Companies that offer products and services often face a number of common problems regarding communication with clients through portals and customer zones. In this series, we will share our experiences with you as to solving these problems and increasing traffic to the portal, as well as the comfort and satisfaction of visitors.
7 ways to improve the customer zone (1/3)
1. PROMOTE!
One simple reason why a customer does not visit your portal or take advantage of self-service might be that they simply do not know about it. Therefore, take every opportunity to lead them to the portal. If you communicate via e-mail or SMS, do not forget to add a message to the tune of “You can solve this matter easily and quickly in our customer zone” with a direct link, ideally directly to a specific area of interest (not just the homepage).
Of course, it’s a good idea to promote the portal wherever possible: on the web, social networks, in the media – and don’t be afraid to mention it in your printed materials.
An effective solution on how to get the customer to work with the portal from the beginning is to offer it immediately upon ordering the service. This way, you guide the customer to the portal the procedure for activating. This functionality can convince the customer that this is the right place to turn for help.
2. Make access as easy as possible
Nothing discourages a client from using the portal more than a complicated registration and login process. There are several best practices to facilitate both of these steps.
Registration: EMAIL, password, and that’s it
In the first step, it is usually not necessary to ask for more than that. Help your client create a secure password; you can use either a real-time password strength indicator, or a set of validations (numbers, letters, characters, at least one capital letter). But again, beware – overly strict measures can discourage registration. Human attention-span and patience on the internet is quite fickle.
If you really need additional information for your services, think about whether you could request this after they log in to the customer zone.
One-click login
The whole process can be made even easier by using the logins of social networks or web service providers. If you allow login with a Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Apple identity, you will almost certainly reach the vast majority of your customers. In addition to a single-click login, the identity provider will take care of its security, so you don’t have to.
And a brief look into the future: it should soon be possible to start using even a banking identity, which will speed up even more processes.
You can look forward to more tips soon, to be continued
