Year: 2020

Portals are online platforms that allow businesses to conduct interactions and transactions with customers and suppliers instantly, facilitating a more intuitive and connected operation. An integrated portal solution allows organisations in the agriculture supply chain to have one interface shared across their business community.

At a basic level, web portals make ordering easier and more reliable, with full visibility and 24/7 order placement. Suppliers, for example, can receive orders via their online portal, offering automatic status updates and other functionality as required. This allows businesses to make transactions more efficient and effective, no matter the size of the order or the customer. Going beyond a simple eCommerce option, a portal solution delivers a more professional and smooth business experience for all parties.

Notable improvements to business operations include:

• Reduced errors: No more wasted time or correcting the fallout from simple mistakes. Portal solutions remove the need to manually input data, eliminating errors and their resulting costs.
• Ease of business: Smoother transactions and communications between businesses, with no need to make radical changes to current Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
• Increased customer loyalty: Portals don’t just make the ordering process more reliable and robust. Businesses seeking to remain competitive can offer attractive benefits via their portal, such as loyalty schemes and seasonal offers.

Portals are best suited to businesses that need to deal regularly with multiple buyers or sellers especially for customer ordering. In particular, manufacturers benefit from the streamlines ordering and tracking granted by a portal solution.

Web Store and Horizontal /Vertical portals

• A Web Portal is a website which works as a single source for different information on a particular domain. It is a useful access point which helps the users to go easily from one page to another while navigating for information which they are in search of.
• Web Portal gives a list of information arranged well for the accessing purpose of the users. Placing the right amount of keywords in the pages at the right positions also can make a difference to your website traffic. Ultimately what matters in content development is to understand and provide what customers search for the most online.
• Portals have information stored which links to various topics like business, new, finances, travel, entertainment, shopping and so on. The popular portals on the internet are Yahoo!, AOL and Google. These portals can be termed as personal portals, as it stores the history data, emails and profile information of the user.
• High resolution images and big files of videos may be required to attract people but it’ll be of no use if the page takes long time to load. An ideal portal depends mainly on search and navigation, notification, personalization, task management, work flow and collaboration.

Enterprise portal development can be divided into two divisions:

• Horizontal Enterprise Portals or Mega Portals or HEPs
• Vertical Portals or Vertical Enterprise Portals or VEPs.

Horizontal Enterprise Portals (HEPs)

A Horizontal Portal is a website that is public and helps to give its users all the necessary services they are in need of. Examples of horizontal portals or HEPs are NetCenter and MyExcite. Horizontal Enterprise Portals include chat groups, horoscopes, weather, stock prices, news and shopping.

These send requests to users for making their page the first page one sees while using the web. These personalizes the page one sees by selecting the city one chooses for knowing the weather, selecting the new sources and stocks one likes to be displayed on the page and alter the web page appearance.

Thus one is able to build multiple stock portfolios and see the updated valuations very often. It has to be noted that if one access HEP from another computer, it loses all the personalization characteristics.

HEPs does not give any kind of information related to any organizations, as they are not connected to any data sources of any organization other than their own. It delivers access to all the web information one needs on one’s own organization.

Vertical Enterprise Portals (VEPs)

Vertical Enterprise Portals or VEPs deliver information related to any organization.  A Vertical Enterprise Portal is an enterprise portal which is used in a specific department for particular business functions like accounting, customer service or e-commerce. When a user logs to a VEP, a customized portal page is produced. This is linked to the user who is logged on to.

Steps in setting up Business on Internet

1. Create a great site: This is No. 1 for a reason. You have to have a great-looking, intuitive, easy-to-navigate site if you are going to be taken seriously by potential e-customers. Your site must look professional. Pictures and content must load quickly. There can be no dead links. Have a robust “About” page.

The good news is that it is easy and affordable to create a great site look for online hosts that have pre-made templates you can customize.

Web surfers who come to your site will judge it in about three seconds. That’s all you’ve got. You better impress them the moment they hit it.

