Benefits of a Customer Portal Integrated with Sage

Introduction

In business, there's a front office and back office, and digital marketing usually requires front-office and back-office software to engage customers and automate numerous business processes. Enterprise resource planning or ERP, software manages back-office accounting systems. Customer relationship management, or CRM, software manages the back office where customer contact data is collected from the front office locations, including websites, web stores, marketplace platforms, brick-and-mortar operations and customer portals. The benefits of Sage integrated portal technology include retooling B2B processes proactively to meet the changing needs of B2B sales--such as managing marketplace sales, committee buying, requests for custom catalogs, product customizations and dynamic pricing.

Taking payments through the portal as well? See Sage 100 payment processing with Clarity Payment Hub, which posts card and ACH payments back to Sage 100 AR as they happen.

Portals create great customer experiences, and 92 percent of customers have had bad experiences, and one-third of them abandon their purchases as a consequence. [1] An average of 47 percent of customer want to see information on products and services immediately before checking out other information about a company. [2] A customized portal provides immediate and relevant content such as the customer’s favorite product categories.

Benefits of Integrating a Customer Portal

A customer portal serves many of the functions of a proprietary app. The portal connects automatically with customer accounts and data including buying history, invoices, browsing behavior and preferences. Website features, catalogs and searches can be customized for greater ordering efficiency. B2B customers prefer self-service, and Gartner once predicted that by 2020, 85 percent of customer interactions would be handled without a human. [3] Another survey quoted in the same article confirms that two-thirds of B2B customers prefer self-service.

A dedicated customer portal fosters loyalty because who wants the trouble of establishing a complex account when everything needed to place an order is customized in an intuitive portal? Integrating portal technology with Sage erp 200 and other versions of the software offers the following benefits for B2B companies and their customers:

Higher Satisfaction Rates

• Self-service, faster searches and custom recommendations increase customer satisfaction and foster loyalty.

Reduced Need for Customer Service

• Handling customer service--while necessary--prevents staff members from working on core business activities. Each human interaction with a customer takes time away from another task, so labor costs increase. It averages 15 minutes to find a copy of an invoice manually. [3]

24-hour Service

• In today's global marketing, customers cumulatively work around the clock in different locations. Portals provide 24/7/365 access to all account information, special catalogs, product research options and customer service issues solutions on any device.

Customer Aesthetic Preferences

• Portals can be branded with logos, special color schemes and custom reporting formats.

Special Prices for Customers

• Customer portals can store customer-specific pricing information including special pricing tiers, custom product prices, incentives, discounts, pricing tiers based on product quantity and dynamic pricing bids for certain large orders.

Special Displays

• It's easy to customize displays to show those products that customers order most often and similar products at different prices and quality levels.

Management of Multiple Delivery Addresses

• B2B customers often order for many branch offices and retail stores and split their orders to deliver products to each address. Portals make it easy for customers to pick a different address for each part of their order.

Increased Productivity of In-house Staff

• Many customers can order seamlessly without needing staff help, which allows staff to be more productive. There's never a need to re-key orders or enter information in another application--integration enables instant information-sharing with all business systems.

The Sage Customer Portal

B2B companies can choose the Sage Customer Portal for different software versions while Clarity can handle the integration work and troubleshooting. Customers can enter their information directly into the portal system, which reduces entry errors and speeds the fulfillment process. Customers only need to log on and choose their products from regular or custom catalogs, database searches or previous invoices. The data are instantly sent to all the relevant integrated applications.

Building a customer portal--at least for your best customers--delivers a personalized and streamlined buying experience that B2B customers appreciate more than the price and quality of products. A Harvard business study found that B2B customer loyalty rises with the number of high-value features offered. about 65 percent of respondents rated high-value features an “8” in a scale of 1-10. [4]

Heading Off Development Issues

The benefits of Sage integrated portal technology include engaging with your customers more effectively and making them feel like valued business partners. Clarity can integrate any of the Sage software versions including Sage 50, Sage 100, Sage 200, Sage 300, 500, X3, etc. Clarity ecommerce and Clarity eConnect can help you choose the best version of Sage software for your needs and handle all the issues that develop when integrating your business applications with Sage software and the corresponding customer portal.

References:

[1] Userzoom.com: 12 fascinating stats about UX and usability testing to help your business case

[2] blog.hubspot.com: 17 Website and UX Design Statistics That Make the Case for Smarter Web Design

[3] Draycir.com: 6 reasons to use a customer

[4] Hbr.org: The B2B Elements of Value