How a customer-partner portal improves the experience of your channel partners?
Having a world-class channel partner experience is more critical for businesses than ever…!!
Over 80% of the world’s commerce occurs via partners like retailers, vendors, dealers, and customers. A study by HBR reveals that business partnerships have increased dramatically over the past decade. And these alliances account for nearly one-third of the revenues of the companies. But unfortunately, as many as 70% of businesses fail to meet the expectations of partners and vendors.
What is a Customer-Partner Portal?
A customer-partner portal is used to engage the channel partners and create extended value for the customers. It is a web application that provides access to exclusive resources to channel partners. The relevant business information helps them to create powerful channel partner relationships, close deals effectively, manage customer relationships and achieve greater business profits.
How does a Customer-Partner Portal help?
With the evolution of personalized marketing strategies like email workflows, segmented campaigns, the business partners also look beyond the conventional methods and expect to be closely tied to long-term success.
A customer-partner portal delivers a visually stunning interface to your customers, vendors, and business partners to access an all-in-one information window and achieve an excellent customer experience. The principle is simple: the sooner channel partners can get the right and real-time information they need, the sooner they can start making a meaningful contribution to the revenues of the company.
If you are still wondering about:
- How to maintain strong partner relationships while meeting business goals?
- How to manage conflicts with external vendors and sales teams?
- How to collaborate with vendors for orders and deliveries?
- How to manage channel partners?
- How to deliver a top-notch customer service experience?
The answer to all these questions is a “Customer-Partner Portal” that is easy to use, fast to set up, empowers your channel partners with relevant information, and provides state-of-the-art tools to accelerate your business growth. Let’s get a deeper understanding of the Customer and Partner Portal.
1. Partner Portal
A partner portal provides seamless two-way integration between your existing ERP / CRM information and a secure and customizable portal. The collaborative portal improves communications with suppliers, vendors, and partners to plan your business activities in a better manner. For example, suppliers can log in to view new or modified orders submitted by you and submit electronic invoices, accounts payable status, shipping notifications, purchase order status, production schedules, delivery acknowledgments, etc. The partners get associated with a specific partner account and have limited access to the data of your organization.
2. Customer Portal
A customer portal is a self-service portal and used as an online support channel for your customers. It allows them to resolve their inquiries without any hassles of contacting the customer service representatives. The customers can check their case status, interact with cases, read self-help articles, and knowledge base with the rich functionalities of the customer portal.
Best Practices to improve the channel partner experience with a Customer-Partner Portal
1. Enhanced Collaboration
Typically, the vendors and customers view the business information in their respective applications which were mostly out of sync. With a customer-partner portal, both parties can access the most relevant data on a common platform without any discrepancies and achieve an improved collaborative process.
2. Engaging Partner Relationship
With a customer-partner partner portal, the channel partners can engage in regular training and education related to business needs. The learning process shows that you care about the success of your channel partners. The constant relationship with your partners will help in marinating long-term relationships and keep them motivated.
3. Saves time for business and customers
An 100% housed customer and partner portal can help in easy access of information like contracts, copies of invoices, due dates, order status, inventory quantity, and provide forms for placing orders and submitting support cases, etc. This eliminates the need for the customer and your staff to exchange emails, go back and forth on a live chat, or have lengthy conversations on the phone.
4. Improves customer satisfaction
It may be impossible for you to answer all your customer queries by email or by phone and a customer portal provides you a place to share customer-centric information like product, pricing, delivery & payment options, etc. Additionally, the self-service features like access to the knowledge base, FAQ, procedural documents and digitally submitting support requests also enhance the customer experience.
5. Measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Using a customer-partner portal helps in understand the areas where you are succeeding and that have the scope of improvement. It can include partner engagement, performance, sales, etc. The regular tracking of these metrics will help in improving the channel partner program and determine the areas of business that need further investment.
6. Shortens the payment process
The portal can be used to deposit invoices and provide payment options to customers which will expedite the payment process. The customer can also be notified automatically when a new invoice is posted. The manual process of printing an invoice and mailing it, then waiting for the customer to prepare a check and mail it back is too slow and inefficient.
7. Guarantees security
The portal can only be accessed by authenticated users who will have a login and password. Additionally, high-grade security will be maintained by your vendor. You can further configure the portal access to provide a tailored experience to the customers to ensure data security.
How “Customer Partner Portal by BizPortals 365” helps?
BizPortals 365 can be easily extended to build customer and vendor portals. Further, the customer-partner portals can be integrated with an ERP and/or CRM system to deliver a seamless, flexible, and highly secure channel partner solution.
The existing functionalities of BizPortals 365 can also be used to automate customer and vendor communications as it offers the building blocks for document management, workflow, and analytics. It also has the flexibility to design the portal specific to your customer and vendor requirements by extending key business data to them. Seamless two-way integration between your existing ERP / CRM information and a secure and customizable portal gives customers and vendors a more effective, accurate, profitable, and faster customer service experience.
BizPortals 365 truly helps to simplify and improve the experience of your channel partners. The interaction with key business partners and customers can take place in the customer-partner portal without any needs to bounce around different systems (CRM, ERP, learning management, content management, marketing, sales, etc). The user authentication and administration facilities of the portal are available via the Office 365 (now renamed Microsoft 365) Active Directory, and the role-based permission hierarchy in BizPortals 365 ensures that all information and communications are secure.
Upgrade your channel partner system today
If you are still wondering how to manage channel partners and customers, a customer-partner portal is your one-stop solution. Start empowering your channel partners with Customer-Partner Portal, deliver efficient business processes, upgrade your channel partner sales cycle, and create a competitive advantage for your business.
BizPortals 365 can help you create a highly personalized environment, fully scalable, configurable, and easily accessible from anywhere. Get a FREE DEMO to learn more and discover how “Customer-Partner Portal by BizPortals 365” can help engage your channel partners, improve customer relationships, and increase business profitability.