2. Pick your products: You should try to find the right product at the right price, he will make a profit. Where do you find great, inexpensive products? It depends on what you plan to sell. It may be a matter of spending weekends picking up some good, cheap stuff. If you want a more formal arrangement, there are wholesalers and distributors for almost any product you need.
3. Have an online catalog or store: When you shop online, there is usually a catalog of products to choose from: Tiny pictures with product descriptions. That is what you have to do. Happily, you do not have to create this from scratch. Your e-commerce site host (see below) will offer a store creation tool, with point-and-click ways to add products, pictures, and descriptions.
4. Have the ability to process payments: This issue is two-fold: The financial ability to process credit card payments comes when you have a merchant account. Search for that term online. The physical ability to process such payments is, again, something your host will offer. Search for “online merchant services” or “E-commerce hosting.”
5. Market and promote your site: All these steps are important, but this one may be a little more important. People have to find your site. No matter how nice it looks or how cool your products, if no one knows about the site, it is a waste of time, money, and effort.

Master search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Engage in viral marketing. Tweet. Have a Facebook fan page. Try pay-per-click. Advertise.

6. Fulfillment: You have to deliver what you sell, on budget and on time. Don’t forget to add the cost of shipping to your prices.
7. After-sales support: How will you handle returns? What should you upsell? Support is the difference between a one-time sale and creating a customer for life.

The insurance organization developed in different forms with fee advancement of insurance practices.

1. Self-Insurance

The plan by which an individual or concern sets up a private fund out of which to pay losses is termed “self-insurance”. The person lays aside periodically certain sum to meet the losses of any contemplated risk. While it may be called “self-insurance”, it is not, as a matter of fact, insurance at all because there is no hedge, no shifting or distributing of the burden of risk among larger persons. It is merely a provision for meeting the contingency.

Here the insured becomes his own insurer for the particular risk. But, it can be successfully worked only when there is a wide distribution of risks subject to the same hazard, it may be lesser expensive, provided the amount of loss is tremendous.

The fund, as it accumulates, belongs to the insured and he can invest it as he may deem prudent.

He pays no commission to agents, no extra expenses for maintaining office.

So, on the one hand, the return on an investment will be higher and on the other, the cost of operation will be lesser.

The self-insurance will be successfully operated where;

1. There are several properties such as machine, motor vehicle, house factories, etc.,
2. The properties or units are widely distributed,
3. These are under the influence of varied risks, and;
4. The risks are greater at one place and lesser at another place.

So a shipping company owning a large number of ships can profitably employ this scheme or an automobile firm having numerous motor vehicles can successfully operate this scheme.

Certainly, a concern about limited risks and resources should not attempt to operate this scheme.

The self- insurance cannot be effectively utilized by those concerns where the losses cannot be easily estimated, no proper management of the accumulated funds can be practiced, and the accumulated funds prove to be inadequate at the contingency.

2. Individual Insurer

An individual like other business can perform the business of insurer provided he has sufficient resources and talent of the insurance business.

The individual organization has been rare in the field of insurance.

3. Partnership

A partnership firm can also carry on the insurance business for the sake of profit.

Since it is not an entity distinct from the persons composing it, the personal liability of partners in respect of the partnership debts is unlimited.

In case of huge loss, the partners have to pay from their own personal funds and it will not be profitable for them to start an insurance business. In the early period before the advent of joint stock companies, many insurance undertakings were a partnership or unincorporated companies.

They were constituted by deed of partnerships which regulated the business.

Before the formation of joint-stock companies, the crown had empowered to grant application letters patent to such unincorporated companies to operate the business with limited liabilities.

Sometimes, the policy-holders were permitted to share the management of the concern.

These forms of insurance had been completely disappeared with the advent of joint stock companies.

4. Joint Stock Companies

The joint stock companies are those which are organized by the shareholders who subscribe the necessary capital to start the business, are formed for earning profits for the stockholders who are the real owners of the companies.

The management of a company is entrusted to a board of directors who are elected by the shareholders from among themselves. The company can operate insurance business and the policy-holders have nothing to do with die management of the concern. But, in life insurance, it is the practice to share a certain portion of profit among the certain policy-holders. The participating policy-holders are getting the bonus. Before nationalization, according to insurance act, 1938, the policy-holders had a right to elect their representatives to the board of directors to the extent of one-fourth of the total number of directors of the company. The provision enabled the policy-holders to have an effective voice in the management of the company. Most of the insurance businesses were done on a joint stock basis before nationalization.

