At Genesis we have always taken pride in our customer service, during business hours we’re always available to take your call, and you don’t have to go through a call center to reach us. But what happens after hours? Or if your growing client base is overwhelming your traditional phone support team? Enhancing your web presence and creating a customer portal might be the answer.

Enhance How?

Many web sites exist solely to convert web visitors into sales leads, which is an important and necessary part of your growth. However, in our increasingly connected world, many of your web visitors will be current clients or customers looking for information. What do they find when they reach your web page? If your web site is just re-selling them they may begin to look elsewhere.

Getting Started

Deciding to create a customer portal is a big endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be hard. When developing the MyGenesisHR HRIS portal, we found the following principles worked successfully:

• Start simple – What are the most common requests or questions fielded by your CSRs? Can any be automated or delivered online, through a FAQ or knowledge base?
• What do I already have? – What data or reports can you deliver to your customers through the web? If you’re constantly emailing certain files to customers, consider making them downloadable instead.
• Keep it simple – Don’t be afraid to add features or data, but don’t add them just to expand your feature list. Take the time to really focus on usability, so that your site can be used with minimal documentation and training.
• Ask! – You may not have to if you have some vocal clients who are already clamoring for access to more data. Gathering feedback from clients will help guide your feature list and stay focused on providing the most useful features. Be mindful to focus on features that will benefit the largest amount of customers to start.

Paths To Success

Once you’ve enhanced your web presence or added a customer portal, some of the benefits you will see are:

• Your customers will feel more connected to your company by being able to access and manage their information whenever they want.
• Providing access to raw data and reports will let your customers use the data how it works best for their business.
• You no longer have business hours (but in a good way)! By augmenting your traditional customer service you’re able to handle more requests with the same amount of staff, and customers can get answers and information when everyone is gone for the day.

We’ve seen great adoption of our online tools and are able to provide our clients with great customer service 24 hours a day. We hope your business will soon be “always open” as well.