Create a customer center in Ontraport so you can offer convenient self-service and save time on administrative tasks.
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Customer center
Course Instructor
- How a customer center is a win-win for you and your customers
- How to build your customer center
- Steps to protect your customer center pages with a login
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Transcript
In this video, I’ll give you a quick overview of how to create a customer center in Ontraport.
Giving your customers access to manage things on their own is a big win-win for your business. It makes things more convenient for your customers because they can review and manage all their own information, like their email address, credit card details, invoice history and more.
And life gets easier on your end too. Since your customers will be able to help themselves, you won’t have to spend time finding and updating information on their behalf.
The best part is you can put this together using a single element in Ontraport’s drag-and-drop page builder.
Let me show you how it works.
Imagine you’re at the grocery store. You’re just trying to buy a pint of milk. Are you going to use the self-checkout? Or would you rather stand in line so a cashier can ring you up?
I don’t know about you, but I’d go for the self-checkout. It’s just quicker and easier to do it myself and get out of there before I find myself in the ice cream aisle.
Turns out, most consumers would do the same thing. The Harvard Business Review reports that regardless of industry, 81 percent of customers will try to take care of their own issues by themselves before asking a live rep for help. Eighty-one percent!
Customers are especially eager to take the reins when it comes to their own sensitive information. For example, customers who want to change their credit card would probably want to log in and update those payment settings themselves — partially for the convenience, but also because it feels more secure. People don’t want to give out their personal details over the phone, or worse — over email. That feels sketchy because it IS sketchy and insecure.
So providing a way for customers to manage their own information isn’t just a nice perk. It’s become a standard expectation for doing business online.
Not to mention, you’ll save time and money with fewer support requests. Your team will be spending time on things that require creativity and problem-solving, rather than simple requests to update customer info.
Building your customer center is easy. It works just like any other page in your account.
Just drag and drop an element from the “Customers” section here. You can add buttons for your customers to update their credit card, change their password, or even see their purchase history, subscriptions or payment plans.
You can pick and choose from these elements to create your customer center however you’d like. But in most cases, you’ll want all three sections: payments, passwords and purchase histories.
To learn more about these elements and how to use them in your customer center, check out the “Page elements” video from our “Pages” series.
One more important thing — your customer center needs to be on a page that’s protected as part of a membership site. That way, users will need to log in before they can get access.
This is important because the customer center manages sensitive information. It’s your responsibility to make sure that information is secure — and you do that by sticking it behind a login.
You may not be interested in membership sites as a product. But this is still worth setting up — even if it’s purely for the purpose of offering a customer center. It’ll be more like a “self-service portal” than a “membership site” in the end.
We have a whole section of lessons dedicated to building membership sites, so I won’t go over all the details here. But basically, you’ll need to follow three steps to set this up:
First, you’ll protect the page that your customer center lives on.
Do this by going to your display settings. Change your page so it’s only visible by logged in members here.
Second when you publish your page, be sure to select a domain where you’ve created a membership site. If that doesn’t make sense, watch the videos in our Membership sites section — you’ll find more details there.
And finally, make sure you’re granting the proper access to new customers and sending them the correct login details. You can do this with an automation — and, once again, you’ll find lots of details on how that works in our Membership sites videos.
That’s the gist of it! Now you know the basics of a customer center and how you can start setting up your own in Ontraport. Your customers will appreciate the control and convenience of it for sure.
Coming up you’ll learn more about communicating with your customers about charges.
Giving your customers access to manage things on their own is a big win-win for your business. It makes things more convenient for your customers because they can review and manage all their own information, like their email address, credit card details, invoice history and more.
And life gets easier on your end too. Since your customers will be able to help themselves, you won’t have to spend time finding and updating information on their behalf.
The best part is you can put this together using a single element in Ontraport’s drag-and-drop page builder.
Let me show you how it works.
Imagine you’re at the grocery store. You’re just trying to buy a pint of milk. Are you going to use the self-checkout? Or would you rather stand in line so a cashier can ring you up?
I don’t know about you, but I’d go for the self-checkout. It’s just quicker and easier to do it myself and get out of there before I find myself in the ice cream aisle.
Turns out, most consumers would do the same thing. The Harvard Business Review reports that regardless of industry, 81 percent of customers will try to take care of their own issues by themselves before asking a live rep for help. Eighty-one percent!
Customers are especially eager to take the reins when it comes to their own sensitive information. For example, customers who want to change their credit card would probably want to log in and update those payment settings themselves — partially for the convenience, but also because it feels more secure. People don’t want to give out their personal details over the phone, or worse — over email. That feels sketchy because it IS sketchy and insecure.
So providing a way for customers to manage their own information isn’t just a nice perk. It’s become a standard expectation for doing business online.
Not to mention, you’ll save time and money with fewer support requests. Your team will be spending time on things that require creativity and problem-solving, rather than simple requests to update customer info.
Building your customer center is easy. It works just like any other page in your account.
Just drag and drop an element from the “Customers” section here. You can add buttons for your customers to update their credit card, change their password, or even see their purchase history, subscriptions or payment plans.
You can pick and choose from these elements to create your customer center however you’d like. But in most cases, you’ll want all three sections: payments, passwords and purchase histories.
To learn more about these elements and how to use them in your customer center, check out the “Page elements” video from our “Pages” series.
One more important thing — your customer center needs to be on a page that’s protected as part of a membership site. That way, users will need to log in before they can get access.
This is important because the customer center manages sensitive information. It’s your responsibility to make sure that information is secure — and you do that by sticking it behind a login.
You may not be interested in membership sites as a product. But this is still worth setting up — even if it’s purely for the purpose of offering a customer center. It’ll be more like a “self-service portal” than a “membership site” in the end.
We have a whole section of lessons dedicated to building membership sites, so I won’t go over all the details here. But basically, you’ll need to follow three steps to set this up:
First, you’ll protect the page that your customer center lives on.
Do this by going to your display settings. Change your page so it’s only visible by logged in members here.
Second when you publish your page, be sure to select a domain where you’ve created a membership site. If that doesn’t make sense, watch the videos in our Membership sites section — you’ll find more details there.
And finally, make sure you’re granting the proper access to new customers and sending them the correct login details. You can do this with an automation — and, once again, you’ll find lots of details on how that works in our Membership sites videos.
That’s the gist of it! Now you know the basics of a customer center and how you can start setting up your own in Ontraport. Your customers will appreciate the control and convenience of it for sure.
Coming up you’ll learn more about communicating with your customers about charges.
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