Customer experience is key to your business and customer portals are a crucial way to achieve that competitive advantage. Increasingly, customers prefer to complete transactions themselves via the Internet–whenever and wherever they want–rather than having to make a call or waiting on a service provider. In fact, the market for performance portals has been growing at nearly 300% annually worldwide.
The Importance of Customer Portals
Think about how many customer portals you encounter in your everyday life:
- Curious about your phone bill? You can log in to your wireless carrier’s portal and see what everyone in your family has used, down to the minute.
- Want to make sure your car is in top shape? Log in to your new car’s portal and check every detail on your vehicle’s performance.
- Keeping an eye on energy savings? Login in to your energy provider’s website and see how much energy you’ve used this month and compare it to your previous usage.
Now think about how much money companies spend on connectivity with you as a transport provider. It makes your everyday spending seem trivial. If they’re not able to login and see up-to-date information, they are likely frustrated.
Connectivity is the lifeblood of their company. As a wireline provider, you need to provide customers with the ability to login to a portal to see their usage, any changes and to troubleshoot any performance issues.
The Impact of Customer Portals
Beyond the obvious reasons, customer portals can have a big impact on your business as a transport provider. Using a customer portal can:
- Reduce the number of trouble tickets you receive
- Reduce the number of calls your customer care center gets
- Reduce your service costs and overall operational costs
- Improve your customer satisfaction ratings; reducing churn
- Increase sales – customers can order bandwidth on demand
- Set you apart from your competitors
Think about it: If your customer doesn’t know that you are not at fault, they will likely assume you are. A customer portal allows you to provide proof that you have done everything correctly and care about their needs. Even when issues occur, custom notifications within the portal let your customers know you are aware of the problem and working to resolve it.
Why Your Customers Will Love a Customer Portal
Your customers will appreciate and take full advantage of your customer portal. With a customer portal they can:
- Review what they bought, what they used and what the costs mean
- Troubleshoot their circuits from one central location
- Reduce the number of variables for technicians to deal with
- Quickly realize if the issue is occurring somewhere else, allowing them to check their server or internal networks or even other providers
OcularIP™: The Leading Customer Portal
OcularIP™ is the industry’s leading customer portal. It has many exclusive features that significantly improve a carrier’s ability to manage Ethernet and IP networks. In fact, analysis shows a return on investment of over 170% based on savings achieved using OcularIP in a carrier Ethernet environment. Contact us to sign up today.