New Age Customer Self Service Portals for CRM

Traditionally, CRM self-service portals used to be the web support channel for customers. Some companies extended this concept and used such portals for employee management, dealer management, etc. However, such use cases are very minimal.

Even today, the majority of the self-service portals in the market focus on these standard functions only:

• Register / Login
• Search / View Knowledgebase published by the company
• Create Service Requests

While these basic features are required, modern web support (whether it is self-service or assisted) wants to go a step beyond this. For example, let us take an example of a college deploying its own self-service portal for students.

• College students get a login (or can register) in the portal
• They can log in, see the college knowledge base/download documents
• In case they have a support requirement, they can create a service request

Wait a minute; when you say “Service request,” what do you mean?

For a student, it may mean many things: Requesting a mark sheet, Requesting an attendance certificate, Requesting a change in the profile phone number, etc.

While all these are service requests, their nature is not the same. For example, when requesting a mark sheet, they may have to provide additional details such as their examination number, year of exam, etc. When requesting an attendance certificate, they may have to say this certificate is required for what purpose, from which date to which date, etc.

This means even though portals call it with a single term, “Service Request,” it actually means many things. You can’t have a single form and expect that to serve every possible service request case. Either that form will be too generic and not serve the purpose, or it will be too long, and users will run away.

Customer Service Management

To take care of such problems, CRMIT’s CRM++ Self-Service Portal is moving in the direction of a dynamic SR Types Management feature. This means companies implementing CRM++ SSP can design their own types of Service Requests, and design unique forms for each one of them, with specific fields, and labels they are looking for. Customers will love this because only targeted questions are asked; agents will love this because all the information they need to solve a particular problem is right in their hands.

Stay tuned for our next SSP release.