Presented by Clinked

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Custom-built, cloud-based portals aren’t the purview of enterprise anymore. As businesses of every size embrace digital transformation, the demand from small and mid-sized businesses for custom client portals is growing.

Generic customer portal products are already designed to help with basic tasks like daily client interactions, document exchange, and electronically signing documents. But SMBs are embracing new, distributed ways of working, increasingly complex workflows, and growing security and compliancy requirements — all of which call for custom solutions.

For SMBs, the main barrier to moving from off-the-shelf to building a custom portal in-house has always been the time, cost and difficulty it requires. Depending on the complexity, starting from scratch could take months or even years, and cost anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well as take up countless resources. It’s a costly exercise that requires specialized skill that many companies simply don’t have access to internally.

“Today, we see companies turning to custom portal solutions providers, which are changing the game for SMBs,” says Tayfun Bilsel, the CEO of Clinked. “The ease of an out-of-the-box solution and the power of white-label, without involving IT, makes them accessible and available even to small businesses, increasing efficiency, serving customers better, and eliminating major pain points.”

The case for going custom

In a competitive market where customer happiness can make or break a competitive advantage, a generic portal might get the job done, but can it cover every business case, handle every unique, organization-specific task, and manage complex client interactions and workflows?

That’s where a custom portal, built in a private cloud, can become a crucial component of a customer service strategy. Not only do these portals help establish company identity, tailored solutions are more efficient, and offer better service, to cement customer satisfaction. Custom features can be integrated into a business’s own tools and software applications to create company workflows that help automate daily operations, offer easy, efficient and secure collaboration and free up teams to focus on the core business and strategic initiatives.

And in an increasingly fraught cybersecurity landscape, custom portals in private clouds offer increased data and security compliance, which not only helps protect the business while still allowing it to go digital, but also boosts customer trust.

“Portals bring everything into one place, and they are custom-designed to match your unique use case. All information is stored securely in a well-organized space that matches your workflows,” Bilsel says. “Client information is easily accessible by all authorized employees and clients, which leads to happier clients, better retention, and increased revenue.”

Designing the perfect portal

Planning a portal requires involvement from every department. For instance, figuring out how some of your company’s existing integrations and professional tools should be incorporated into a custom solution requires in-depth internal consultation.

Plus, analysis of past performance, thorough documentation and standardization of the processes, will help ensure the cloud can continue to meet ongoing needs — and turn up organizational inefficiencies such as process and service duplication, silos and poor security.

As an example, many SMBs naturally rely on email to manage client communication and project workflow, because email is already central to a company’s communication. But this can overlook the potential pitfalls and hidden costs, especially as a company grows. As the number of clients multiplies, communication breakdowns, data leaks from accidental shares and more become a constant concern — but so do information siloes. If one team member is out unexpectedly, the rest of the team may have no access to their client interactions.

Partnering with the experts to design a custom solution

The best way to end up with a perfect cloud portal is to optimize internal workflows, processes and security so that they all work harmoniously in the new environment. But because the “ideal” private portal can be hard to visualize without prior technical knowledge, companies are partnering with enterprise portal providers to guide them through the design and build process.

A custom portal partner can capture all the best of a company’s internal customer processes. Workflows are upgraded to cloud-based, always-available, user-friendly features, and designed with a view toward how they’ll work together in the new environment for both the company and its customers.

Of course, the primary consideration when designing a portal should be the client’s needs, not just business requirements, Bilsel says.

“For managers and CEOs, the most important driver is revenue,” he says. “But when you step back and think about your clients’ needs when designing a portal, you’ll come up with a solution that saves time, makes you more productive and ultimately results in happier customers, which naturally increases revenue and helps you hit your targets. That makes everyone happy – your clients, your company, employees and the team.”

Learn more here about how easy it is to build a custom portal in a private could environment that fits your exact requirements and budget with Clinked.

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