They were operating within the memorandum of association and articles of association framed by them.

They used to distribute only 5 percent of divisible profit to the shareholders and more than 95 percent of the divisible profit was distributed amongst the policy-holders.

5. Mutual Companies

The mutual companies were co-operative associations formed for the purpose of effecting insurance on the property of its members.

The policy-holders were themselves the shareholders of the companies, each member was insurer as well as insured.

They had the power to participate in, management and in profit to the full extent.

Whenever the income was more than the expenses and claims, it was accumulated in the form of saving and was entitled to reducing the rate of premium.

Since the insured were insurers also, they always tried to reduce the management expenses and to keep the business at a sound level.

The theoretical base of the mutual companies is issuing of participating policies, i.e., the policyholders had full power in management and profit, whereas the joint-stock companies, strictly were to issue non-participating policies.

But, in practice, the joint-stock companies were also issuing participating policies.

It made them mixed companies i.e. where the features of joint stock companies and of mutual companies were present.

6. Co-Operative Insurance Organization

Co-operative insurance organizations are those concerns which are incorporated and registered under co-operative societies act. The concerns are also called ‘co-operative insurance societies’. These societies like mutual companies are a non-profit organization. The aim is to provide insurance protection to its members at the lowest reasonable price.

7. Lloyd’s Association

Lloyd’s association is one of the greatest insurance institutions in the world.

Taking its name from the coffee house of Edward Lloyd; where underwriters assembled to transact business and pick-up news, the organization traces its origin to the latter part of the seventeenth century.

So, it is the oldest insurance organization in existing form in the world.

In 1871, Lloyd’s act was passed incorporating the members of the association into a single corporate body with perpetual succession and a corporate seal.

The power of Lloyd’s corporation was extended from the business of marine insurance to other insurances and guarantee business.

The Lloyd’s association is an association of individual insurers known as ‘underwriters’. They are also termed as ‘syndicates’ or ‘names’.

Any insurer who wants to become a member of such association has to deposit a certain fee as security for the regular payment of his liabilities.

The association before enrolling the insurer as a member of the association will inquire about the financial position of the concern, business reputation, and experience.

On satisfactory proof, the association admits him in the association.

The business is affected by the insurers called underwriters, syndicates, or names.

The association is merely a controlling and guiding body. Anybody desirous of taking insurance will approach to the ‘underwriters’ and not to the association.

Each underwriter will be responsible for his business underwritten by a policy.

Thus, a policy will be underwritten by several underwriters but their share or portions of business are fixed individually.

When the policy becomes a claim, the insured realizes money from all the underwriters who had underwritten the policy according to their respective shares.

If an underwriter fails to pay his share of claim, the association will pay from his security which he had taken at the time of enrolment of the underwriter.

Never is one member or underwriter liable for the losses of other members either on a policy or in a syndicate. Underwriter assumes liability ‘each for himself and not for another’.

Lloyd’s as a corporation is never liable on a policy.

It does supervise the conditions under which its members may issue policies; it undertakes to provide collective protection for the commercial and maritime interest of its members.

The Lloyd’s has done commendable work not only in the field of marine insurance but in other insurances also.

War risk, election risk, export risk, aero-plane risk, etc. have been insured by Lloyd’s association.

The association also publishes, ‘Lloyd’s list’ and ‘register of shipping’ for the information of ensuring public and the insurers.

8. State Insurance

The government of a nation sometimes owns the insurance and runs the business for the benefit of the public.

The state insurance is defined as that insurance which is under the public sector put; more specifically it can be stated that when governments have taken over the insurance business particularly life insurance.

France had nationalized larger insurance companies in 1946.

In Brazil, Japan and Mexico, the insurances are largely nationalized.

Previously, the state undertook only those insurances which were regarded to be very vital for the public interest or where private companies were not able or willing to enter the field of insurance.

Social security, unemployment, crop insurance, war risk insurance, export credit insurance, aero-plane insurance were generally understate insurance.

In India, the life insurance business was nationalized in 1956 and the general insurances were nationalized in 1971.

Thus, the insurance business in India, today, is under the control and ownership of the central government although they are in different forms of insurances.

