Client portal and customer portal software

We’re all the same. When we buy from a company, we feel entitled to ask them questions, call the support help desk and expect quick turnarounds. This is especially true in B2B businesses where customers have invested thousands of dollars for a product. They expect quick service, sometimes to the same problems/concerns. However, B2C giants like Amazon have also set high standards for how they treat their customers, compelling small businesses to follow suit.

In short, customers expect concise, secure and streamlined communication. Avenues such as email and mobile messenger platforms fall short here and client portal software comes in.

In this guide, we’ll help you understand what a client portal is, how it helps your customer experience and the top brands to consider so you land on the right customer portal software.

What is client portal software?

Client portal software or customer portal software enables businesses to launch web portals for customer support. It combines features such as ticketing, knowledge base, and community spaces to help businesses deploy and maintain an online portal quickly.

Sure, a business could choose to develop a customer portal from scratch. However, that would mean a resource-intensive undertaking. While some companies may have unique requirements beyond a client portal software’s inbuilt features, most businesses can benefit from them with slight customizations.

Client portal solutions make building a customer portal efficient, quick and inexpensive.

Top 8 client portal software solutions

Now that you know the benefits of deploying a client portal, here are the top 7 software providers for you to choose from. It can be daunting to pick the right one. So, we detail the key features of each to simplify your decision-making.

1. Freshdesk Omni

The Freshworks AI-powered Freshdesk Omni combines the power of self-service bots, conversational messaging, and ticketing into a single solution. 

Freshdesk Omni is built on generative AI technology, using Freshworks’ Freddy AI. Freddy unlocks self-service for customers, empowers agents to solve problems in a flash, and gives leaders the insights they need to maximize business growth.

The  omnichannel Suite can elevate customer support capabilities with engaging customer experiences and improved agent productivity.

Key Features 

Freshdesk Omni provides:  

• Self-service automation is powered by Freshworks across all channels, including web, social media and mobile devices. This means less repetitive tasks for support teams and more freedom for customers to exercise their options.

• Robust ticketing and resolution enable effective collaboration and communication between agents and customers within a unified portal. This synergy leads to swift and efficient resolution of customer problems.

• Unified agent workspace provides agents with complete customer context so they can resolve issues faster. Freshworks streamlines interactions so that agents handle customer requests incoming from diverse channels in a single portal – thus eliminating the need to switch tabs constantly. 

• AI-backed insights and recommendations uncover key issues, create automated solutions, and execute them for you, all through simple prompts.

Other features:

• End-to-end portal customization

Tailor the look and feel of your customer portal with Freshdesk Omni. Point your support portal URL to your own domain to make customers feel like they never left your website. Add your logo, style and color to have the portal match your brand. Simply choose from a host of themes and templates to create a portal without developer assistance.

• Flexible ticket forms

Freshdesk Omni’s ticket forms help collect the required information so that agents don’t have to ask customers for basic, repetitive information. You can customize the form fields to fit your business type and internal support process and even introduce dynamic ticket forms where the fields change based on user inputs.

• Multi-product and multi-lingual support portal

Freshworks customer portal software is capable of multi-product and multi-lingual support. If you’re a large company or an enterprise, you can create dedicated client portals for each product and still manage all customer conversations in a central location. The language of each portal can be different based on the individual product and your audience’s geography. It also supports multi-lingual portals so customers can converse with your support team in their preferred language.

• Complete privacy control

Are there parts of your documentation that you must lock for logged-in users, users on certain plans, or even internal employees? A secure client portal software like Freshdesk Omni allows you to set up access controls and user permissions for secure document management. You can choose whether all support staff can view all tickets. This works excellently for B2B clients, with system administrators managing ticket visibility to support agents. Freshworks supports Single Sign On (SSO) with Google, Twitter, and Facebook.

• Auto-suggestion of solutions

When a customer creates a ticket in the portal, you can configure auto-suggest functionality to present relevant solution articles. Customers can choose to resolve the ticket independently with the help of the suggested article or still opt to receive support. Enabling self-service options for customers can significantly reduce ticket volume and save time for both agents and customers.

