Choosing the right Client Portal Software is Hard
Every business is different. That’s why we’re here to help you find the best client portal solution to match your specific needs.
What is a Client Portal?
A client portal is the center of your customer experience and the home for your organization’s secured files, billing, CRM, forms, knowledgebase, project management, and more. Accessible via browser or mobile app, these portals create secure applications that customers can login to and view all pertinent information in one place. As such, making the choice of what product to use is an important decision – your entire business can be built around it.
We're here to
make life easier
Rather than spending hours searching for the right tool, we’ve done the hard work for you and created a list of best practices and guides so that you can get up and running in no time.
Why use a client portal?
Years ago, email was the primary source of communication between businesses and their customers, but let’s face it: email just isn’t secure. Easily intercepted and read by bad-actors, email is no longer the king of customer communication. Using email, a customer has to request any information they might want to know relating to their interactions with the company, but a client portal allows them to serve themself. With 24/7 availability, you can leave project updates, files, tasks, and more in each client’s account for them to access when it’s convenient – meaning you no longer have to suffer through late night texts and frantic phone calls asking where some important document is.
When you offer one, singular source of truth for your clients to reference you can kiss lost and missing emails goodbye forever. Why suffer through reminding clients to check their spam when you can say hello to a completely integrated messaging system that you can sync to recent activity in their account? Collaboration gets easier than ever as well, with the ability to keep your team up to date in real time with a shared CRM that includes quick reference information about the client including contact information, address, company details and more.
One of the most valuable things your company has is a replicable system and with a client portal you can automate as many of the boring and repetitive steps of that system as possible. It’s a win – win, you save time collecting information from customers and look super professional with a streamlined on-boarding process.
When it comes time to collect payment, your client portal has got you there too. Create, send, and accept payments on invoices with just the click of a button. Next time your client reaches out to request the balance of their invoice, any member of the team can easily check and direct them to their self-service portal for future reference.
Find the right Client
Portal for your Industry
All client portal tools have different features and functionalities to suit every industry’s different needs. We compare the top tools in the market so you can find the perfect one for your niche.
How can a Client Portal help me?
There are many companies that provide tools allowing you to support your customers throughout the client lifecycle, but an integrated client portal solution will seamlessly allow you to coordinate all aspects of your business in one tool. Whether your company is B2B, B2C, or both, a client portal has got you covered.
Sales and Marketing
Consistently generating new customers is a critical task for your business and shouldn’t be an afterthought in your software stack. You can be sure to support your team by picking a client portal tool that keeps your employees focused with deal stage tracking, offering the ability to quickly see your leads and how far along they are at a glance. For your more difficult opportunities, take advantage of automation to send drip campaigns with meaningful and relevant information to remind them of the value you can provide.
When it comes time to pitch, stand out from the competition with 100% branded digital proposals to wow customers with a detailed plan for their purchase, and seamlessly convert that proposal to a contract the second they’re ready to say yes. Keep things moving by providing clear paths to completion for customers and let your sales team focus on closing deals, not administrative tasks.
Onboarding
Great! You’ve just closed the deal and everyone is eager to begin… now what? Your team can now begin the standardized onboarding process with just a few clicks. To the customer you look organized, experienced, and capable with a defined set of tasks for them to accomplish as soon as they login and the team will appreciate not having to follow up with a client for the 37th time to send in their information. You can even create multiple sets of sequences for all of your different project types! The more menial tasks you can offload to the portal, the better, as every moment saved is an opportunity to scale your business while lowering costs.
Education
For businesses that require education of their customer before being able to proceed, a client portal makes a perfect tool for centralizing information and tracking progress. Using custom pages and even a Learning Management System (LMS) you can bring customers up to speed in no time on your products and services, all while ensuring that sensitive information is secured from curious competitors and window shoppers.
Relationship Management
Everyone loves those magical experiences with customer service where it seems like no matter who you communicate with, they’re always up to speed with your interactions with the company. Delight customers with synced customer relationship management, allowing your team to record calls, emails, meetings, and other interactions with every client – so no matter who picks up the phone, you can provide personalized and professional service in the blink of an eye.
Client Servicing
Now it’s time to get down to business. You have the client, their information, and everything you need to get started. With integrated project and file management, you can organize tasks, files, and updates in a centralized location. Just as with onboarding, you can create templates here to simplify setup for your employees and keep projects on track. For companies that offer more bespoke services, every step of the process can be customized for each client to keep your team up to speed on the intricacies of the project.
Examples are worth
a Thousand words
Instead of just writing about it, we’ve created example workflows and content from other businesses that use their client portal to maintain customer relationships.
What essential features do I need?
White-Label
When you invite your customers to log in to their portal your branding should be front and center, not someone else’s. Look for tools that allow you to customize logos, colors, domain, and even menus. Putting your domain at subdomain.yoursite.com goes a long way in building trust with your clients and looking professional. More advanced portals even allow you to customize the nomenclature used throughout the platform. Want to call forms surveys? No problem, there’s a solution for that.
Secure File Storage
One of the biggest arguments for using a client portal over email (or as a supplement) is because email just isn’t secure by default. In this day and age, you can’t afford to have a data breach, so selecting a trusted client portal solution with secured file storage is a must to protect both your customers and yourself.
Billing
Why struggle and wait for your customers to receive your invoices in the mail when you can provide them with a convenient portal to pay their invoices with? Leading solutions allow you to set up automated reminders as well so you can sit back and wait for the money to roll in. After payment, customers can refer to their billing center for receipts and past invoices for accounting purposes – no more emails asking for a copy of their old invoice.
Customer Relationship Management
While you could use a dedicated CRM that is separate from your client portal, many companies benefit greatly from selecting an all-in-one solution. Having quick and organized access to customer details, files, and interaction history is critical to providing delightful customer support.
Secure Forms
Need your customers to fill out questionnaires full of the same information each time? You can offload this information gathering exercise to your portal and allow customers to submit the information on their own time, rather than requiring tedious in-person meetings or phone calls.