Direct marketing for the insurance sector is a marketing method used to generate leads for insurance agents. According to the Direct Marketing Association, insurance marketers spent $6.81 billion on direct marketing in 2008, the last year for which figures are available from the DMA. Given the plethora of marketing messages bombarding businesses and consumers, direct marketing offers insurance agents a personal, quantifiable method of generating leads.

Types of Direct Marketing

Insurance brokers and companies use many direct marketing methods to find new customers. Direct mail postcards and letters are two types of traditional direct mail that are popular for insurance marketing. Many companies purchase local lists and send lead-generation mailers out for their insurance brokers. Other types of direct marketing used by the insurance sector include telemarketing, radio, television and digital advertising.

Benefits

There are several benefits of using direct marketing to sell insurance services. Direct marketing is easily measured, which makes it easy for insurance agents and companies to assess how well a campaign performs for them. Direct mail marketing activities can be hidden from competitors, a great benefit in the highly competitive insurance industry where companies may battle for new customers.

Measurement

Direct marketing campaigns can be measured in several ways. The overall response rate is assessed as the number of leads that come into the insurance office divided by the number of mail pieces sent out or audience size reached. Other metrics for insurance marketing campaigns that can be measured include the lead-to-close ratio, or how many of the leads that came in actually resulted in sold policies.

Tips

Insurance marketers offer several tips for generating a better response rate, especially for direct mail. Always offer a free gift to those who respond. The gift may be a report on home safety for home insurance leads, winterizing an automobile for auto insurance or estate planning for life insurance, but it should tie into what you’re selling. Include a response card, and use a unique 800 number to track phone responses by campaign.

Account aggregation sometimes also known as financial data aggregation is a method that involves compiling information from different accounts, which may include bank accounts, credit card accounts, investment accounts, and other consumer or business accounts, into a single place. This may be provided through connecting via an API to the financial institution or provided through “screen scraping” where a user provides the requisite account-access information for an automated system to gather and compile the information into a single page. The security of the account access details as well as the financial information is key to users having confidence in the service.

An aggregator is an entity that purchases mortgages from financial institutions and then securitizes them into mortgage-backed securities (MBSs). Aggregators can be the issuing banks of the mortgages or subsidiaries within the financial institutions themselves. They can also be brokers, dealers, correspondents, or another type of financial corporation. Aggregators earn a profit by purchasing individual mortgages at lower prices and then selling the pooled MBS at a higher price.

The database either resides in a web-based application or in client-side software. While such services are primarily designed to aggregate financial information, they sometimes also display other things such as the contents of e-mail boxes and news headlines.

Understanding an Aggregator

Aggregators are essentially service providers who eliminate some of the effort issuers need to go through in creating a mortgage-backed security. Depending on what the end customer is looking for, aggregators can seek out and purchase a defined type of mortgage from a diverse set of lenders and originators. By expanding the search across a variety of mortgage originators, including regional banks and specialty mortgage companies, it is possible to create tailored mortgage-backed securities that can’t easily be sourced from a single mortgage originator.

Secondary Mortgage Market

Aggregators are better understood as a phase of the securitization process rather than a distinct entity in the secondary mortgage market. When an originator, like a bank, issues a mortgage, they want to move it off the books to free up capital so that they can issue more loans. Selling a single mortgage directly to an investor is tricky because a single mortgage faces a lot of difficult-to-quantify risks based on the individual buying a property. Instead, the aggregator buys up a collection of loans where overall performance is easier to predict and then sells that pool to investors in tranches. So there is a pooling/aggregation phase that takes place before the MBS can be sliced up and sold.

• An aggregator is any entity that purchases mortgages from financial institutions and then securitizes them into mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) for sale.
• Issuing banks, subsidiaries within the financial institution, brokers, dealers, and correspondents can all be aggregators.
• Aggregators function as service providers that remove the work for issuers in creating a mortgage-backed security.
• When mortgage originators become aggregators in the securitization process, they create special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to facilitate the transaction.

Customer experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction is made up of three parts: the customer journey, the brand touchpoints the customer interacts with, and the environments the customer experiences during their experience. A good customer experience means that the individual’s experience during all points of contact matches the individual’s expectations. Gartner asserts the importance of managing the customer’s experience.

