If you are willing to build a long-term relationship with your customer, the right thing for you to do is have your own B2C customer portal. Buying services would bring repetitiveness and that would be of no use.
Now, to run your portal efficiently, you need have a proper design that would lead to customer satisfaction and will also bring savings for your business. Now service providers have their own specifics. Outside the box custom portal software is often crushed by custom built portal solutions, provided by the service providers.
Let us ask ourselves three questions about having a Custom B2C portal.
What Makes a Portal Convenient?
The interaction with a customer has to be very effective. So, your B2C portal has to be very familiar with the customer, so that their expectations won’t go in vain and that also raises the level of provider’s competitiveness. To crack the competition, the provider has to offer things that no one else has yet to offer and make the best use of social networking websites to have active promotions.
The portal itself has to be very convenient and also helpful to meet the customer’s level of expectations and make sure the service is such that there shouldn’t be any need for them to call up the customer care.
According a to report provided by Nielsen, it is crucial to have simplified navigation system, updates should be quite frequent, should take less time for things download and also provide quality content to have a seamless user experience.
Now, let us chunk down the functions in detail to have a convenient portal by the above given usability dimensions.
Catalogue with Gestalt Principles
You surely want your search functionality to be pretty strong. Adding the must have products or highly recommended products in your search bar, works well the customer psychology. You can organise your portal on Gestalt principles and with an apt design of the given service catalogue, customers get attracted to the things that you have to offer.
Try and put your services in categories that are separated by whitespace, which in result will provide customers with a rapid scanning of products and also improve their experience. You need to organise your list of items in such a way that each category in which they exist should maintain their relations. Ecommerce Development Specialists are always hard at work for users to understand about B2C customer portal and how to be successful in making one.
Order Placement and Effective Management
You have to make sure that, your users have a satisfactory experience and for that the journey between “Buy now” to “Greetings” must be without any hassles. Your self service feature has to have an advanced order placement option, such as custom services and an effective service management.
Make sure your user can review about their experience from their personal account. Make the services more flexible, by adding the ability to make any changes to the service, and also well inform your customers about it, at any time of the day.
Payment Options
Any transactions that happen via B2C portal become more fluid if it offers various payment options. Your payment by default would’ve payment options via debit card or credit card, by try incorporating points system or providing the users with gift cards to have a better ratio of purchases.
Better Support System
You should be there when your customer needs you the most. They should have an easy and less time consuming access to your customer care support. Your custom portal has to have enough flexibility for your customers to get quick response and resolve their queries.
To increase the level of interactivity, provide them with Live Chat or Quick Call options. Allow your customers to put up reviews and be responsive enough to make them feel satisfied with your portal.
How About a Mobile Application?
Mobile devices have had huge impact upon us over the course of time. Reports suggest that 79% of users would have a positive impact if the service provider offers a dedicated mobile app for customer support. In general, many of the customers also prefer using mobile app to contact customer care support.
The better option here is to have a free app for your customer portal. This will make your app to be easy to access and also flexible enough for them to use anywhere and anytime. Your app needs to be on every mobile platform and avoid being exclusive to a certain platform. Your app must be easy view on any given mobile screen, making the customers feel satisfied with your portal. Make things simple and not complicated, your menu must offer easy to use features and make sure they (your customer) get the same experience as your web version.
Your app has to perform accordingly to the potential of each device; you can add extra features like barcode scanner or take picture instantly depending on the capability of the device. Try and add customisable notifications, which will help the customer get notified each time a new product or feature comes out or get notified if some changes are made to the services.
Is Integrating CRM a Better Option?
If you integrate your customer portal with CRM, you are likely to gather more customer data and also avoid slow data processing time, which in result will help you build a better reputation among your customer base.
CRM will automatically update the customer’s profile and gather the required data for you. CRM will help you understand how customers are buying things, and give you detailed insight and help you ease down the interaction between you and your customer.
Consider having a system that logins to your portal providing you with tools that would help you track down your regular customers and the customers, who never came back. You can offer them more of a personalised service by tracking their purchase history.
Now, to sum it up, B2C customer portal is a power tool to reduce the costs and build a large and satisfactory customer base. Custom solutions will provide you with satisfactory results rather than outside the box solutions. Ecommerce Development Experts also provide strategies for you to make your own B2C Portal.