Why customers rave about Freshdesk Omni?

Freshdesk Omni is a unified, omnichannel, conversational support and advanced ticketing software backed by generative AI. The all-in-one solution helps boost customer service and agent productivity with: 

1. Self-service automation, which can be easily implemented across many messaging channels, allowing customers to resolve issues on their own and boost support productivity

2. A unified agent workspace with intelligent agent assistance and advanced ticketing capabilities that save time and resources for support teams

3. AI-backed insights and recommendations that can help leaders make better decisions about the customer experience and use insights to boost revenue and customer loyalty

4. Easy-to-implement and easy-to-scale support for better and faster resolutions that ultimately boost the bottom line. 

2. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is an AI-powered customer portal software from Freshworks designed for ticketing, ease of use, and rapid resolution of customer issues. With seamless ticketing experiences and self-service options across various portals, it improves customer support operations. Freshdesk's AI-driven automation routes tickets intelligently, ensuring smooth collaboration among team members for swift and precise resolutions. With Freshworks' built-in AI engine, Freddy AI, Freshdesk enables agents to deliver outstanding service consistently, delighting customers every time.

Key Features:

Freshdesk empowers you to deliver multichannel experiences through one portal. 

Advanced Ticketing System: Streamline workflows and prioritize resolutions with a powerful ticketing system. Track, manage, and resolve customer issues efficiently, through one portal.

Seamless multi-channel support: Seamlessly manage customer interactions through email, a self-service customer portal, Facebook, website forms, and a robust knowledge base. Empower customers to find solutions independently while ensuring all inquiries are efficiently addressed.

AI-powered platform for faster resolutions: Leverage Freddy AI to elevate customer service. Freddy AI enables agents by summarizing tickets, refining communication tone, drafting efficient responses, and even generating solution articles, thereby personalizing the customer experiences and reducing resolution time.

Collaboration made simple: Foster seamless communication and collaboration with built-in collaborative tools, including shared ownership, threaded conversations, and easy knowledge base management to keep everyone on the same page. 

Intelligent ticket routing: Ticket workflow automation helps automatically assign tickets to agents and groups based on past history (auto-triage), keywords, ticket requester, skill-based, time-triggered, intelligent ticket assignment, ticket properties-based, or round robin

Advantages:

Reduced Ticket Volume: Empower customers with a self-service knowledge base, deflecting repetitive inquiries and freeing agents for complex issues.

Improved Agent Productivity: Automated workflows, collaboration tools, and AI-powered assistance empower agents to resolve issues faster and focus on delivering exceptional service.

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Offer a convenient and consistent customer experience across all channels, leading to happier and more loyal customers.

Pricing

Pricing starts from: $0

Free trial period: 14 days

Why customers rave about Freshdesk?

Freshdesk offers a modern and intuitive user-friendly customer service interface that makes it easier for agents to navigate and manage tickets. 

Intuitive Interface: Freshdesk offers a user-friendly interface, making it easy for teams to learn and adopt the platform quickly.

Scalability: Freshdesk scales with your business, adapting the customer portal to your growing needs and evolving customer demands.

Customization: Tailor Freshdesk to your specific workflows and branding for a seamless customer experience.

Cost-Effectiveness: Freshdesk offers a range of plans to fit your budget, making it an accessible solution for businesses of all sizes.

3. Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM empowers businesses with a 360-degree customer lifecycle management solution. Its key features include:

• Contact management

• Pipeline management

• Workflow automation

• AI-powered conversational assistant

• Task management

• Customer support services

• Inventory management

• Reporting & analytics 

4. Clinked

Clinked is a cloud-based client portal and collaboration tool. It allows for efficient collaboration between teams, project groups, and business clients. Its key features include:

• Secure cloud storage

• Client portal customization

• Project management

• Task management

• Workflow automation

• Two-factor authentication for secure access

• Live preview your documents without downloading

• Native integration with Google Workspace, AdobeSign, DocuSign, and JotForm

5. One Hub

Onehub offers a suite of robust business tools with secure file storage and sharing services. Built for businesses of all sizes, its key functionalities include:

• Highest-level encryption of your data

• Control over file access 

• Virtual data rooms and client portals

• Integration with Google Docs

• Automatic watermarking and branded workspaces

• Custom agreements to share files

• Client portal customization

• Security and privacy

Pricing starts from: $15/month

Free trial period: 14 days

6. SuperOkay

SuperOkay offers freelancers, agencies, and service providers an easy-to-use dashboard to facilitate information exchange with their clients. Its key features include:

• White-labeled and custom domain name

• Native app integrations with Trello, Miro, Airtable, etc

• Rich document editor with smart modules

• Reusable blocks, case studies, and team bios

• Interactive briefs

• Project management

• Task management

• Real-time reporting and dashboards with embedded apps

• Knowledge base management

Pricing starts from: $25/month

Free trial period: 14 days

7. Hub Intranet

The Hub is a collaborative intranet solution leading brands use to boost employee engagement, share news and resources, and communicate effectively within one secure digital workplace. Its key features include:

• Branded and customizable client portal

• Tailored functionality and training to suit business objectives

• Integration with social tools and IT

• Customer feedback management

• Workforce management

• Task management

• Real-time reporting

• Free version upgrades

Pricing starts from: custom pricing*

*Free trial available

8. Huddle

Huddle is a document collaboration solution for enterprises and governments, empowering them to collaborate effectively within a secure environment. Its key features include.

• Control file versions

• Task management

• Document collaboration

• Workflow management

• Security and privacy

• Project management

• Real-time reporting and analytics

• Unified dashboard for all customer mentions

Pricing starts from: $30/month*

*Free trial available

How do companies benefit from client portals?

We’ve all spent countless hours pressing ‘1’ and ‘2’ endlessly over support/service calls. We know how powerless and annoyed we feel when that’s our only choice to talk to customer service. Email, messaging, mobile apps, phone calls, and social media are typically customers’ preferred channels to avail support. A dedicated portal not only unifies those support channels under a single purview but also empowers customers with self-service portal—and deflects IT tickets to optimize support resources.

A dedicated portal allows companies to save costs, deliver efficient customer support and integrate other fragmented customer management aspects, such as invoicing, ordering, project management and customer relationship management.

Every business that deals with repetitive customer service requests that can be centralized and automated and struggles with building a secure document repository needs a customer portal.

Let’s consider a business without a customer portal. Customers send support queries over an email address. Since their contact information and other data is siloed, customers need to repeat the context of their query- What did they purchase? What is it they need? Where is the issue? Did they come across the same issue before? How did they resolve it the last time and why has it happened again? 

Without a customer portal, a support agent is tasked with finding out the context of each customer query repeatedly before processing the request and moving on to the next one. It’s exhausting for both parties and expensive for the business.

A customer support portal is a way to meet rising customer expectations, stand out in a stiff competitive market and elevate customer satisfaction.

What should a customer portal software include?

A modern client portal will come adorned with the following features.

Ticket deflection functionality

Ticket deflection ensures that customers don’t need to contact the customer support help desk to troubleshoot every little problem. A robust portal deflects trivial support tickets by redirecting customers to an array of self-service resources and a well-connected community forum. 

This way, customers can self-serve their issues quickly, and agents can focus on addressing advanced customer queries. Automated ticket deflection minimizes the ticket volume for support staff and benefits both employees and customers.

Brand identity

A client portal should be an extension of your brand. It should be customizable to add your brand’s logo, consistent visuals and design, and a look and feel that resembles your company’s. For instance, if a customer interacts with your brand through your website and clicks on the support page to access the web customer portal, they must not know they have accessed a third-party portal. Consistency reassures customers they are in the right place. 

