Powerful Customer Portals
Posted on 11. Mar, 2010 by AscendWorks Consulting in Development
Much of the intelligence about your customers will reside in Salesforce.com to serve your team. However, this data warehouse can be leveraged to enhance your relationship with your customers. In Salesforce.com, the ability to work with the Application Programming Interface (API) allows for software development of customer portals. A portal is a secure login site which your customer can access to:
- Update their account records
- See their account information
- Log support cases
- See the status of support cases
- Send and manage referrals
There are numerous applications which can be scoped for increasing customer loyalty and ultimately revenue. Building a customer portal requires thinking through the best presentation of data and how the data syncs with your Salesforce.com interface. The process includes data mapping and developing the rules for managing the data flow between Salesforce.com and your custom portal. The portal itself can be developed using web services to a secure site or using Force.com sites as the venue for your customers to login to. Each has benefits which would need to be evaluated based on requirements and a business case.
Management of your users via login credentials would be a layer of implementation that is inherent with a portal implementation. Their information and how it flows with your Salesforce.com system are part of the requirements to explore.
Imagine your customers having a much higher value perception of your brand because of transparency and convenience being offered to them. Your team manages data on the back end using Salesforce.com. Your customer has access to what is relevant as well as inputs what is changing. It is more value to bring to customers that want to have an increased relationship with you. It is a differentiator in an economy where your competitors are vying for your customers’ attention.