How customer portals help with digital customer retention

Digitisation is progressing continuously. In the digital age, customers have long been represented with a wide variety of devices on many new channels, whether in the B2B or B2C sector. Innumerable possibilities for new contact points (touchpoints) for customer interaction arise – and unfortunately often remain unused because the legacy systems in use do not support these channels. An established customer portal, combined with state-of-the-art technologies, can create strong customer loyalty. Gain advantages through customer portals, seize your chance and provide your customers with the much-cited “digital experience”.

Customer portals: Advantages and new opportunities

Everyone knows it from personal experience: In the last fifteen years, customer requirements and expectations of companies and their services have changed significantly. Customers now expect to be able to interact with companies and their services/products in a variety of different ways – whether it is via an app, by chat, or a web- and/or customer portal. Customers want to use the services offered anytime and anywhere. Although it may be something of an exaggeration, if such media offers don’t exist, then the company won’t exist either. Asked straight out: Would you use a service that is not available via app, web app or browser – a ticket service, a shop of your choice or whatever else? That’s a rhetorical question, it isn’t necessary to answer.

The aforementioned methods for providing customer interaction can be implemented quickly via a customer portal. The following customer portal advantages are evident at first glance:

• Time saving for customers: Services can be used anytime and anywhere
• Generate added turnover: Use up- and cross-selling potential via the customer portal
• Stronger customer loyalty: Customized measures for customer care
• Monitoring the customer’s points of contact and interactions with the company leads to a constant optimization of its services
• Stay competitive: Are your competitors already using customer portals? 

What is the “magic” of a customer portal?

A portal solution can be described as a bidirectional interface between customers and companies. The communication between the two parties takes place via the portal on a direct and transparent basis, and in retrospect, in a comprehensible way. Whatever the goal of the communication, the information which is exchanged remains coherent and comprehensible to all of the parties involved. It can be text, images, documents etc. Communication via portals can therefore be understood as being business transactions.

Customer portals – often used technologies

Customer portals essentially consist of mature web technologies. The user interfaces from HTML/CSS, JavaScript (libraries: React, TypesSript, Flutter etc.). The backend written in Java, Go, PHP etc., combined with database solutions (MySQL, PostGreSQL, NoSQL etc.). The big advantage: Customer portals created in this way can be easily extended with new functions at a later date. The customer portal solutions are responsive, and can therefore be used on several devices: in the browser on the desktop, or on mobile devices. A server (Apache, NGINX etc.) supplies the requests.

It goes without saying that a customer portal solution can also be provided as a Progressive Web App (PWA) which customers download from the Internet. Even more is possible, however: Enhanced with key additional functions that the customer portal solution doesn’t offer as a website itself, there is nothing to stop it from being distributed via the large app stores.

This makes customer portals the ideal starting point for designing and monitoring the contact points (touchpoints) along the customer journey.

What is a customer portal?

A portal solution can be described as a bidirectional interface between customers and companies. The communication between the two parties takes place via the portal on a direct and transparent basis, and in retrospect, in a comprehensible way.  

Whatever the goal of the communication, the information which is exchanged remains coherent and comprehensible to all of the parties involved. It can be text, images, documents etc. Communication via portals can therefore be understood as being business transactions. This makes customer portals the ideal starting point for designing and monitoring the contact points (touchpoints) along the customer journey.

Creating customer portals – we have the success stories

Our customers have been relying on the flexibility of customer portals for a considerable amount of time. In fact, we are able to refer to two examples who use the easy to provide their customers with a forward-looking and effective user experience: a bank and a health insurance company. Both organizations were and are aware of the fact that user expectations have changed – and will continue to change. They wanted a flexible solution, so creating a customer portal was the obvious step. Are you interested in learning more about the topic “customer portals”? Then take a look at our whitepaper.