What is Salesforce all About?
Salesforce is the leading CRM on the planet and it’s the first choice for over 150,000 companies including big players like Amazon, Spotify, American Express, Toyota, and the New York Post. CRM is short for “Customer Relationship Management” and covers all the Sales, Service, and Marketing interactions organizations have with customers. These customers can fall under B2B, B2C, B2B2C, or any other eCommerce type. In this article, we look at why you should integrate Titan Web Customer portals with Salesforce and how this benefits your business.
First up, we take a look at the context around customer portal software for Salesforce and the needs it fulfills for the Salesforce community and beyond. After this, we explain what a customer portal for Salesforce is and some benefits of customer portals for Salesforce. Finally, we check out some of the limitations of portals for Salesforce and how Titan Web integrates seamlessly with Salesforce to solve some of the CRM giant’s biggest pain points. Keep reading to find out more!
Customer Portal Software for Salesforce: What Needs Does it Fulfill?
The Salesforce CRM is an internal system used for managing processes within an organization. This means Salesforce users are typically employees, technicians, field technicians, and sales representatives of a particular company.
But what if your organization wants to open up Salesforce to customers and partners to enhance the user experience? This is where Salesforce portals can provide powerful self-service options and give customers the ability to interact directly with your Salesforce processes.
Previously, you could create a Salesforce portal using communities and you can now do so via Experience Cloud. Customer portal software from Salesforce has the power to transform your organization, boost customer satisfaction, and ease the burden on your support team!
What is a Customer Portal for Salesforce?
Data shows that both Gen Z and Millennials prefer self-service options when it comes to almost every customer experience from support requests to placing orders, and even banking. Nowadays no one wants to enter a store to get their case resolved or stand in a boring queue to receive feedback from customer support. It’s way easier to handle these issues online and Salesforce self-service portals for customers make this seamless.
Using Salesforce Experience Cloud, you can build self-service portals to give customers the freedom and flexibility to handle their requests 24/7. Customers can raise tickets via the Service Cloud and create orders in the Sales Cloud. They can also solve their burning questions fast by drawing on a range of personalized resources such as FAQs and how-to guides.
Every interaction in your self-service portal is dynamically integrated into Salesforce to give your company a 360-degree view of your clients. As your Salesforce is extended and your circle expands, customers get instant support at their fingertips while your organization reaps the benefits of gaining individualized insight into customer preferences.
Salesforce Customer Portal Benefits
Customer portals in Salesforce have a range of benefits including the following:
- Real time access to Customer 360 data
- Knowledge Base for customers
- Personalized resources
- Customers can automatically raise support tickets
- Customers can update their account info and manage their billing details
- Payments can be made quickly and securely
- Orders can be tracked at any time of the day or night in a few minutes
- Customers get a personalized journey with the help of Salesforce that provides unique insight into each individual user
Do Salesforce Customer Portals have any Limitations?
So far, we have discussed how Salesforce portals for customers can open up a world of possibilities. Via personalized portals, customers can more easily interact with your organization and also become part of your Salesforce processes. But nothing is perfect, right? So do portals built with Salesforce tools have any limitations? And how do you overcome them?
One limitation of Salesforce is that creating branded and well-designed websites for unique user experiences isn’t easy without development. Sure you can change the colors and surface-level branding but you will still be stuck with the Salesforce UI. The same goes for catering to different use cases and company onboarding programs. The ability to fully customize your portal and make it accessible across different device types, like Desktop or Mobile is not possible with Salesforce’s out-of-the-box options and you will need to invest in dev work. This slows down go-to-market and can ramp up costs. So what are your options?
Create a Customer Portal Integrated with your CRM
Given the limitations of Salesforce native solutions for building customer portals, we suggest you visit the AppExchange and choose a third-party tool.
A short visit to the Salesforce AppExchange will tell you that there are several powerful and adaptable tools designed to extend the Salesforce experience and that can help you overcome some of its limitations. These apps are all recognized to effectively integrate with the #1 CRM and many aim to make it more user-friendly by providing no-code options to speed up G2M.
When shopping around for the right platform to create customer portals fully integrated with Salesforce, we suggest the following criteria should be met:
- The platform should be able to create dynamic pages
- Have robust design tools that allow you to brand your portal without any code or CSS
- Mobile-first approach
- Custom UX per device type will allow you to give the best user experience to your customers
- Bi-directional integration with Salesforce in real-time
- Identification process using data saved in Salesforce
- Offline capabilities
- Generate documents and sign them from within the portal
- Create customized profiles for customers
- Fully secured and compliant with leading regulatory frameworks like GDPR, SOC 2, and HIPAA
Not many tools on the market have all the above capabilities for developing custom web apps and portals but we can vouch that the Titan platform does. Titan has made it their mission to provide intuitive no-code solutions to users both in and out of Salesforce. This solution will empower you to create branded and personalized websites for any use case using no-code. One of the special features of Titan’s codeless web tools is the ability to fast-track time-to-market so you can create customer portals 70% faster and with none of the hidden costs.
Final Thoughts & The Future of Salesforce Customer Portals
The biggest benefit that a Salesforce portal offers your business is the ability to include customers in your CRM by inviting them to be part of your organizational processes. This enables you to work collaboratively and to ensure that everyone has access to the same data at every touchpoint along the way. It also gives your company the power to provide personalized and streamlined support.
So what’s the next step for Salesforce customer portals? Well, we think that in the future they will probably involve greater incorporation of bots and AI while providing even more personalization. We can’t wait to see how this technology develops and the future innovations it brings.