Customer Portal Development

Most support requests are questions the customer could answer themselves

Customer portal development is the work of building a secure place where clients can see their own information without asking anybody for it.

• Where is my order
• What do I owe
• Can I have that invoice again

None of these questions require judgment, and all of them currently require a person.

Wink builds secure customer portals that improve customer experience while reducing manual support requests.

What a Wink customer portal provides

Wink develops portals covering the full self service surface of a customer relationship.

• Account management and profile updates
• Order tracking
• Invoices
• Payments
• Subscriptions
• Support tickets
• File sharing and document downloads
• Appointment management
• Notifications and messaging
• Service requests
• Reporting dashboards

Self service is a capacity decision before it is a convenience

A portal removes the routine requests from your team's day, which is what makes the remaining requests answerable properly.

Support teams are rarely overwhelmed by difficult problems. They are overwhelmed by volume, most of which is retrieval that no human judgment improves.

Reducing that volume is not about serving customers less. It is about being available when the question actually needs a person.

A portal also answers at the hour the customer asks, which no team can do without being staffed for it.

Business to business customers in particular do administrative work outside their own operating hours, and a portal is the only channel that is open then.

Security is what makes a portal acceptable at all

Wink implements secure authentication, encrypted connections, role based permissions and industry standard security practices.

A portal exposes customer data to the internet by design, so authentication and permissions are the product rather than a setting applied at the end.

Role based permissions matter most for business clients, where several people from the same company need different levels of access to the same account.

Payments and invoices in one place

Wink integrates secure online payment gateways for invoices, subscriptions and service payments.

Payment collection improves when paying is easier than asking how to pay. An invoice with a button attached is settled faster than an invoice attached to an email.

Support tickets keep the conversation in one thread

Wink builds support tickets, messaging and notifications into the portal so requests have a status the customer can see.

The most common complaint about support is not the answer but the silence. A visible status removes the follow up message asking whether anyone received the first one.

Connecting the portal to the systems that hold the truth

Wink integrates customer portals with CRM systems, ERP platforms, websites, mobile applications, payment gateways, accounting software, cloud storage, authentication services and third party APIs.

The portal should never hold its own copy of anything. It is a window onto the systems of record, which is what keeps what the customer sees and what your team sees identical.

Who customer portal development is for

• Businesses serving B2B clients who need account access for several staff
• Service companies fielding repetitive status and invoice requests
• Subscription businesses where customers manage their own plans
• Organizations whose support team is at capacity on routine work
• Companies wanting to strengthen long term customer relationships through better access

What customer portals connect to

A customer portal is the client facing layer of business systems development, and it is at its strongest sitting on top of a CRM system.

It is often delivered with the website as the entry point, and businesses that also take appointments connect it to a booking and reservation system.

Where to start

Look at the last fifty support requests and count how many were retrieval. That count is the size of the portal's business case.