Nowadays, 88% of customers expect brands to have self-service portals. With Dynamics 365, it often becomes difficult to collaborate with partners and vendors because of constant back and forth of communication. Sometimes it may lead to confusion, errors, and eat up a lot of your time. However, you can easily solve these challenges by leveraging a Dynamics 365 portal. Here’s how:
What is Dynamics 365 Portal?
Dynamics 365 portals extend the functionality of your existing Dynamics 365 solutions. It is done via CRM data to portal users like customers, partners, employees, or communities. It opens up collaborations and engagement opportunities with your target audience.
Customer Self-Service
The Dynamics 365 portal allows you to reduce the incoming request volume for service agents. On your portal, you can provide a knowledge base targeted at resolving frequently asked questions by customers. This way you answer customers’ questions before they ask. To enhance the capabilities of your self-service portal you can add live chat, personalized customer collaborations, and analytics features. It creates a convenient path for customers to interact with your brand.
Community Forum
To enhance interactions with customers about your product/service, create and monitor community forums. You can analyze the conversations and get to know the feedback of your product/service. And get suggestions and ideas to do something new or improve the existing.
Partner Collaboration
If your business requires collaborating with distributors and sellers, a partner portal can be a solution. With this portal, you can cooperate with your partners and share important data with the involved parties. This will avoid confusion between you and your partners and help you streamline the sales process so that everyone is on the same page.
Employee Self Service
With this portal, you can target specific HR features and data for the employees. You can share knowledge internally with your employees. You can also share training material on the knowledge base. It helps you enhance the company’s corporate spirit by introducing media galleries, communities, and events.
Vendor Collaboration
If your business requires dealing with the supply chain then this portal is efficient enough for the supply chain management. With the Vendor portal, you can collaborate with your vendors and manage all operations on a secure platform. The vendors will be able to add, manage and track orders directly. This will reduce back-and-forth communication between you and the vendors. They will have all the essential information on orders, stocks, delivery dates, etc.
Structure and Functionality of Dynamics 365 Portal
Your web portal has the following elements:
Web Pages
Portal delivers content via web pages. They are linked to a single URL address. These web pages connect as parent-child relationships and form sitemaps. They also provide access to web files, forums, etc. You can create your own templates or customize the existing ones.
Content Snippets
This portal allows you to create, store, and use snippets, including text or HTML layout. With snippets, you can create a consistent look and feel of the portal. It makes multiple languages more manageable.
Entity Lists and Forms
Entity lists define which CRM and ERP data are displayed on the portal. You can create and manage the entity list and set workflows for various display formats, grid lists, calendars, or spreadsheets. To work with entity lists, Dynamics portals feature entity forms. With these forms, the portal pages can interact with CRM functionalities. Each time a user fills up the form, CRM qualifies it as a lead.
Conclusion
Adding Dynamics 365 portal extension to your existing CRM will help you serve your customers, employees, suppliers, vendors, etc. in a more manageable way. It will help you build a community of loyal customers which is required if you want to build a brand and grow your business.
