A great addition to any CRM is a self-service customer portal. These systems are relatively common – the client goes to your website, sees a link to Login, and once logged in can navigate a variety of information reserved just for your clients. That info may relate to all your clients – such as an FAQ list, or Knowledge Base. Or it may be specific to them, presenting their history (from the data inside your CRM) of customer support cases, quotes, invoices, projects, and so on – as well as allowing them to add new data.

It’s fair to ask – if your CRM system is supposed to be about Customer Relationships, then how can that possibly be true if only employees can use it? Customer portals are about making your customer relationships a two-way street, as they should be.

For 1CRM the customer self-service portal is a product called the 1CRM Customer Connection, and it is supplied as a plug-in for WordPress.

Because 1CRM is an All in One CRM and contains not just sales and marketing type information, but also customer service, project management and order management data, it enables the portal to interact with the client on this much wider range of topics.

The usual CRM would have a portal which offers the client:

• FAQs
• A navigable and searchable knowledge base
• The ability to update their own contact information within your CRM

The 1CRM Customer Connection does all of that, but adds:

• View, download and approve quotes
• View and download current or past invoices, and even pay outstanding invoices
• View current Projects, and examine progress on each project task. Also upload and download notes and file attachments to exchange project information
• View current and past service cases, and add notes to cases.
• The ability to make GDPR-compliant data requests, such as viewing all personal data or requesting its removal

(You can see these capabilities illustrated in images included in the section below.)

A customer portal lets your clients share with you a subset of CRM data that relates to them. More types of data in the CRM results in a broader number of ways your clients can interact with you via the portal. This results in improved customer satisfaction and retention, as well as reducing support costs for your organization and the workload on your administrative staff. What’s not to like?

Looking for more information? Read our Ultimate Guide to All In One CRM Solutions.

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