Spotlight #2 - Overview on Zoho CRM's Portals

Hello everyone,

In today's post, we will give you a brief overview on Zoho CRM's Portals.

Portals serve as a gateway through which you can give your customers, vendors or partners an easy access to the CRM modules and some of the associated data like products, inventory, quotes and so on. Also, based on the accessibility permission the users can create, edit or view the data in these modules.

Benefits of Portal

Portals can be beneficial to your organization as well as the customers in many ways. In the list below we have comprised few such benefits:

Share information - Portals provide a platform through which you can exchange notes, business documents, product updates and so on with your customers.
Access data - Deploying portals will enable the customers to instantly access their data as well as organization related information in CRM. It will serve as a single gateway that can let your customers track their application status, quote details, pending payments and so on without your intervention at every step. Hence, increasing the productivity and overcoming any delays in communication.
Attach files/documents - Customers can view, edit or update their information and add relevant documents or supportive data right inside CRM.
Secured Sharing - Misuse or loss of sensitive data can pose a threat that can be effectively avoided by given restricted access to such information. For example, you can share the quotes module only with a particular set of vendor and restrict the others from viewing it.

Portal User types

Based on the type of users who will be accessing the portal, it can be categorized into retailers, manufacturers, students, distributors, partners and so on.

Configuring Portal

Portals can be of two types - client and non-client portal. The client portal is the first and the default portal that you create in your CRM account, you can add up to 5000 users without making any payments. We also let you create non-client portals for the leads and custom modules and add more portal users by purchasing the non-client portals. You can check out our payment plan to make the purchases. Few key actions that you will perform while configuring portal:

Select a module for which the portal is created and its associated modules.
Choose the layout(s) of these modules.
Define record permission like read only, view, read and write.
Choose either list view or canvas view for the module.
Use the lookup filter option to decide which records the user will view and access.
Specify field permission like read only or read and write.

Changing a portal user type

There can be chances when you have to move a user from one portal user type to another. For example, if a user who is a customer is interested in investing in your company will now become a part of the stakeholder's team, in such case you will have to give him access to those modules that are pertinent to a stakeholder. You can accomplish this effortlessly by moving the user from customer portal to stakeholder portal.

Choosing portal user type during lead conversion

During lead conversion either manually or automatically using the workflow rules, you can choose the portal user type to which the particular lead must be transferred to. For example, if you have created two portal user types in Contacts module - Health Insurance Policies and Auto Insurance Policies, while converting a qualified lead to a policy holder you can choose to which portal the buyer must be added to.

Learn more about portals here.

We hope you found this post useful, go ahead and try it out and write to us what you think by commenting below.

Regards,

Anumita

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