Creating new customer portals will make it easy for your customers to understand and access your services. Engaging and satisfying your customers help you remain competitive in your market. A customer portal should always be intuitive, personalized, and adaptable. There is plenty of “out-of-the-box” customer portal software out there, but ask yourself: Do I really want to look exactly like my competition? (No. No, you do not.)
Customer Portal Software Improves Satisfaction
Many of our clients handle the administration of millions of accounts and participants. While their business models vary wildly, they have one main thing in common: They have all been able to innovate their practices quickly to keep up with their respective markets by utilizing customer portals with custom integrations that could be adapted to their unique customer needs, their processes, and their most important data.
One of the great benefits of having an integrated customer portal is that you can tailor the content to the information relevant to each customer.
Some common uses of a customer portal include:
- Creating and tracking support tickets
- Managing purchase orders
- Tracking order deliveries
- Sharing policies and documents
- Looking up invoices and quotes
- Sharing detailed FAQ information
Customer portal access allows customers to be more involved with your business and plays an important role in helping to retain them long term. Consumers have proven a desire for self-service when it is most convenient, rather than reliance on an associate who may or may not be available at the time the customer needs. In fact, approximately 70% of customers today expect self-service applications on a company website.
With that, here is a list of our faves for most popular and/or most valuable CX Portal integrations:
Top 10 CX Portal Integrations for Ultimate Customer Satisfaction
1. Salesforce Integration
Salesforce integration for Web-to-Lead form generation is likely the most popular application to integrate, and for good reason. This simple but powerful integration allows you to build forms within Salesforce and specify the fields for the exact data you want to collect. All submissions are populated directly into Salesforce for your team to follow up on, qualify, and add to your future marketing.
Salesforce integration allows you to be sure your organization is working with the most up-to-date information across the board, and know your data is all in one place. This gives you the ability to prevent multiple people from contacting the same lead, as well as utilize email marketing best practices to maximize the conversion rates on your sales and marketing efforts.
2. Google Single Sign On (SAML) Integration
Single sign-on (SSO) is an authentication method that enables users to authenticate securely with multiple applications and/or sites by using one set of credentials in a session. SSO works based upon a trusted relationship set up between an application (or service provider), and an identity provider (OAuth 2.0/OpenID/SAML). In SSO, the trusted identity data takes the form of tokens, or segments of secure code which contain identifying bits of information about the user like a user’s email address or a username.
A Note on SSO vs. Password Vaulting:
There is a difference between Single Sign-On and password vaulting/password managers. These are sometimes referred to as SSO which can mean “The same Sign-on”, and this can be confusing as a website owner. The password vaulting system is simply storing your credentials for all the different applications and populating them when needed. The user must confirm the populated sign-on with each sign-on instance, and there is no trust relationship between the applications and the password vault.
With Single Sign-On, once you are logged into the portal, you can access all company-approved applications and websites without having to log in or confirm login each time. This includes cloud applications as well as on-premises (local-server) applications, often available through your custom login portal.
3. Stripe Integration
The Stripe Customer portal integration is one of the simplest ways to offer your customers secure subscription and billing management functionality.
Your customers can manage their own subscriptions and billing details including:
- Upgrading, downgrading, and changing their subscription quantity.
- Subscription cancellation, immediately or at the end of a billing period.
- Pause subscriptions, for a specified period, and resume when desired.
- View active subscriptions.
- View invoice history and download invoices.
- Update payment methods.
- Update billing and tax information.
The Stripe portal can be integrated and customized to seamlessly match your company’s branding and linked to your terms of service and privacy policy. Local versions of the portal can even be automatically displayed to customers based on their browser settings to build further rapport.
4. Twilio Integration
Twilio powers a LOT of communications.
For example: Chatting online with customer support, messaging an en-route driver, receiving an appointment reminder, and video conferencing with your healthcare provider is just to name a few.
The Twilio Customer Engagement Platform can be integrated via application program interfaces (APIs), a set of building blocks developers use to build the exact customer experiences you have in mind. Twilio can be used to build just about any digital communication experience, using capabilities like SMS, voice, video, email, WhatsApp, and even IoT devices.
