The customer support solutions you provide your B2B clients are critical for your continued success. While having a dedicated support team who can deliver fast, well-informed solutions for client issues is important, a self-service option has become increasingly popular. Putting the control in the hands of your clients means you can take some of the workload off your in-house team and also provide a level of convenience your clients will appreciate. However, it’s imperative your system functions smoothly and continues to grow to meet your client’s needs. Measuring the success of your portal is necessary to keep things running smoothly. Let’s look at five ways to do this effectively.
Establish Goals
In order to properly measure the success of your portal, you first need to define what you’re trying to achieve in the long run. This way you know what metrics to examine and what steps need to be taken to streamline the user experience, which should be your ultimate goal. Aside from the overall functionality of your portal, you should shoot for an increased engagement with it from your clients. You may also want to look at how quickly users can troubleshoot issues and find the information they need. If your portal is effective, you’ll reduce the amount of time your in-house team spends on the onboarding process, allowing them to spend more time on internal operations.
Define Metrics
Next, you’ll need to define which metrics you need to gather and how they’ll help you understand the overall success of your self-service operation. Look at how many clients are using the portal and which pages are the most popular. You not only want high engagement with your portal, you want your clients to be submitting tickets on their own. You should also monitor what content is being accessed in your knowledge base. This will tell you what’s working and what needs to be refined. It’s also a good idea to track how many users are taking advantage of the search function and if they’re finding what they’re looking for. When gathering these metrics, take advantage of visual reporting solutions.
Customize a Dashboard
Understanding the metrics you gather is much more convenient with a custom dashboard. Your configurable customer support software makes this process easier. You’ll be able to access the data you want when you want it, and then make changes to your dashboard as you refine your metrics. The great thing about this is you can also share this data with other departments. And with the ability to organize the information as you see fit, you’ll avoid confusion when evaluating metrics.
Take Action
Your dashboard gives you a clear picture of how your portal is operating. Now it’s time to take steps to make it as successful as possible. You’ll want to look for content in your knowledge base that isn’t getting accessed on a regular basis or that has a high bounce rate. If this is happening it may be time to remove it or have rewrites done. You’ll also want to look at search queries and if they’re bringing your clients to the right information. This could tell you if your pages are tagged properly or not. You can also look at resolution times. If clients are submitting tickets through the portal, how quickly are the issues getting resolved?
Continue Evolving
In order for your client portal to see continued success, you must revisit all the metrics on a regular basis. That way you know whether the changes you’ve implemented are actually paying off for your clients. Over time, you’ll also determine which features are holding your system back and need to be removed altogether. Remember, there’s never a definitive solution for providing the highest-quality client portal. Think of it as a living, breathing thing that needs to evolve over time.
Maintaining the success of your client portal allows you to provide top customer service and also ease the stress of your in-house department. Make sure you take measures to make it the best it can be. PhaseWare provides configurable customer support software for B2B entities who want to streamline their support operation. Contact us to learn more.