Customer Self-Service Portal: Crash Course

5 min read

Nikita R.

Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.

Updated: Jan 13th, 2025

What is a Customer Self-Service Portal?

It’s an online platform used by many organizations across various industries. They are popular platforms that allow customers of a business to perform tasks independently through the portal. One good example of this scenario is when a company displays a how-to guide on its self-service portal so that customers can follow the content provided to independently troubleshoot a product at home without the help of a support agent.

Customer self-service portals are an excellent system for enhancing your customer experiences. And, they can also streamline your business operations drastically by reducing the number of queries submitted to customer support teams.

Salesforce Customer Portal Features

If you already enjoy the benefits of a Salesforce subscription, you might want to consider building your customer portal with the world-leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform. We invite you to sit back, relax, and take a look at a few features of a customer portal from Salesforce.

You can choose between the Customer Community, Partner Community, and Employee Community customer portal solutions with Salesforce. Each of these customer portals has self-service options and its own set of features and capabilities, but to get you started, we have curated their standard features:

Firstly, Salesforce portals allow you to configure who can access your portal based on user roles and permissions. By setting access control on your customer portal, you can control who can see your content and what they can do on your customer portal, such as logging a support request ticket.

With a Salesforce portal, you can go ahead and customize the interface to match the art direction of your brand. Portal customization can provide customers with a consistent experience across all your interactions.

And the best thing about a Salesforce portal is that they have self-service options. For example, you could add frequently asked question sections and upload documents about your products so that users can find answers to help troubleshoot problems during non-working business hours.

Is this the type of portal you were looking for? Wait, there’s more: you can also add functionality to your customer portal that allows customers to submit cases, track the status of their orders, and manage their own account data independently.

Building a Customer Self-Service Portal

Usually, to build a self-service customer portal from scratch, you would need a whole project team to cover a variety of design and technical skills. Take a look at our table that reveals the roles and skills required to build a customer self-service portal without the help of a no-code platform like Titan.

Role	Skills
Project Manager	The project manager will monitor all the stages in the software development lifecycle. They usually create project plans that include milestones and deadlines but are also responsible for assigning work to team members and making sure the portal meets its requirements.
Business Analyst	The business analyst elicits requirements from all stakeholders involved in creating the portal. They will be responsible for documenting these findings and making sure that the team understands the features and functionalities of the customer self-service portal.
UX Designer	The user experience designer will create the user interface for the customer self-service portal with wireframes and prototypes. These designs need to be intuitive as they impact user experience.
Front-End Developer	This developer will focus on creating the customer self-service portal based on the designs provided by the UX designer. The front-end developer will use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build the portal’s user interface.
Back-End Developer	This developer will work with server-side logic and databases. They focus on storing data securely and making sure customers who use the portal can access their data.
Database Administrator	The database administrator manages the database that stores customer information.
Security Specialist	A security specialist will make sure that your portal is safe from cyber threats and aims to protect your customers’ data.
QA Tester	Quality Assurance testers will test your portal and raise any bugs that need to be fixed. They ensure that your portal functions well.
DevOps Engineer	The DevOps engineer is responsible for deploying and adding any automation to your portal to ensure it is always running and accessible to your customers.
Content Specialist	A content specialist will create content for your portal. They will also focus on updating content and providing accurate information to customers.
Legal Expert	It’s always wise to consult with a legal expert to make sure that your customer portal is compliant with any regulations in the region it operates in, as there might be specific data protection laws that must be followed.
Project Stakeholders	These are all the people who will provide guidance and feedback for the portal, such as executives, marketing teams, or customer service reps, to name a few.

Why Automate Self-Service Processes?

Customer self-service portals are a great approach if you want to automate self-service processes. For example, suppose you find that your organization is growing rapidly, and the amount of repetitive tasks your employees have to undertake is starting to delay project timelines. In that case, it’s probably time to start self-service automation processes.

A common repetitive task that could burden your employees is data entry into Salesforce for adding customer details. With a customer portal that uses customer self-service software, customers can log into their accounts to verify or edit their details, which can be pushed to Salesforce to eliminate manual data entry tasks.

The Management of Self-Service Portals

Managing customer service portals requires many steps and depends on the software or platform that you choose to integrate into Salesforce. There are many third-party apps that you could choose from to help you manage your customer self-service portal. Here are a few that spring to mind:

Community Cloud

Zapier

Jira Service Management

SurveyMonkey

DocuSign

Twilio

Desk.com

MailChimp

SurveyGizmo

Titan Web

FAQ

Before you head off to create magical customer self-service portals or a community portal in Salesforce for users to help you scale your business operations, take a look at our three short questions and answers related to customer self-service portals.

What is a customer self-service portal?

It’s an online platform that uses self-service software to display content to logged-in users so that they can find the answers that they need to solve their issues without the help of a support technician or argent.

What is a customer portal example?

Google has a solid self-service portal for customers who want on-demand self-service, including a FAQ center, a Knowledge Base, and discussion forums.

What is another name for a customer portal?

You could use “client portal software”.

Check out Titan Web

As we saw in our article, creating a customer self-service portal from scratch requires much coding and design knowledge. We recommend choosing Titan if you want a powerful, no-code platform that integrates bi-directionally with Salesforce Experience Cloud to improve self-help customer services.

With Titan, you can create websites, customer portals, partner portals, complex forms, surveys, and so much more! We are your all-in-one solution to perform any business process you want! Contact us on one of our social media channels below for more information.

We hope to see you soon!

Titan Website

Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.