Self-Provisioning Portals Add Value to Customers

Ease of use is a key requirement for any provisioning portal; it should be simple for resellers to provision new customers, easy to manage billing, and analytics should provide visibility of activity and usage. 

However as a service delivery tool, resellers should leverage their self-service portals to add value to their relationships with customers.

Rather than just a management tool, portals should be viewed as a customer relationship tool that helps drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Resellers should review all analytics and audit data available to them, to highlight data that can be used to add real value to their relationship.  This could be for example data on usage, trends, unused services, how utilisation could be improved etc.

In order to achieve this, a self-service portal should deliver in-depth analytics and audit capability – not just the ‘what’ but also the ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘who’.  With increased visibility and understanding delivered via dashboards and executive summaries, resellers can use the analytics and audits from portals to better understand their own businesses as well as their customers.

This window into trends and patterns of what is being used, where and by whom provides insights for upsell opportunities.  And with more data to understand customers, resellers can add more value around the services that they offer – an enhanced managed service delivering real business value.

Self-service provisioning portals can significantly reduce time to market and help resellers to deliver a better customer experience that is geared towards their customers’ business needs.

Parts of this article were originally published in Comms Business.