What is the difference between a customer relationship management (CRM) system and a customer portal?

customer relationship management (CRM) system

What is Customer relationship management ?

Customer relationship management (CRM) suggests a more sophisticated system with more options for sales and marketing. CRM systems allow users to schedule upcoming actions, events, and meetings, move prospects through the sales funnel, generate email lists, and categorize prospects and customers. It does more than just store data; they also manage relationships, sales cycles, and funnels.

A Customer relationship management (CRM) is especially beneficial for companies with lengthy or complicated sales cycles that call for constant client involvement, set follow-up dates, and thorough communication logs.

Customer relationship management

What is a Customer Portal?

A website called a customer portal is made to provide current customers with access to the services and data they require. It typically requires logging in and is private and secure.

Account data, payment data, case data, account history, downloadable digital files, access to support resources, and a way for users to input data are all possible inclusions.

A customer portal is essentially a digital information hub and exchange mechanism between a business or organization and its clients.

Let’s discuss the difference between Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Portal

The primary distinction between customer relationship management and customer portal is that the customer portal is a self-service website for customers, whereas Customer relationship management is software that aids in developing customer relationships through the tracking of leads, management of pipelines, workflow automation, etc.

Customer relationship management includes the following features

Statistics and Dashboard interface

Your sales agents and receptionists will be able to complete their tasks more quickly and hit the sales targets set for them thanks to the CRM Interface, which presents all crucial statistics and dashboards in an easily understandable manner at a glance.

Customer portals can offer a variety of significant advantages to both you and your clients.

Customers can utilize a customer portal as a knowledge base and prevent repeating inquiries by keeping track of their support requests and the responses or resolutions they obtained for earlier ones.

Monitoring and tracking the progress of their support requests gives customers peace of mind that their issues and queries addressed.

Contact management

It maintains a searchable database of contact details, including names, residences, and also social media accounts.

Records of clients

This CRM software Dubai helps you keep track of all your clients and also future clients and will remind you to contact them via emails, phone calls, texts, and social media.

Lead management

The lead section has to be updated with all of the leads that the sales representatives have generated.

This allows you to keep track of every possible consumer and their pertinent data. You can use this section to fill in information about the exciting products, the price they wish to pay, and the adjustments they require.

You can also assign the leads to the appropriate sales representatives or support team members for additional follow-up and discussion.

Opportunity management

The marketing team’s produced leads can be qualified and advanced to the opportunity stage.

You may now screen out potential clients and the deals they are interested in.

Thus, the sales team can communicate with customers directly and provide them with product estimates.

Make a Better Proposal

Receive professionally designed, automatically generated business proposals and invoices ready to be sent to clients.

You may also quickly check various discounts and rates that are offered to multiple consumers.

Users can put the payment terms, expiration date, delivery terms, and other selling details here.

Users can additionally specify the transaction’s currency and VAT values.

With our quotation and invoice generators, you don’t have to worry about creating a unique invoice for each client; we deliver ready-made pdf files directly to them.

Using your company’s logo, colors, and trademark signatures, we can customize invoice and report templates for your business.

Workflow automation

By designing workflows that initiate actions or send follow-up reminders for further actions, it automates repetitive chores.

The customer portal has the following functionalities

The standards for your self-service client portal will change depending on the precise needs and uses of your firm.

It is best to look for client portal software that is simple to implement and customize when choosing which client portal software to utilize.

Several client portal features to keep an eye out for are as follows:

• Secure, round-the-clock self-service on desktop and mobile.
• Management and placement of orders.
• Ability to modify and include your own corporate identity.
• Statements and online payments are available.
• Support for huge load volumes and multiple currencies.
• Simple to embed into business websites.
• Delivery and credit memos
• The capacity to read and write data as well as personalized CSS style options.
• Experience with numerous key business systems with market-proven functionality for simple data integration, such as SAP, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.