Self-service is the future of customer service, and businesses have started realizing it. Gone are the days where customers would have to call or email companies to register their problems and follow up on them until they are solved. Instead, businesses today look for customer service solutions that endow their customers with more flexibility and enhance their experience. Similarly, companies are also on the hunt for ways to automate their employee management and reduce dependency on emails, calls, or other manual processes.

All in all, companies want to give their customers and employees the option of self-service. And for that, they need a self-service portal. When customers and employees get the solutions to most problems themselves, it won’t only help speed up the process but also reduce the burden on support agents.

In this post, we are going to talk about the self-service portals for Dynamics 365. By the end of this post, you’ll be clear about Dynamics 365 self-service portal and its importance. You’ll also get an in-depth knowledge of both the Dynamics 365 customer self-service portal and the Dynamics 365 employee self-service portal separately in detail.

So, let’s start with the basic overview of the Dynamics 365 Self Service Portal.

What Is a Dynamics 365 Self-Service Portal?

A Dynamics 365 self-service portal is basically an interface like a website or an app that contains information and resources to enable users to find solutions and resolve issues. Be it a Dynamics 365 self-service portal or any other CRM portal, the primary role is to help users cater to most of their common needs without any manual intervention. A self-service portal complements an organization’s service agents and shares their workload.

A self-service portal is great that saves both time and money for an organization. When human resources get more free time, they can think of better and innovative ideas, work on more complex problems, and help the company grow. It can also help you build a community to teach customers new skills.

What Is Dynamics 365 Customer Self-Service Portal?

As the name suggests, the Dynamics 365 customer self-service portal helps organizations provide a self-service option to the customers. There are also features for assisted service scenarios present in this portal.

Here are the resources that a Dynamics customer self-service portal provides to help resolve issues.

Knowledge Articles

The Knowledge Base articles benefit an organization by reducing the volume of logged cases and complaints. This is because customers can find answers to their questions in the knowledge base in the portal. It also helps improve customer service and satisfaction levels as they don’t have to go through a long process of generating a support ticket every time and waiting for it to close.

Forums

Forums help staff track customers’ problems, and your staff takes part in giving answers to those problems. When the staff answers the questions over a long time, they all pile up and create a public archive for reference for all the others with the same problems.

Support Cases

Cases allow customers to submit support cases. It is one of the most important features and provides an organization a way to converse and interact with customers. The main benefit is that customers can always reach the customer support team if they don’t find anything relevant to solve their problems in knowledge articles, videos, or blogs. This way, they don’t feel they are by themselves and can always get in touch with the right support agent.

What Is a Dynamics Employee Self-Service Portal?

A Dynamics 365 Employee Self Service Portal provides organizations with a way to assist employees to find specific human resources, access the company’s relevant information, and resolve employees’ issues easily.

The resources to help resolve issues of employees are as follows:

Knowledge Articles

This is also similar to the one in the Dynamics customer portal. The difference is that it contains information that concerns employees rather than customers. Knowledge articles contain general company information, procedures, rules and regulations, policies, emergency procedures, and other relevant information.

Forums

The Forum functionality works in the same way as it does in the customer self-service portal. However, the discussions here are about topics related to employee self-service. Besides, it may also contain general topics, company’s goals, announcements, opinions, etc. These are mostly the topics that employees can access anytime and participate. However, there is a difference. The forums in the employee portal are accessible for only the internal staff.

Support Cases

Here, employees generate support cases for issues they face in different things like filing ITR, calculating salary, leave-count error, system breakdown, etc. The cases are mostly around the issues that customers may face at times while working in an organization. Based on the support case type, the concerned team takes the appropriate action.

For instance, if A generates a case that their system has crashed, the IT department gets back to the employee and helps them fix the issue. In the same way, if there is any issue concerning leave miscalculation or general query, the HR department mostly takes care of it all.

How Does a Dynamics 365 Self-Service Portal Benefit?

Coming to benefits, a self-service portal helps solve customers’ problems proactively. This helps increase their trust in your brand and win loyalty. When they get information beyond simple answers to their questions, it helps them know more about your products and services. A portal also helps boost site traffic with a custom knowledge base. You can encourage your customers to use your portal by inserting the link to your blog, FAQs, etc. A Dynamics self-service portal also allows users to personalize their accounts. Whenever a customer or an employee logs in, they can get their name, profile photo (or custom avatar), and curate content on their home page. This helps the users get only the relevant information they need and save their time, engaging them further.

A Dynamics self-service portal also contributes to the enhancement of productivity of customer service agents. At times, support agents are swamped with so many redundant questions or queries that they fail to focus on bigger issues. A portal frees them up to dedicatedly solve major issues, unlike small redundant queries, and focus on the big picture. The proper utilization of their time in this way brings more productivity to your business.

When you can improve the customer support experience, it is sure to boost your overall sales. The satisfied customers will return to your store for future purchases and contribute to increasing your repeat purchase volume. Over time, these repeat customers will also help you gain more customers through word-of-mouth publicity.

Coming to other advantages, you can offer 24/7 customer support that runs day in and day out for your customers. How? As support agents work in shifts, there may be some non-working hours when your customer may not get the service they need. However, if you have the customer portal, the customer can easily log in and find out the solution to the problem - especially if it is self-solvable. Similarly, an employee can access the information relevant to them at any time irrespective of office hours.

A Dynamics 365 self-service portal also helps you enhance your content management. You can track customers’ and employees’ queries, questions, etc., and update the content accordingly. For example, you can revise your FAQs, documentation, manuals, etc., for customers to refer to. You can also include informative visuals and videos to cater to customers more engagingly.

Moving forward, the overall expenses of customer support go down. This is because calls, faxes, emails, etc., may require you to invest more money and effort. Unlike this, a portal helps address the most common queries and questions of customers. This helps reduce the volume of calls, emails, etc., to serve customers and brings down the total expenses significantly.

A self-service portal also helps level up social media visibility and outreach. If you have multiple social media accounts, you can increase your interactions with customers on your accounts. You can also participate in various forums relevant to your industry and answer their questions. Through all these social media channels, you can redirect your target audience to your portal. This way, you can get more visibility and social media outreach that can be good for your brand-building.

So, if you want to build your customer self-service portal or employee self-service portal, our portal solution can help you out.

CRMJetty - Your Right Portal Development Partner to Build Your Portal

Now that you have understood how a self-service portal can help your organization grow, now is the time to develop one for your organization. However, while building your portal from scratch may sound attractive, it may not be feasible - especially if your business is in the nascent stage. Well, there’s a way out of this situation - a launch-ready portal solution.

Our Dynamics 365 portal solution helps optimize your business operations and improve customer relationships. It provides you with the following benefits:

• A unified space where you can interact with your customers and channel partners.
• Provides self-service support to customers in a hassle-free manner.
• Helps provide more flexibility to manage operations on the go with a phone.
• Enhances security by providing role-based access.
• Helps build an efficient sales pipeline to shorten buyers’ cycles.

We also provide configuration freedom for entities like cases, knowledge base, appointments, invoices, documents, forums, hierarchy management. If you also need a full-fledged Dynamics 365 self-service portal exclusively built for your business, we can do it for you. Our developer team can collect the portal requirements, build a development roadmap, and proceed. It also gives you iterative updates on the progress in development, and once it is ready, the QA team checks it. If it finds it all ready to enter the market, we hand it over to you for your business. We can also provide repair and maintenance services for your old portal to make it future-ready.

So, let’s get your portal off the ground right away.