Customer experience implies customer involvement at different levels – such as rational, emotional, sensorial, physical, and spiritual. Customers respond diversely to direct and indirect contact with a company. Direct contact usually occurs when the purchase or use is initiated by the customer. Indirect contact often involves advertising, news reports, unplanned encounters with sales representatives, word-of-mouth recommendations or criticisms.

Customer experience encompasses every aspect of a company’s offering the quality of customer care, but also advertising, packaging, product and service features, ease of use, and reliability. Creating direct relationships in the place where customers buy, use and receive services by a business intended for customers such as instore or face to face contact with the customer which could be seen through interacting with the customer through the retail staff. We then have indirect relationships which can take the form of unexpected interactions through a company’s product representative, certain services or brands and positive recommendations or it could even take the form of “criticism, advertising, news, reports” and many more along that line.

Customer experience is created by the contribution of not only the customers’ values but also by the contribution of the company providing the experience.

All of the events experienced by customers before and after a purchase are part of the customer experience. What a customer experiences is personal and may involve sensory, emotional, rational and physical aspects to create a memorable experiencer. In the retail industry, both company and customers play a big role in creating a customer experience.

In short, customer service is just one part of the whole customer experience.

As we mentioned, customer experience is a customer’s overall perception of your company, based on their interactions with it. Comparatively, customer service refers to specific touchpoints within the experience where a customer requests and receives assistance or help for example, calling an operator to request a refund or interacting via email with a service provider.

In other words: CX is larger than customer service. It includes every touchpoint a customer ever has with your company, whether it’s the moment they first hear about you in a blog post they found on Google, all the way through to the time they call your customer service team to complain about your product (and hopefully get a prompt response).

What is a good customer experience?

In short, good customer experience can be achieved if you:

• Make listening to customers a top priority across the business
• Use customer feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of your customers
• Implement a system to help you collect feedback, analyze it, and act on it regularly
• Reduce friction and solve your customers’ specific problems and unique challenges

Importance of Customer Experience

A remarkable customer experience is critical to the sustained growth of any business. A positive customer experience promotes loyalty, helps you retain customers, and encourages brand advocacy.

Today, customers have the power, not the sellers.

Customers have a plethora of options to choose from at their fingertips plus the resources necessary to educate themselves and make purchases on the own.

This is why it’s so important to provide a remarkable experience and make them want to continue doing business with you customers are your best resource for growing your brand awareness in a positive way.

So, how can you measure your customer experience to determine what you’re doing well and where there’s room for improvement?

Measure Customer Experience

1. Analyze customer satisfaction survey results.

Using customer satisfaction surveys (which you can easily create in HubSpot) on a regular basis and after meaningful moments throughout the customer journey provides insight into your customers’ experience with your brand and product or service.

A great way to measure customer experience is Net Promoter Score®, or NPS. This measures how likely your customers are to promote you to their friends, family, and colleagues based on their experiences with your company.

When measuring NPS, consider data in aggregate across teams. Since multiple teams impact your overall customer experience, you’ll need a clear picture of performance and that comes from multiple data points. For example, what is the NPS for in-product usage? What is the NPS for customer service teams across communication channels (phone, email, chat, etc.)? What is the NPS for sales? What is the NPS for attending a marketing webinar?

Analyzing NPS from multiple touch points across the customer journey will tell you what you need to improve and where you’re providing an excellent experience already, while showing customers you’re listening to them and care about what they have to say.

With your NPS score, dive into your team-by-team performance to ensure you’re performing well across the board. Also, you may choose to follow up on customer feedback whether it’s positive or negative to connect with customers, deepen your relationship with them, and improve your retention and loyalty.

2. Identify rate and reasons for customer churn.

Churn happens: it’s part of doing business. But it’s important that you learn from churn when it happens so you can prevent it from happening again.

Make sure you’re doing a regular analysis of your churned customers so you can determine whether your churn rate is increasing or decreasing, reasons for churn, and actions your team may take in the future to prevent a similar situation.

3. Ask customers for product or feature requests.

Create a forum for your customers to request new products or features to make your offerings more useful and helpful for the problems they’re trying to solve.

Whether that forum is shared via email survey, social media, or a community page, give customers the opportunity to proactively offer suggestions. This doesn’t mean you must implement all of the suggestions you receive but if there are recurring trends popping up, they might be worth investing time in to.

