Blog

The Missing Portal!

September 21, 2017|LB Networks

Customer Experience is key to generating positive cash flow in the service provider industry. Consider all the costs to acquire a customer:

  • Sales expenses
  • Marketing and advertising
  • Capital for construction and technology
  • Off-net negotiations
  • Contracts
  • Time and much more.

Add to this the competitive and consumer landscape we work in today:

  • Your business customers are getting bombarded at every turn by an evolving landscape of competitors, alternative providers, hosting and cloud service companies.
  • “It takes 10 good customer references to make up for one bad mention.” In our world of social media, forums, review sites, it doesn’t take much to get the word out about you, good or bad.

Customers expectations are on the rise. You need the tools to improve CX through a comprehensive, intuitive and integrative customer portal, a portal that provides fast and easy optimized views of service delivery. Easily track key CX through service performance metrics and you will see the hard dollar payback for these actions in just months. Consider this:

THE MISSING PORTAL

If you’re like most carriers you already have multiple portals:

  1. A billing portal: Transport providers have been providing portals for clients to log on and review invoices, taxes, and make payments.
  2. A marketing portal: Marketing portals serve as a great place to talk about what makes you different – everything from products to customer support.
  3. A ticket portal: This system makes it easy for customers to log issues, open trouble tickets and ask questions enabling your service team to follow up.

A recent Forrester report stated that over 80% of business customers prefer to access a web portal for their interaction with a business partner. Marketing, billing and ticket portals provide a lot of data but are missing the item customers value most – how is my service performing?

That’s where OcularIP comes in. With OcularIP you can provide real-time, end-to-end circuit and service visibility. And with its 340 connectors and Performance Connect™ APIs, you can quickly and easily integrate a service level portal into your strategy.

OcularIP will:

  • Improve customer satisfaction
  • Increase sales to your most profitable customers
  • Differentiate your company to attract new customers
  • Reduce real operating expenses.

through enabling your organization to easily provide the following :

  • A flexible customer facing service portal
  • Seamless Integration
  • Client Self-Subscription
  • Optimized, Accurate and Automated Reporting
  • On-Demand Bandwidth Request and Ordering
  • Private Branding
  • Convenient Custom Notifications

INTEGRATE WITH YOUR ARCHITECTURE

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.

With Ocular IP and Performance Connect, it’s easy to integrate a service level portal with your current portal and web strategy and make it seamless for the customer. OcularIP offers:

  • Single-Sign-On (SSO): Your users can login with the same ID and pass- word they use for all your other portals. This integration with your IDM and other applications allows customers to bypass the complexities of dissimilar login and authentication.
  • Private Branding Plus™: OcularIP makes it easy to incorporate your brand and graphics (your logo, colors, fonts and general look and feel), so customers don’t realize they’re on a different portal.

“It is intuitive, easy to integrate and affordable, providing down to the second reporting and an operating interface that makes implementation painless.”

Connectivity is the lifeblood of you clients company. As a provider, you need to provide customers with a portal to see their service status, usage, any changes and to troubleshoot any performance issues. In addition to above, customer portals can have a big impact on your business as a transport provider. Offering a customer portal can:

  1. Reduce the number of trouble tickets you receive – Clients recognize 17% reduction
  2. Reduce the number of calls to your customer care center
  3. Reduce your service costs and overall operational costs
  4. Improve your customer satisfaction ratings; reduce churn
  5. Increase sales – customers can order bandwidth on demand
  6. Set you apart from your competitors

Think about it: If your customer doesn’t know that you are not at fault, they may assume you are. A customer portal allows you to provide proof of your service delivery and that you care about their needs. Even when issues occur, custom notifications within the portal let your customers know you are aware of the problem and are 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 use and supporting their purchase from you
  • 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 internal infrastructure, networks or even other providers

“OcularIP has many exclusive features that significantly improve a carrier’s ability to manage Ethernet and IP net- works. In fact, analysis shows a return on investment of over 170% based on savings achieved using OcularIP in a carrier Ethernet environment.”

Consider what your top customers would say if you told them they would soon have access to a customer portal to see all of their activity, to trouble- shoot and to pull reports. Do you think it would make them a more loyal and engaged customer? If so, OcularIP is the solution you need.