Customer Portals are Crucial to Keep Your Clients Loyal

Customer portals are the most important tool for your digital clients’ loyalty. They are the central point of contact for your business and your clients. In the customer portal users can, for example:

Digitalization, technologies, and customer expectations are developing rapidly. Besides, the customer experience is becoming critical for a successful digital business. That is why there are currently entirely new requirements for client portals.

Security is one of the most important aspects when you consider a customer portal. Your clients must feel comfortable when they use it because it involves trust. They save their private data, sometimes even including credit card details, there. Any security breach means a huge reputational backlash.

Currently, SSL/HTTPS is standard for pages that don’t handle private data. That’s why in a customer portal, it’s even more important to have it set up. It provides privacy, critical security, and data integrity for both your websites and your users' personal information.

Single Sign-On and integration with LDAP are other features that help to improve the security of a customer portal. Your employees should be able to log in with the same credentials they use for other systems in your company instead of creating yet another password to remember.

Customer portals are also an excellent target for hackers, who love unstable deployment procedures, improper security configurations, outdated databases/os/web servers, known default passwords, lack of data security knowledge, broken authentication, or hijacked session management.

Using a fully maintained virtual service instead of traditional servers reduces the risk of being hacked. With no databases, plug-ins, or dynamic software running on a server, the potential for code injection and hacks is decreased dramatically.

A customer portal must be available 24/7, even during public holidays. If you make sure that it is fast and also works smoothly on mobile devices, you can be sure your clients will sort many things out on their own when it’s most convenient for them.

To ensure high speed worldwide, you will need top-class infrastructure and a fast CDN with a vast net of endpoints around the globe. To make sure your customer portal is available on mobile devices, responsive design support is essential.

No matter what you do, you inevitably experience traffic peaks, for example before Christmas, during summer or winter holidays, or on Black Friday. You should not need to worry if your customer portal can handle the traffic, you have enough to do with processing orders and answering inquiries. Your system should scale automatically without pressing a single button. And you should only pay for the resources you actually use.

It’s essential to enable clients to see all their orders with their status, value, items ordered. It’s even better when they can track the delivery, so they know precisely when they will receive their goods.

Internet users expect a seamless experience whatever they do, from the beginning to the end. They don’t like logging in to several systems to complete one action. All the processes should be integrated to make it as easy as possible to increase conversion rates.

In case something goes wrong, customers should be able to quickly contact customer service representatives to find help with whatever they need. Because people are different, customer portals should offer their clients a few ways to contact you, for example, an online/video call, chat, or contact form with a history of messages.

The above means your customer portal needs to be integrated with other systems. The exchange of information must be secure and fast. The best way to achieve this is to build the communication between different systems via rich APIs and build the architecture around microservices.