What is a Customer Portal?
A customer portal is a type of website or web application that focuses on information exchange between a company and its customers. In the context of the relationship between a company and its customers, a portal offers the possibility to communicate more efficiently, i.e. productively and directly focused on the individual relationships. Clients can log in to their account and make inquiries of all kinds via the portal, for example:
- Place, Manage and Track Orders
- Access Invoices, Statements, and Online Payments
- Send Business Correspondence
- Configure Communication Settings
- Raise Issues and Track Support Tickets
- Search the Knowledge Base
- Read the Documentation
Why a Customer Portal Is Important
Customer portals need to be deeply integrated with other business systems such as ERP or CRM in order to have the required information available and provide it to the customer in a user-friendly, orderly way. The customer portal’s task is to securely present the information to the client, but the information as such is taken from several other sources. The bigger companies get, the more likely it becomes that a large number of systems need to be integrated. This integration is critical because clients expect a seamless experience when they interact with all systems of a single brand, and they want to be able to perform all the tasks quickly and easily.
To satisfy the customers’ expectations, an architecture based on microservices seems to be the best choice. Instead of operating a single, complex system, you can build and manage a set of services that can interact in a many-faceted way. In that landscape, a CMS’s responsibility is to work as an integration platform - transmit the data securely via APIs and present it to a client on a website or via an app.
Mobile Customer Portals
According to Statista, mobile accounted for more than half of the web traffic worldwide. Customers become more and more tech-savvy, they use their mobile phones to do almost everything now, from email, shopping, learning to video conferencing. That’s why a modern customer portal should be responsive, and ideally also comes as a mobile app. What is more, all channels should present consistent information with no delay. If, for example, a user places an order via his mobile phone, they should instantly see it when accessing the customer portal from a PC.
Scrivito Can Be the Backbone of a Customer Portal
Customer portals can be expanded step by step with Scrivito. The key strengths of the CMS that are particularly helpful to build such portals are:
- The API enables the integration of backend processes, such as existing product databases, CRM and ERP systems,
- Widgets make it possible to extend customer portals in an agile manner,
- The SaaS architecture frees companies from all backend management tasks,
- Last but not least, a React-based frontend can also be used from mobile devices, offers great usability, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing websites.
