A customer portal is the part of a company's website where a signed-in customer sees their own account: the orders or jobs, the invoices, the documents, the open cases and the answers to the questions that would otherwise become a ticket. What is a customer portal, for a company of a few hundred accounts, is less a piece of software than a decision about which questions the customer should be able to answer without a person: where is my engineer, what does this invoice line mean, where is the contract I signed. An online customer portal that shows those three things has already removed the bulk of the inbox. This page sets out what the portal shows, what it has to answer, why customer care portal and customer experience portal are vendor names for the same thing, and how the content behind it is sized from the tickets the company already gets.
What the portal shows: the customer's own record
The account: who the customer is, what they have bought or contracted, the people on their side who may sign in. The status: the job scheduled, the engineer assigned, the order shipped, the renewal date. The money: invoices issued, paid and open, with each line explained. The documents: the contract, the certificates, the reports, downloadable without asking. The cases: every request the customer has raised, its status and its history. A portal that shows those five things answers the questions that make up most of a small company's tickets, because most tickets are a customer asking to be told something the company already knows.
What the portal has to answer, and how to find out
The company's own ticket history says which questions the portal must answer: the twenty questions that account for most of the volume, grouped by category, with the count per category over a month. A help centre article per recurring question, written once, answers the next hundred askers. The free self-service portal content worksheet on this site does that sizing from the figures you enter: ticket categories, tickets per category, articles per category and minutes per article, and it reads the articles to write, the hours they take and the share of tickets they cover. A customer experience portal that launches without that sizing launches with a search box and nothing behind it.
Care portal, experience portal, customer portal: one thing
Vendors name the same product by the outcome they are selling: a customer care portal to a support team, a customer experience portal to a marketing team, a customer portal to everyone else. The thing built is the same: the signed-in account view, the help centre and the request form that raises a case only when the answer was not there. What differs is the price and the modules bundled around it. A small company should buy the three parts and measure them by the deflection figure, the share of would-be tickets the portal answered, month by month. Deflectvo Pro keeps every customer's account, cases, articles read and requests raised against the customer, with that figure per month, and exports it.
Questions people ask about customer portal
What is a customer portal?
A signed-in area of a company's website where a customer sees their own account, status, invoices, documents and cases, reads the answers to the common questions and raises a request only when the answer was not there.
What should a customer portal include for a small company?
The account, the current status of jobs or orders, invoices with their lines explained, the documents the customer is entitled to, the case history, and help centre articles for the twenty questions that fill the inbox.
Is a customer care portal different from a customer portal?
No. Care portal, experience portal and customer portal are vendor names for the same three parts: the account view, the help centre and the request form. The difference is the modules and the price bundled around them.