To increase their online presence, businesses started building websites. It was the most interesting transition for offline businesses. They gained visibility and were able to market their products and services worldwide. Websites only offer static information. To interact with your customer online, you require a web portal. A web portal is a platform that offers users access to content and allows interaction through an easy-to-use interface. Portals are the best way to increase customer engagement. To maintain your position in the market, integrating a portal with your website is necessary these days. Let us have a look at some crucial features of the web portal development that can help your business grow immensely.
Interactive Homepage
The homepage is the first thing a user will see. It can be the deciding factor whether your customers will explore the rest of the portal or leave from the homepage itself without even logging in. The functionalities that you can add to your homepage depending on the purpose of your portal.
The homepage for the real estate industry will be way different than the school or online education portal. As the audience and purpose change, the portal’s functionalities should also change. The real estate portal will ask for details related to properties and location, while an online education portal will include the types of courses a student can enroll in.
You have to smartly organize the content on the homepage as the overall design will show whether the user is able to understand or find it easily or not. You can add quick links for them to jump to the things they are finding.
Content Organization
The purpose of the portal is to give your users access to all the relevant information without interacting with any human. The right features can ensure all the data is well organized and suitable with the interface so that even non-technology savvy people can find what they are looking for. The portal can manage different types of content like tags and widgets, start and end dates, locations, prices, and other things.
The content management should be such that it should update the users when any action is required on the document they created. Portal offers more than a standard file management storage service; it offers interactive ways to work with your team and share files.
Online Workspace
More and more companies are adopting remote or hybrid work cultures. The ability to work online and collaborate with the team is essential for a business. Portals should not be a medium where you just share files. It should be a platform that allows you to interact with your team and all the employees of the company.
For instance, allowing users to tag and comment on the files so that other members have updates about it. There are discussion boards that you can use to eliminate the chances of assumptions and have more clarity on the decisions.
All your team members will be using different tools. Collaborating can be a challenge as it gets difficult to bring everyone on the same page. But portals let you collaborate on different tools. It gets easier to communicate and keep the team updated.
There will be tools to communicate with your colleagues. This instant messaging feature will eliminate the need to send emails for small changes and updates. You can also form team-wise groups to keep your members updated. The chat also allows you to share files and other documents, which eases the whole process.
Self-service Options
Be it your customer or employees, they usually prefer to find answers to their questions by themselves. There are a few things that you can add to your portal that will make it easier for the ones finding answers, and you will have fewer incoming tickets.
Adding a knowledge base with rich articles, videos, etc., can help the users find the information at their convenience. You can add search bars to find what they are looking for. Having AI chatbots loaded with FAQs to find answers to common questions.
Having a self-service feature means you will have fewer incoming tickets. Your support agents will have time to focus on more complex and priority tickets. Also, adding documentation of different tools can help the employees refer whenever they are stuck at any point.
Personalization
The portal must be relevant to the user, or else it would not be that effective. The portal must allow the user to modify it as per their workflow so that they can make the most out of it. Customized dashboards allow the users to remove unwanted information and add the required widgets. This makes it easier for the user to work on it.
For example, if it is the customer portal, you can personalize your customer experience by showing them recommendations. You can send them offers and relevant content to improve engagement with them.
Customization features give you the authority to choose the content on the dashboard. It can be anything like giving your employees new widgets, calendars, and documents that they frequently refer to. If the required information is seen first, then it will be convenient for the user to use the portal rather than going through ten different places to find it.
Acknowledgement
You can ask users for their consent and request them to agree to the acknowledgment message. You can also request consent to new terms and conditions, new compliance policies, etc. The portal allows you to personalize the acknowledgment format like a popup, article, dropdown bar, etc. You can choose where you want to display the message. The portal will give you a detailed report of the users who have acknowledged the article or not. This feature can help you in case there are any legal actions taken on your business, and that is why you must consider this feature during web portal development.
Conclusion
The web portal brings in the missing interaction features in the website. Users can easily go through their data at their own convenience. Whether you want the portals for your customers, employees, partners, or maybe all, it will definitely smoothen the communication and data sharing path between you and them. There will be more transparency which will avoid miscommunications and misinterpretations.
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