Back in December we asked our customers for some feedback to help us prioritise some of our internal development projects. Over 95% of respondents told us they would like to have access to a self-service facility on our website to view and manage their account information.
During 2015 we invested over 600 hours of development into improving Midas, our internal customer management system, to improve our invoicing, payment processing and customer support facilities. We’d also been working, on and off, on several features that we’d planned to launch – including an online helpdesk ticketing system and a facility to enable customers who use out website analytics system to view their website performance data online. We’d started working on these features with no clear roadmap and development dragged on (and on) throughout the year.
Fast forward to December and we thought we’d ask our customers what they would like us to be working on to improve the service we offer. This was a big eye-opener for us and gave us a clear end-result to aim for – an online customer account portal – something we’d thought about but didn’t think would be something our customers would want to use (after all, it’s not like we’re a mobile phone provider or an energy supplier!).
We’re now starting to roll-out Client Connect, our new customer account management portal to our customers. We’ve gone way beyond just giving our customers access to invoices and payment receipts – some of the main features are listed below and will be accessible to all of our customers in the coming weeks:
- View contact information we hold about you and your business (we’ll be adding the facility to update these details online shortly!)
- View and add new payment methods to your account.
- View your full invoice and payment history, going back to when we first started trading in 2006. You can also download PDF copies of any invoices or payment receipts issued for your account.
- View web design project estimates – created through our online project estimator.
- View quotes we’ve sent you, along with contracts that have been singed online (we’ll be blogging about that next!)
- View projects we’re carrying out or completed for you along with online project status tracking. (for projects opened from January 2016)
- View products and services on your account – such as website hosting, domain names and social media management – along with renewal dates and prices.
- Access your full helpdesk case history – including automated emails we’ve sent you and emails you’ve sent and received to our support and sales addresses. You can also open new cases and add updates to existing cases.
- View your website analytics data and website performance reports – we’ve made data going back to 2006 accessible to all customers who have used our analytics service since then.
At the moment most of the features are read-only but we’re already working on making it possible for you to update information and make changes to your services online and we’d love to hear from you with any suggestions about what we can add to Client Connect.