Why Liferay is perfect for self-service client portals

Customers become frustrated when they waste time trying to find the information they need. Getting through the IVR to contact a customer representative is equally tedious. New-age customers need autonomy and self-sufficiency to access information without conventional customer support channels. According to the Harvard Business Review, 81% of customers across industries try to resolve their queries themselves, and a Gartner study found that 85% of all customer service interactions will start with self-service. With customer-led automation, you can empower your customers with tools to find the information they need without the assistance of a service representative. This can be achieved by complimenting your ECM investment with the implementation of modern customer self-service portals. 

Liferay customer portal – A unified customer experience platform 

The Liferay customer portal lets you bring all tools and information related to the customer onto a unified platform. While self-service can be delivered by multiple-point solutions like chatbots, FAQs, or video tutorials, these solutions often work in siloes and eventually fail to provide a connected experience. Liferay is a unified platform that provides access to all digital self-service features. Liferay’s Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model lets you build solutions on a platform faster, generate value sooner, and drive innovation. Liferay is an API-first platform, allowing businesses to add new customer channels and distribute content across all channels while managing it in a unified repository in the back end.  

Liferay also builds forms to capture customer requests or feedback to help track changing customer needs. Using integration tools built on open standards, Liferay makes integration with existing systems easy. It enables the integration of back-end systems and data without any custom integrations from scratch. It supports single sign-on and multi-factor authentication.  

Liferay’s self-service capabilities help businesses around the world to: 

• Launch self-service sites empowering customers to resolve their issues unassisted. 

With its intuitive self-service capabilities such as knowledge management, intuitive search, and robust integration Liferay reduces customers’ dependency on assisted customer support channels. 

• Decrease in the number of support calls as customers can find answers for themselves through online resources. 

• Increase in portal traffic as customers feel more confident about finding answers and visit the portal frequently. 

• Increase in total support volume handled - Self-service enables more customers to be served in a shorter time span. Customer service reps can focus on handling complicated questions as routine questions are answered with self-service.  

• Decrease in total support costs - Maintaining self-service channels is cheaper than managing live support channels. It costs $8.01 per contact on the live channel and $0.10 per contact in self -service channel. 

• Turn a customer portal into an engaging communication hub 

With modern digital engagement tools provided by Liferay, customers can post, respond to, share, and rate user-submitted content. Customers can also provide feedback and send requests to the business. 

• Unify existing customer service touchpoints 

This helps customers access all information from one site instead of jumping through multiple sites and applications. Typically, self-service is beneficial for high-volume routine customer journeys. However, self-service would not be the best customer service option for complicated questions that need human intervention.  

Key considerations 

Whenever a customer is accessing a self-service customer portal, some business activity happens behind the scenes to produce the result that the customer is expecting. This requires integration between the customer-facing interface of the customer portal with the back-end content management system. Liferay offers a seamless integration experience with its open standard integration tools. It combats integration risks and facilitates the integration of existing systems into a single platform. This helps in delivering a connected customer experience.  

Examples of customer self-service portals 

EATEL, a telecommunications company, modernized its customer experience by developing a self-service portal for its customers. With self-service, the company reduced the call volume by 30%. 

Blue Diamond, a grower, and manufacturer of almond products, offers a chatbot on its website that allows customers to select topics based on the products they are interested in. This allows Blue Diamond to provide direct answers in chat, instead of redirecting customers to a page. 

In the insurance industry, self-service can be used to help policyholders file claims more efficiently. West Bend Mutual Insurance not only allows members to manage claims online through self-service but also video payment information and ID cards through its member portal. This easy access to information helps reduce costs and help desk calls. The Excellus insurance company offers a personalized dashboard to each of its policyholders with its self-service portal.  

Conclusion 

Immediacy, connectivity, and simplicity are the order of the day. Customers prefer to help themselves and need access to information that they are seeking to solve their problems. An open-source digital experience platform (DXP) like Liferay is the most cost-effective way to launch self-service. It reduces maintenance and management costs by integrating existing systems and knowledge into a unified platform. It also accelerates time-to-market with out-of-the-box functionalities, such as knowledge management, search, and workflows, needed to drive self-service. This allows businesses to unify common customer service processes and narrow their focus on customizing and maintaining what is important to the business.  

As a Liferay partner, Proventeq can help you to build rich and engaging digital experiences with our Liferay platform expertise. Reach out and speak to one of our experts today to find out more.