4. Analyze customer support ticket trends.

You should also analyze the customer support tickets your support reps are working to resolve every day. If there are recurring issues among tickets, review possible reasons for those hiccups and how you can provide solutions across the board this will allow you to decrease total number or tickets reps receive while providing a streamlined and enjoyable experience for customers.

In a highly competitive market, service-based businesses need to capitalize on any opportunity to set themselves apart from their (often very similar) competitors. While implementation, system details, and service management are all important, perhaps the best way to distinguish your business is to foster strong customer relationships based on the quality of your service.

Running a successful service company should be synonymous with delivering excelling service. If not, then why consider running a service business at all? Yet, if all companies which perform services effectively compete on providing the service, then the key differentiator lies in the service management model and the ability to execute it. Designing the service delivery system should focus on what creates value to the core organisations and how to engage frontline employees to deliver the ultimate customer experience.

Key Elements of a Service Delivery

1. Service Culture

Service Culture is built on elements of leadership principles, norms, work habits and vision, mission and values. Culture is the set of overriding principles according to which management controls, maintains and develops the social process that manifests itself as delivery of service and gives value to customers. Once a superior service delivery system and a realistic service concept have been established, there is no other component so fundamental to the long-term success of a service organization as its culture.

2. Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement includes employee attitude activities, purpose driven leadership and HR processes. Even the best designed processes and systems will only be effective if carried out by people with higher engagement. Engagement is the moderator between the design and the execution of the service excellence model.

3. Service Quality

Service Quality includes strategies, processes and performance management systems. The strategy and process design is fundamental to the design of the overall service management model. Helping the client fulfil their mission and supporting them in the pursuit of their organizational purpose, must be the foundation of any service provider partnership.

4. Customer Experience

Customer Experience includes elements of customer intelligence, account management and continuous improvements. Perception is king and constantly evaluating how how both customer and end-user perceive service delivery is important for continuous collaboration. Successful service delivery works on the basis that the customer is a part of the creation and delivery of the service and then designs processes built on that philosophy – this is called co-creation.

Five ways to improve service delivery in your organization

1. Error on the side of communication

When it comes to customers, there’s no such thing as over-communication your clients feel more comfortable when they know what’s going on. That being said, the amount of communication is not so imperative as the timeliness, its context, and its ability to clearly identify the value addition to the client. In a world of constant connectivity, your ability to cut through the flood of subpar information with quality and timely answers can go a long way.

2. Define everything

Service definition is vital to service management. You need to make sure that you and your customer are on the same page regarding what to expect (or not expect) from your service offerings. This includes what your services do and don’t encompass, eligibility, potential limitations, costs, how to get assistance when needed, and more.

This level of definition shouldn’t stop with the customer the best service organizations also clearly delineate any internal efforts needed to provide and support their service.

3. Automate when possible

As services like IT and HR become increasingly digitized, it’s important to capitalize on your ability to automate formerly headache-inducing processes. For example, once you’ve carefully defined onboarding and offboarding, these types of consistent, easily-broken-down processes can be automated into a new customer welcome (or, in the case of offboarding, an exit after the completion of a service).

In general, service delivery automation is high return and low risk, and more and more service organizations are finding ways to cut costs and provide a simpler customer experience by reducing human involvement.

4. Track employee availability

Like any business, your company has a finite amount of resources and you want to use these wisely. To understand your current resource needs (and to anticipate future resource needs), service organizations need to be able to track employee schedules and capacities. With this visibility into your resource utilization, you can schedule in accordance with current projects and sales forecasts, and ensure that no resource is over- or underutilized.

5. Foster strong culture

After establishing a feasible service concept, there is no other factor so instrumental to the success of a service organization as its culture. Employees should be aligned when it comes to a specific set of overarching principles and, while methodology is crucial to service delivery, this should feel more like a philosophy.

Don’t take it for granted that your culture is strictly internal it shows up in your service delivery, your methodology, and your relationships and interactions with customers. And customers know this, it’s one of the reasons why people ask for RFPs. The better you understand your value prop and what your company’s about, the more that translates to your customers. More often than not, your customers will know if you and your employees aren’t on the same page.