Open for Business: Introducing Your New Client Portal

November 7, 2013

6

min read

Table of Contents

When we set out to improve the client portal months ago, we hadn't expected such an astounding and positive response. All the user feedback allowed us to build the best client portal to provide high quality service to your clients. After many months of effort, you’ll now find the client portal live in your Accelo account!

Our main priority when building the new Client Portal was to help you deliver better, more responsive, more transparent and higher quality service to your clients - all while saving you time. Sounds pretty good huh? With the portal, you'll spend less time chasing your clients (and vice versa) via email or phone, and instead give your clients on-demand access to their project, issue, retainer, and account information - while leaving you in full control.

Benefits

Here are some major benefits our users are telling us this Client Portal will them:

Up-to-date account information for your clients: they can log-in anytime to see an overall snapshot of their account and don’t have to make phone calls to find out what’s going on.
Enhances collaboration and transparency: your clients will appreciate how clear-cut you are about your services (but they won't know how much you're not sharing - that's our little secret).
Asynchronous communication: you won’t need to clear your calendar to conduct business when your clients can access your portal 24/7. This is especially awesome for signoffs where you're wanting feedback from clients... but they'll only give it when it suits them.
“Sticky” factor: you’ll drive clients to a portal where they interact with your brand, instead of a series of emails.
Makes approvals easier and faster: get approved for your work and give your clients a place to make comments against attachments and work descriptions.
Secure documents: the portal lets clients know that their data is protected when they send sensitive documents (coming next week).
Client service bonus points: the portal shows your clients that you go above and beyond when it comes to providing quality service.

Features & Highlights

Here's some of the features and highlights of the new Client Portal that that's now live in your account:

Customize the look and feel of your client portal

The Client Portal is meant to help your clients engage with *your* business. That’s why we’ve built it to be easily customizable to match the look and feel of your brand. With the new Client Portal, you can upload your own logo, add a custom background and choose your own colors.

For more information on how to get started with customization, check out our help site.

Choose what clients see with fine-grained permissions

The portal is built to allow you full control over the details you share with your clients. While you might want to share budget progress on a project, you might want to keep time usage private with your internal team. The new Client Portal now lets you open or close access to specific clients, specific groups of users in a client, or even specific sales, projects, issues or contracts.

For more information on how to manage permissions, check out our help site.

Get collaborative client approval with the signoff module

Here’s something both your team and your clients will love. Anything that you needs your clients’ approval, such as a proposal or design mockup, can be done through your Client Portal. As a completely new feature, the sign-offs module will make it easy for you to get feedback or approval from clients. You’ll get to easily upload files or attachments you want approved and receive sign-offs or comments from your clients.

For more information on sign-offs and approvals, check out our help site.

Share & Track Tasks with Clients

When your client creates a task, the manager of the sale, project, issue, etc will be notified via email, but is not assigned to the user. This makes sure that managers retain control of the team workload. Whenever tasks have status changes, clients will be notified by email - boosting collaboration and transparency.

Securely Share Files & Attachments (coming soon)

When a client creates an attachment, it’ll automatically be stored to the sale, project, issue, etc and let the manager know that a new file has been uploaded. This is perfect for situations where your clients need to upload revisions or large documents that are a pain to email - now they can stay inside your portal.

For more information on how to set up permissions, check out our help site.

Encourage self-service and peer invitations

Now that you’re up to speed on what you can offer your clients with the portal, it’s time to get them in there! Inviting your clients to the portal is now easier than ever. Anyone you invite will receive a special invitation link that gives them access to their own account in your portal.

Your clients will also be able to invite their colleagues to use your portal. If those colleagues aren't already in your client database, they’ll automatically be added in when they create their account. This means that your clients are not only interacting with you, but they’ll be spreading the word about your business as well.

For more information on how to send invitations, check out our help site.

Let clients see billing histories & even pay online (coming soon)

You're in business to get paid, so it makes sense to make it as easy as possible for your clients to see their billing history, outstanding invoices & even pay their account online thanks to our integrations with Stripe and Authorize.net.

...and more to come!

The Client Portal today has launched in Beta, and we'll be steadily adding new features, functionality (and patching a few bugs to be sure) in the coming few weeks. We'd love to hear what you think - especially if you can think of fields you want to share or see a bug - so if you have something to let us know please email [email protected].

Author Bio