The 6 Challenges to Overcome when Implementing Client Portals

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A client portal is a private hub where customers can access information, personal data, account settings, and support tickets. It requires a secure login before the client can complete transactions, use self-service support, and manage their communication with your company.

Many businesses provide a client portal so customers can have access to their information without reaching out to a support agent. It helps to increase customer satisfaction, improve agent productivity, and reduce support costs. It’s also great for collecting insights on customer behaviors.

In this article, we’ll discuss the challenges that come with finding and implementing efficient client portal software.

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The challenges of implementing client portals and provide solutions for a smooth transition

It’s only possible to benefit from a good customer portal. If the platform is buggy, your customers would feel frustrated and disappointed. Such issues can lead to more support tickets and also increase agent workload. The best way is to learn the potential challenges and tackle them upfront. Let’s look at certain pitfalls associated with client portals:

Challenge 1: Finding the right client portal software to match the needs of your business.

When trying to create a customer portal, you need to have a well-defined plan and design. You’ll determine the pain points to address, the goals and objectives, resources and workflows to include, and how it helps all client personas.

It’s also necessary to choose a preferred site architecture and navigation design. Then, you can select the features that allow for communication with agents, self-service support, and real-time collaboration with team members.

A good plan helps to make informed research on vendors and compare their features or design. Make sure to check other important stuff like customisation, accessibility, security protocols, compliance, on-premises vs SaaS, etc.

Challenge 2: Integrating with other business systems. Customer data can be lost, duplicated or corrupted.

It’s necessary to connect the client portal to other business systems for real-time data transfers and updates. But you can experience integration issues such as lost records, data mismatches, inaccurate data, and duplicate entries.

To ensure accurate and secure data transfer, you need to consider customer portal vendors that offer automated integration and compatibility with your current systems. It allows you to set up and move data without any hassle.

There may be cases when your IT team needs to set up the data integration manually. They can build connectors and data flows as well as map data inputs and outputs. Then, test and verify the workflows to ensure accuracy.

Challenge 3: Data security concerns.

Digital platforms are vulnerable to data breaches, cyber-attacks, and hacking. It’s important to safeguard company data as well as ensure the protection of your customers. You should be careful when implementing a client portal.

It’s possible to address these concerns by selecting a portal software that meets industry standards for security. The software needs to have strong security protocols such as firewalls, encryption, and two-factor authentication.

The software provider should also conduct regular security audits to detect and remove any loopholes in the system. They need to be transparent about their procedures and provide frequent communication about security updates.

Challenge 4: Lack of personalization.

Some software vendors tend to provide a one-size-fits-all client portal application. This means you can’t customize design and features according to your brand’s needs. It’s quite difficult and inefficient to use such a generic platform.

You may create a custom solution from scratch or simply

consider customisable software that aligns with your unique business requirements. This allows you to build a client portal with great features, design, and architecture.

Another option is to choose a niche software vendor who provides client portals for certain niches or industries. This means you’ll use a platform that’s tailored to your kind of business and includes the necessary functionality.

Challenge 5: Ineffective training

Some employees may be reluctant to switch software and adjust to new internal workflows. You should educate them on the benefits of using a client portal and how it helps to automate several tasks as well as boost work efficiency.

Employees such as support reps, account managers, and sales reps should learn to use the system well. This allows them to manage customer interactions quickly and easily. IT support should also know how to troubleshoot issues.

You can provide resources and organise training sessions to explain how your staff can perform their tasks. e.g. adding and updating customer information, replying to and resolving support tickets, adding help articles, and more.

Challenge 6: Teething problems

A customer portal needs to be intuitive, user friendly and offer a smooth experience. Any technical glitches should be detected and fixed almost immediately. If not, you’ll notice that customers aren’t using the platform anymore.

The first step is to choose a client portal software with good features, high ratings, and positive reviews. Their customer support needs to be available and offer timely support. This would help to resolve any problems quickly.

You also need to test the platform thoroughly before letting customers on it. It’s important to check for unresponsive features, system lagging, and problems that may arise. With user testing, you can detect issues before launching.

Conclusion

Client portals are a great way to empower your customers with a dedicated hub where they manage everything. You can improve customer experience and automate customer service activities with the platform. However, it’s necessary to address any potential challenges that may occur during the implementation process. Planning helps to ensure seamless integration, data security, and customisation.

Author Profile

Manuela WillboldOnline Media & PR Strategist

Blogger and Educator by Passion | Senior Online Media & PR Strategist at ClickDo Ltd. | Contributor to many Education, Business & Lifestyle Blogs in the United Kingdom & Germany | Summer Course Student at the London School of Journalism and Course Instructor at the SeekaHost University.