I’ve written my first email blast to customers with shaking hands and worried eyes. We announced we had created a customer portal for them in the email. Up until that point, our support team provided email support only. It wasn’t a positive experience for customers and our team, as the team had to manually attach every email inbound or outbound to our CRM system. As a result, customers experienced hidden chaos that impacted the level of service they received.
Back in the day, the customer portal was the go-to solution. It evolved into a tool that is now widely used as a backdrop for interactions and information retrieval, the “Help Center.”. Despite this, customers still need portals, welcome packs, and other types of cheat sheets to understand how to contact support, seek answers, and access LMS.
Moreover, customers have to locate their CSM, TAM, and AM emails to ask a question and book a meeting through email signatures. It is common to find endless links between many of these systems, and this leads to a disjointed customer experience and makes everything more complicated than it should be.
Since I advocated multiple tools for many years, I am somewhat responsible for that as well. I always used the following strategy for all the systems I chose for my teams:
1. Define the customer experience that I want to deliver, considering factors such as average customer age, role, field, and level of touch.
2. List the benefits such a system would bring to the organization.
3. Put the above into a requirements document, with what I want to see in such a tool.
Next, I evaluate each tool against my list of requirements, looking for one that fits close to the bill. Regardless of what I’ve used before, the system that satisfies most requirements will win. The tool should match the task, not the other way around.
This approach has solid merits since we should only use the most effective tools to provide the highest quality service possible. Although each popular desk system (Zendesk, Freshdesk, etc.) is more robust in some areas, they lack in others, so it was always the obvious choice to use multiple tools towards this goal.
I was wrong, or rather, the world changed. And yet, so many companies still do it the same way. Just as we have seen a trend toward PLG in recent years (due to remote work and more people familiarizing themselves with online everything, etc.), we will also see a shift to providing services in-app, inside the product itself. By connecting the service to the product in a more integrated way, we can resolve more friction in the process.
As an alternative to hordes of portals (one for partners, one for customers, etc.), imagine that a seamless experience lives within your app as an embedded widget, where customers can find contact info like Peleg’s email address or phone number, schedule meetings with me directly from the widget, look for content to solve an issue, or follow a how-to side-by-side. Through the widget, they can contact customer support, communicate with them, and access the Learning Management System.
In fact, unlike a Help Center, most links do not take them outside the app. Keep them engaged and inside the product.
So I’ve convinced you that you should integrate as much as possible in-app. What’s next?
It’s likely that you already use a customer service system (whether it’s Zendesk, Freshdesk, SFDC Service Cloud, etc.). All customer service systems have widgets, but they are not all equal. As with most things, there are trade-offs, as some systems have a more robust embedded widget (e.g., Intercom) but are less powerful for other functions. Here are some tips to help you determine which direction you should take towards an integrated in-app customer experience:
- Can you create an integrated experience within your current platform using the widget it offers?
- Can you build a custom portal within your development team, or do you have the budget for an external development team to develop one for you?
If the answer to both questions is no, you may still be able to find a workaround, utilizing additional products that can help achieve some of it, as with the entire customer experience, every little change counts as well, and you can always think long-term about how you can make it work.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and feel free to share!
