Customer Portal Feature Overview
The customer portal steps up the self-service experience for your customers. The new customer portal enables you to fully exploit the capabilities of the Web as the ideal channel to deliver superior self-service while at the same lowering the cost of serving your customers. Because the customer portal is 100-percent hosted by salesforce.com just like the Salesforce application itself, you get the same service delivery benefits and none of the maintenance and infrastructure headaches that come with hosting a portal yourself.
Feature Details:
The customer portal steps up the self-service experience for your customers. The new customer portal enables you to fully exploit the capabilities of the Web as the ideal channel to deliver superior self-service while at the same lowering the cost of serving your customers. Because the customer portal is 100-percent hosted by salesforce.com just like the Salesforce application itself, you get the same service delivery benefits and none of the maintenance and infrastructure headaches that come with hosting a portal yourself.
- Put more power behind your customer self-service strategy
- Enable entirely new self-service processes
- Provide differentiated service to different customers and segments
- Completely customize your portal with the Apex platform
- User Interface: The full power of Salesforce’s award-winning user interface is available to your customers in the customer portal. Popular capabilities such as advanced search, quick create, and recently used items create a superior customer experience. You can also personalize the UI for each user or user group so your customers are presented with the precise information they need.
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- Advanced Case Management and Knowledge Base: In addition to logging and viewing cases, you can now allow your customers to edit or even close their cases, search for cases, and associate cases to existing assets. Portal users can also search and browse for rich content solutions in your knowledge base.
- Documents: Provide access to product documentation and other relevant documents to your customers with folders and document search in the portal.
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- Custom Objects and Tabs: Create and deliver entirely new self-service processes—g oing well beyond cases and solutions— with custom objects and tabs. You can expose custom objects and tabs created in Salesforce to your customers in the customer portal to meet the unique customer service and support requirements of your organization and your industry.
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- Portal List Views: You can define columns and filters for case and custom object list views so that your customers can sort lists and quickly find the information they are seeking.
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- Multiple User Profiles and Record Types: Provide a personalized experience to different accounts and customer segments using configurable portal user profiles and record types.
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- Account Role Hierarchy and Sharing: You can use a three-level role hierarchy inside each customer account to give executive and manager-level users access to data owned by users below them in the hierarchy. In addition, you can create sharing rules to allow portal users to share data with other users.
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- Branding and Style Configuration: You can quickly brand your customer portal by customizing the home page, header, and footer as well as changing the portal colors and fonts with an easy-to-use style editor.
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- Unlimited Customization: The power of the Apex platform gives you greater flexibility to extend the same advanced capabilities that are available to you in the Salesforce application to your customers via the portal. All the advanced customization and extension features of the Apex platform—including s-controls, custom buttons, mash-ups, and much more—are available to help you provide a streamlined experience to your customers.