Twilio has built relationships with a global network of communications providers so your message or call is guaranteed to make it to your recipient. Because of this, your Twilio Customer Engagement Platform integration scales with your business – effortlessly.
5. Zendesk Integration
Zendesk client portal software provides a dedicated community and hub for customers and partners to manage support requests, a knowledge base, and community contributions. Because Zendesk is a dedicated web portal integration, users can easily find what they are looking for by searching through their own, or others’ previous interactions and tickets, so that problems can be solved quickly and efficiently, with no need to contact an agent.
The ability to share updates with your team or your business partners is a standout feature of your Zendesk integration. Partner portal software gives members visibility into each other’s requests, which eliminates the need to keep customers waiting, and also increases transparency across multiple partner organizations.
6. Authorize.net Integration
If payment processing is a big part of your business, you may consider this integration. Authorize.net helps to make payment processing a simple, low-stress part of doing business with easy, secure processing methods so you can focus on bringing in the cash flow.
Authorize.net manages the submissions of billions of transactions to processing networks on behalf of merchants. Stored customer profiles enable merchants to securely tokenize and store sensitive customer payment information on secure servers. This ability to recall profiles simplifies payment processing for returning customers and recurring transactions while maintaining PCI compliance.
7. Hubspot Integration
With Hubspot Integration, your customers have the means to create, update, and view tickets from a branded portal that is part of your own website. This HubSpot service portal allows people who are not yet Contacts to register on your portal and create tickets as soon as they are registered. They are able to create a support account AND submit a ticket with any custom field you choose to provide.
Hubspot itself has powerful integrations with Zendesk, SurveyMonkey, Eventbrite, Wistia, and many more, so adding Hubspot’s integration to your customer portal, allows you to easily share data across all of your major applications and systems.
8. Facebook Integration
Facebook integrations help to advance businesses that use this well-known social media platform. Facebook offers a plethora of integration options, and they are becoming increasingly relevant.
Facebook loves customer data, and you probably do too, right? A Facebook integration can be defined as connecting one or more applications to a Facebook product, with the purpose of sharing data to optimize workflows and campaigns.
There are even applications that you can connect to these Facebook products like chatbots and email marketing apps, collaboration tools, and other social media connections.
Facebook also has popular partner integrations for Shopify, HubSpot, WooCommerce, Squarespace, Salesforce, and more, which allows you to quickly reach a broader audience by using data from all of your sources without the need to manually import/export to and from Facebook.
9. Twitter Integration
Much like the above-mentioned Facebook integrations, CommonPlaces offers Twitter integration so that your web presence aligns with your Twitter strategy and makes it easier for your content to go viral. With the use of the following tools, you can turn your site’s users into followers and beyond.
Twitter widgets, buttons, and tools are the basic integrations you can start with, while further integration allows you to:
- Create a daily digest post of your tweets.
- Create a blog post from each of your tweets.
- Create a tweet whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post.
- Post a tweet from your sidebar.
- Pass your tweets along to other services (via API hook).
Twitter also is host to an abundance of add-ons like Tweet This, TwitThis, and Chirrup, which make your website’s Twitter integration smooth and on-brand, allowing you to tweet to multiple platforms right from the time you publish new content. Effortlessly.
10. Google Analytics Integration
Google Analytics is important to continually improve your business’s website. While not often thought of as an ‘integration’, it definitely makes our list because it will provide you with visitor data to identify what people are doing on your site. There are other web analytics tools you can use to collect site data, but Analytics remains the most popular version that website owners choose, and for good reason:
Google Analytics allows you to track and understand your customer’s behavior, online content, device functionality, user experience, and more. Google Analytics helps provide the data you need to help you form your business’s success strategy. By integrating Analytics, you will discover pertinent information you would have otherwise never known about visitors to your site, which of course, helps you focus your marketing efforts or improve your UX.
Final Thoughts
Making your customer portal experience seamless and effective will mean the world to your customers. The trust and accountability of your business is built right into your customer service capabilities, and your customer portal is an extension of that. We make it easy to use the services you’re already accustomed to using – packaged into simple customer portal integrations to improve your automation while creating seamless customer experiences which keep people coming back.
We at CommonPlaces will recommend and employ only the integrations that will benefit you and your customers and keep your user experiences in tip-top shape. Ask us how to get started.