Your customer service portal should also fulfil your brand’s promise. For instance, if you guarantee a quick turnaround time, your customers should receive the same experience through the client portal.

Customer information repository

A client service portal lets a business capture customer information and perform analytics and reporting to understand them better. Customer data generally includes contact information, tickets raised, and how frequently and why customers have interacted and purchased from the brand across channels. 

Businesses use the stored data to add context to the customer’s problem and avoid unnecessary back and forth. Companies also use insights from captured data to inform product updates, monitor team performance and learn about customer pain points. 

Status of customer queries

A customer support portal is a transparent communication channel between brands and their customers. Customers can easily log in to the client support portal to view the status of their current and past tickets and answer questions such as: Is the request under process? Which agent is working on the ticket? How long before I get a response? 

Timely and updated information makes customers feel acknowledged and cared for. Access to information also makes them feel empowered and in charge of their experience.

Product updates and company policies

Customer service portals host information about products and policies of returns, exchanges, upgrades, order processing, etc.

Businesses that support multiple products may need a dedicated client portal to manage their diverse catalog. Tools like Freshdesk Omni offer multi-product support so that support requests stay consolidated behind the scenes while customers only see what’s relevant to them. 

Security

A secure client portal comes with features that boost its security. These functionalities include secure file sharing, multi-factor authentication, custom permissions on documents, active directory support, single sign-on (SSO) and secure cloud storage. These features enable high security for data and information housed in the client service portal, ultimately lowering the risk of a data breach and increasing trust.

Secure online data sharing includes assigning customers and employees various access permissions. So, a document restricted for everyone except an administrator would not be accessible to another user or role. This way, businesses can automatically prevent unauthorized access to information and relay data on a need-to-know basis.

Session timeouts are another way to secure a client support portal, eliminating any chances of mistaken access when a device is left logged in. SSO allows customers to authenticate themselves with a single set of credentials across multiple websites and portals, eliminating the need for complicated password management.

How to choose the right customer portal software?

Here are the must-have features when choosing a customer portal software.

Knowledge base management

Customers want to access high-value information about products to solve their problems using a client portal. The software should host this information in easily identifiable folders, FAQs, and guides. Some software also supports universal search functionality that helps customers find all relevant articles and solutions with one search.

Support community building

Customer portal software should empower customers to discuss solutions and troubleshoot issues among themselves. An ideal solution allows customers to share their opinions about the product with other customers, helping spread the word about their experiences. Such discussions may also uncover their common reservations before purchasing a product or the pain points they experience while using it. Businesses can use this information to build product updates or new offerings.

Ticket creation and task management

Portal software helps customers raise queries and complaints as tickets and channels tickets into a unified dashboard where agents can resolve them. If a customer doesn’t find the solution to their issue in a self-service resource, they can easily transition to contacting a support agent. Then, customers can track their support tickets as they get processed. On the other hand, support agents can efficiently manage tickets and associated tasks and resolve them asynchronously.

Access to product updates and announcements

Your chosen customer portal software should integrate with third-party apps through APIs and enable a smooth workflow and collaboration. This helps teams to keep the portal updated with company policies and product releases so customers can learn about them in a central environment.

How to build a customer portal solution?

By now, you know a client portal is necessary to deliver efficient customer support and service. Robust customer service software like Freshdesk Omni allows you to build a client portal customized for your brand. With themes and templates, you can quickly build a customer portal that serves customer expectations and business needs.

You can start by customizing and white-labeling the portal with your company’s logo and branding style. It’s important to refrain from overloading the portal with branding materials that may visually overwhelm customers. 

Once you’ve branded the client portal, enable ticket submission and chat options that work well for your business. Finally, integrate the portal with your website so it’s easy to find. You can do this by placing a link or inserting a widget onto your website that directs customers to the portal when they click on it.

Additionally, you can enable a knowledge base, community forum and other self-service options for your clients. You can also use multi-product support and launch your portals in different languages to support a worldwide audience.

Check out a collection of successful customer portals powered by Freshdesk Omni.