," writes SupportBee, for example.
Main benefits
If it is the case that our customers expect some type of customer portal, then it is not a far-fetched conclusion that it is because they have learned that they benefit from and appreciate that type of support function from a vendor. But if we scratch the surface, where does the benefit consist at a higher, more conceptual level? The benefit can be described with:
Further reading on customer portals
We have produced a page that highlights 10 reasons to use a customer portal. You can find the page here and it is also possible to download the page as a PDF.