In the era of digitalization , customers expect more and more control over their journey. This transformation disrupts the customer relationship with increasingly autonomous users and a less and less linear customer journey. The customer area responds to this growing expectation of autonomy while offering many decisive advantages to the companies that set them up.
What is a customer area?
A customer space is an interface that provides customers with full visibility of all interactions with your business . The purpose of this portal is to centralize access to information and to the uses involved in the customer relationship. Customers will be able, for example, to follow the latest updates of information concerning them, consult the documents relating to their transactions, find answers to their questions with an FAQ and many other functionalities which will all have in common to make the relationship with your company.
The watchwords of the customer area are therefore personalization and accessibility.
The customer space being a private space, it is possible to share all the personal information of your customers. This feature makes it a highly customizable space. Most of the functions being automated, the customer can, for his part, permanently and independently access his personal space. Accessibility being at the heart of the process, it is therefore important that a customer area be responsive , thus giving your customers the possibility of connecting to it from a computer, smartphone or tablet.
Optimize the customer relationship
The development of a personal space is part of an approach to optimizing the customer relationship . From this portal, customers will be able to access all the transactions that concern them, to make their payment in just a few clicks, or to download the documents relating to their transactions.
Many aspects of the customer relationship are then simplified with, for the company, the possibility of being kept informed of the various actions carried out and thus of maintaining contact interactively. The customer area is therefore a powerful CRM tool.
To exploit its full potential, some companies choose to use solutions that allow them to manage and analyze the mass of information generated by a high-performance customer area .
Win time
Without a dedicated space, customer relationship management can very quickly become excessively time-consuming. Not having centralized the main information useful to customers means exposing yourself to having to devote considerable time to dealing with their requests.
On the customer side, finding the answers to their questions or accessing their personal information is sometimes an obstacle course. One of the main strengths of the customer area is therefore to centralize all the information that can be and to facilitate access to it so that the customer can easily find his way around.
Without in any way deteriorating the quality of your professional follow-up, it is a question of reducing the time granted to the most tedious and redundant tasks of the customer relationship by automating them.
Lower the costs
As you will have understood, by optimizing the customer relationship and therefore saving time, you indirectly earn money; or at least, you make the economy of actions which could make you lose some. This is therefore another advantage of the customer portal, it is part of a cost reduction strategy .
Indeed, traditional customer relationship management can involve costs that a customer space will significantly reduce. Giving customers greater autonomy in the management of their information, for example, makes it possible to reduce telephone exchanges or the sending of letters.
Thus, all personal information may be transmitted in a dematerialized manner . In addition to significantly reducing the expenses related to the processing of your customers’ requests, this also has the advantage of limiting the use of paper in an eco-responsible way.
Strengthen loyalty
As Accenture presented in a study in 2015, the last decades have been marked by a leap in consumer volatility. With digitalization, the traditional customer journey has been transformed. Today, customers do not hesitate to turn to the competition if they consider that their needs will be better met there.
Having a customer area means offering your customers the advantages of a personalized relationship that aims to best meet their expectations. In fact, showing your customers that you have a good understanding of their information needs puts them at the heart of your approach.
With the personal space, it is thus easy for them to get in touch with the after-sales service and to give them more power with the possibility of managing their account as they wish.
Make the choice of digitization
Setting up a customer area is therefore choosing to support the digital transformation and thus meet the expectations of your customers .
The benefits for businesses are considerable. In addition to optimizing the customer relationship and strengthening loyalty, the creation of a personal space saves time and reduces the costs of your actions. This transformation requires optimal management of information, it is possible to acquire CRM tools whose purpose is to centralize and organize this data in such a way as to be able to draw from it all the potential it holds.