Client Portals for ECM platforms

Introduction

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 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. 

Content security and classification have become a growing concern for many organizations and with both GDPR and ADA requiring a new approach to how the enterprise collects, records, and secures both data and information. Now more than ever, businesses are raising concerns about long-term data protection and archived records that have historically existed within legacy content systems.

With hybrid working patterns being the ‘new norm’, businesses are having to be agile with how they respond to data access and information processing – giving employees the ability to work away from the office in cloud-based software, and able to correctly store and access the documents they need as required.

As the demands of digital preservation and technology evolve, access problems across industries can hinder an organization’s ability to act swiftly and make necessary business decisions if employees can’t access the information they require. From corporate or institutional governance, or for reasons of statutory, legal or regulatory; you may find you need to retain digital information for longer than 10 years.

In the case of litigation, for example, historical data needs to be referenced as needed, and law firms have strict obligations to preserve all documents that might be relevant to a case.

Similarly, financial firms must comply with the record-keeping regulations of various regulatory bodies. The firms must also archive and retain the data according to the data archiving and retention requirements set out.

With a rise in the need to find and access “inactive” records, you need to ensure that your records are easily managed and accessible during their lifespan.

With the volume of content within the typical organization’s digital ecosystem expected to rise 2 to 5 times over the next 3 years, there needs to be more consideration with regard to the preservation of data.

Data backup is an essential component of long-term digital preservation planning

Preservation of data needs to consider the obsolesce of software, hardware, and operating systems.  Information trapped in legacy ECM systems is at risk of being lost or deleted forever.

Proventeq’s Migration Accelerator can assist you with migrating from your legacy ECM to SharePoint Online, consolidating your data, and determining which data requires long-term archiving or preservation to meet compliance requirements.  Active preservation of data is made possible with Proventeq’s Content Integrator Tool, acting as a sync tool between your ECM platform and the long-term preservation platform, enabling the enterprise's active digital preservation requirements.

How do you mitigate the risk of falling short of compliance and failing to secure immediate access to long-term digital information?

Our alliance partner, Preservica has an early access group of their latest offering Preserve365, a seamless and automated archiving and active digital preservation tool for Microsoft 365 which makes it much easier for users to automatically comply with retention policies for long-term records. Preserve365 automatically keeps long-term information alive, and easily discoverable, for decades. It ensures archived records particularly those from legacy ECM systems, can be quickly found, always read, trusted, and actioned when needed.

Conclusion

All organizations should look at their document preservation policy. The automatic deletion of electronic documents is a particular issue and should be reviewed so that the documents can be verified for relevance, and then saved, before deletion takes place. Protecting long-term records needs to be an integral and automated part of your M365 governance program.

Get in touch with us to discuss your digital preservation requirements or book a discovery workshop with us today to boost digital workplace effectiveness through secure storage and intelligent delivery of content.