Leading agency for the development of customised customer portals

Customer portals are digital applications that you can use to provide potential or existing customers with self-services. Where your users previously had to seek direct contact with you, they can now log into your customer portal via a browser or mobile app and resolve their concerns independently. It is important that the customer portal development takes your company's goals into account right from the start: Should customer satisfaction be increased, should support staff be relieved or is the focus on improving efficiency in marketing and sales? The design of the platform will change depending on your priorities.

You can use a customer portal in all phases of your customer journey - from product advice and product configuration to contract management and support during the usage phase. In our opinion, these are the 5 most important use cases:

1. Manage orders: A customer portal enables your users to monitor the status of their order, view invoices, arrange payments and initiate returns. This prevents many questions about the ordering process from arising in the first place.
2. Configure products and services: Switching to a higher tariff, cancelling a service or booking an additional service - with customer portals, your users can flexibly adapt their purchases to their life situation with just a few clicks. Conveniently and without the time-consuming personal dialogue with one of your service employees
3. Receive support: If your product breaks down at the weekend or a user needs support late at night, there is often no service and support hotline available. In many cases, the customer portal can provide up-to-date 24/7 first aid with chatbots and tutorials.
4. Contract management: If your customers want to change personal data or their contract, they can do this quickly themselves - without using your employee resources.
5. Customer communication: With mobile customer portal apps, you gain a new channel for contacting your customers directly via push notifications. They receive a high level of attention, which they can use to build customer loyalty. For example, you could send reminders about important contract deadlines or provide information about usage behaviour.

Whether configured standard software or customised solutions: there are huge differences in the quality of customer portals. What should a customer portal achieve today? If you bring us on board, you can be sure that your portal will excel in at least the following five dimensions.

• Self-service basics: Your customers want quick answers. Customer portals therefore need to be available around the clock and solve even complex issues at the touch of a button. In 24/7 customer service, AI chatbots often develop into game changers. In addition to high-performance technology, an intuitive interface determines whether your customers are frustrated by your portal or become fans.
• Integration of different systems: In customer portal development, you need to ensure that existing systems and technologies interact seamlessly with the platform. Your portal must be able to access data from different sources and synchronise it in real time. This is the only way to realise far-reaching self-services and a first-class user experience for your customers. For your company, the depth of integration increases the efficiency of data management, as many manual data transfers can be eliminated. In addition, well thought-out data integration makes it easier to display personalised content, which is essential for successful customer loyalty.
• Consistent, intuitive customer experience: Whether via desktop, smartphone or another device - your users should be able to access your customer portal via various digital channels and find their way around the platform intuitively. The design and function must be as consistent as possible. Navigation is a particularly important element that determines your customers' satisfaction with your portal. Users need to find the information or service they are looking for quickly and without any detours. A well thought-out user experience not only increases the efficiency of your customer portal, it also strengthens users' trust in your brand.
• Optimised customer onboarding: If the UX is strategically considered during customer portal development, comprehensive 1:1 onboarding is no longer necessary. Depending on the complexity of the functions offered, individual questions may arise. Your customers should find answers to these in a help section or via chat bot. Interactive tutorials are particularly effective. The short videos can not only help your customers to solve their initial problems, but also show them how to utilise the benefits of your portal for themselves - and thus encourage regular use.
• Updating and further development: Information in the customer portal must be up to date, otherwise your offering will lose trust and cause more harm than good. In addition to the information, the technological basis must also be regularly checked and updated to ensure the security of the data and the performance of the portal. Last but not least, your company should analyse the use of the customer portal and monitor the market in order to regularly provide your customers with new, improved functions and to be remembered as the best provider.

An individualised approach is crucial in customer portal development, as every company has different requirements and goals. What should always take priority, however, is the involvement of all relevant stakeholders. This is the only way to ensure that your customer portal achieves the expected effects and is supported internally. Sales and support teams, for example, are the best source for gaining insights into customer wishes and concerns and for customising the functionality of the portal. The IT team, on the other hand, is the number one point of contact for scrutinising the technical feasibility of ideas and requests. The team also plays a central role in the planning of operation and further development.

The introduction of a customer portal changes the work in many areas of the company. Customer support has to invest less time in answering simple administrative enquiries and instead focuses on processing complex customer enquiries as well as maintaining the content used for the chatbot and knowledge database. The IT department has to maintain the customer portal and familiarise itself with new technologies for data analytics and chatbots. The way the marketing team works is also changing: They gain a new channel for addressing customers and can use data analyses to gather information to make campaigns more effective. The same applies to sales: sales employees can address customers more effectively with the help of usage data from the portal and achieve more new deals with less effort.

The latest generation of AI chatbots are revolutionising customer interaction. They are able to communicate with customers in natural language, answer simple questions immediately or forward complex requests to human employees. AI chatbots can also be used as a guide to a desired function in the customer portal. AI has vastly improved the quality of chatbots in recent years. As AI applications also learn with every customer interaction, they are becoming better and better assistants that noticeably relieve the burden on ticket systems and hotlines.

We work flexibly with a variety of technologies. Our strength is the development of customised customer portals. However, we also take on the individualisation of standard software if this is technically possible and makes sense in order to achieve the desired result. Let us talk about your plans in a non-binding consultation.

Simple customer portals that customers can use to change their master data and retrieve invoices can sometimes go live within a few weeks. Comprehensive customer portals that change all areas of the customer journey usually take several months to realise. Thanks to our agile approach, you can always offer your customers an initial portal version quickly and then gradually expand it.