5 Reasons a Customer Portal Will Boost Your Sales Revenue
Are you looking at ways of growing your sales revenue? A customer portal might be the way forward.
Customer portals are often seen as ways of simply providing better customer service, but that is just the beginning. The future of B2B sales and service is continually changing but one trend is clear to see, B2B buyers are demanding digital, self-serve platforms. Businesses that don’t provide one are potentially missing out on a huge amount of revenue and also risk losing customers to competition.
Direct sales, through a customer portal, are the most obvious but certainly not the only ways in which a portal can reinforce an organisation’s growth strategy. Here are just 5 we have come up with:
- Increase customer engagement.
B2B customers have never had more options or were more likely to move between suppliers. This has significantly increased the importance of regular engagement with customers in order to ensure that organisations secure and strengthen a customer’s loyalty.
A customer portal allows customers to access a spectrum of services from a company, when they want, how they want and anywhere they want. Whether it is machine documentation, training articles or tracking their orders, the customer portal allows and encourages these with much more frequency than a member of your team can. The benefit? Increased engagement and thus, increased opportunities to conduct business. - Improve customer service.
A customer portal provides the ability to streamline, speed up and dramatically improve customer service. By providing self-serve options, knowledge bases and easy-to-use service request forms, support to customers can be very efficiently optimised.
Improving customer service leads to happy customers and happy customers are much more likely to continue, and perhaps increase, their business. - Increase sales.
A customer portal is a perfect way to inform, feed and grow an organisation’s sales funnel. Analytics of how a customer uses their portal can inform personalised recommendations whilst certain portals have the ability to present interactive and engaging sales material which can increase the chance of securing a sale.
Another way in which sales can be increased is simply by increasing the convenience of ordering products and parts. Premium customer portal solutions offer spare parts ordering modules that replicate the convenience and ease seen in B2C purchasing. Displaying previous purchase history and easy re-ordering features can also support high sales growth. - Maximise upselling and Cross-selling.
Selling is not always easy and requires personal skills that many staff unfortunately lack. A customer portal can support and take on a large proportion of this work. By providing information about related products and associated parts, customer portals make it quick and easy for customers to add additional products to their order. - Improve understanding.
Analysing the way in which customers use a portal can assist in developing and improving marketing and sales strategies. Having a significantly better understanding of customer’s behaviour and interests allows organisations to remain one step ahead of the market and ensure they are ready to evolve with the needs of their customers.