A lot of companies deal with subcontractors for installation and services, providing material from different suppliers, joining multiple partners to deliver a large project, or selling via their vendor network. But it can be hard to keep track of the progress and performance of all of them. Client portals (alternatively called partner portal, supplier portal, or vendor portal) are the key answer to such problems. They allow staff to share information with their partners, such as project schedules, invoices, and progress update. In this article, we’ll cover what are client portals and the benefits they provide to businesses.
What is a client portal? And why businesses should use them?
Client portals are changing how business is done today. Due to organizations becoming increasingly reliant on data, they need to adopt a secure client portal to interact, share, and exchange sensitive information between their clients, subcontractors, stakeholders, suppliers, and vendors.
Extranet solutions are highly protected platforms that give limited and predefined access to their users, to share and receive documents, submit new orders to manufacturers, and monitor the project progress and task completion status.
Different types of extranet solutions
Different types of extranet solutions consist of:
Contractor portal
Contractor portals improve the workflow by providing a platform to share the customers’ contact information, contracts, services schedule, and role types. With the help of contractor portals project managers can assign tasks to subcontractors and share the workload.
Then each contractor can log into their contractor portal to check service delivery scheduling and access customers’ contact information. Therefore, they deliver the requested service on the due date and when the task is fully done, they can take picture of the provided service and upload it to the portal to assure the organization that the job has successfully completed. They can even report failures in case of unexpected problems.
The contractor portal solution streamlines the process of providing services and increases users’ collaboration and communication to assure business owners all the tasks are being done on- time and appropriately.
Supplier portal
Supplier portals allow organizations to communicate and collaborate with their third-party suppliers more efficiently through a user-friendly interface and they streamline the supplier onboarding processes. Supplier portals provide a secure environment for businesses and their suppliers to submit new orders, track the progress, access all the required documents and contracts, issue invoices, and follow payment status.
Deploying a supplier portal solution helps organizations to store all the documents and sensitive data of an order in a safe place so that members can access the latest version of each document without having to search for them in the chaos of emails. However, old approaches such as sending and receiving data using emails are time-consuming and might lead to data loss or users’ confusion.
Business owners can monitor the progress and performance of the supplier on their mobile devices and receive invoices through the portal and then upload their payment receipts.
Customer Portal
A customer web portal is an easy and convenient way to simplify communication for your customers and keep them aware of the latest information which is relevant to them. This saves them time and also promotes a sense of security by providing a place for your customers to go for all their needs any time of the day.
The customer portal solution increases customer satisfaction by bringing high transparency to them and assures them that all the steps of the project are being done accurately. It also prevents customers to search for invoices in their email inbox, instead, they can easily access detailed invoices along with other documents using the portal.
Vendor portal
Through role-based access, vendors can register, communicate, and request goods. One of the best benefits of vendor portals is that they can perform as a database, so users manage their own accounts to enter contact information and to request new orders without making phone calls to the parent company. Such technologies streamline operations significantly, as it enables business partners to communicate via a shared platform.
Partner Portal
Partner portals are secured environments that bring the whole team together so members can access real-time information about the ongoing task and be informed about the latest version of all documents created during the lifecycle of projects. Partner portals provide better partner relationship management (PRM) systems since they link different companies and bring consistency across involved parties.
To increase the security of the partner portals, companies can limit the access to data, so that each member can only access to required data they need. Therefore, the involved parties are only able to change or update data that they are allowed to.
365 Digital Consulting customizable portals
365 Digital Consulting offers organizations who have purchased the Microsoft Office 365 license is to utilize the Microsoft PowerApps portal. The reason behind this is that you can benefit advantages of the whole Office 365 suite alongside your client portal extranet. 365 Digital Consulting can integrate your customer portal with your own internal system or your accounting system. By developing a bidirectional synchronization between your internal apps and your client portal, we allow the flow of the data between apps and eliminate double entries and human errors.
The implementation of the Microsoft 365 PowerApps portal as your client portal is a cost-effective solution. It cuts down many expenses such as paying for additional licensing because organizations do not need to pay for a new app license as they have purchased the Microsoft Office 365 suite before.
365 digital consulting also provides high-end custom client portals to build collaboration, manage document versions, streamline workflows, and track tasks and approvals across all parties 24 hours a day. We develop highly customizable portals that suit the different needs of companies with top-notch security.
Client Portal benefits
Client portals are innovative content management systems that provide high-end services to your clients, they can be accessed via mobile apps and can be integrated with 3rd party apps to increase collaboration and communication. Some of the other advantages of client portals are listed below.
Increased Transparency
Users can update, review, annotate, or comment on tasks to inform other members and project owners about each task and to keep progress visible.
Accessibility
All documents are stored online and users can access them anytime, anywhere using their mobile devices.
Higher security
Compared to old solutions like emailing, client portals provide higher security to organizations. Since customer portals are cloud-based solutions, they utilize technologies like end-to-end encryption to guarantee your clients’ sensitive data from being sabotaged.
Improved customer satisfaction
Client portals put a stop to endless phone calls that clients make to service providers. After implementation of the customer portal, clients will just log into their accounts and observe the whole ongoing process.
