When choosing a partner for your portal technology needs, there are many important aspects to consider. Does your partner have equipment finance industry experts and experience with integrating your portal solution into other systems? Is your partner’s hosting environment regularly audited for compliance, and do they have a comprehensive disaster plan in place?
Providing and Storing Customer Information
With a hosted web portal solution, you’ll want to provide your audience with up-to-date information on their account. When the account information is less accessible, there are options – extracts to be housed in your partner’s secure network, or API integrations for real-time calls to the data. Complex data can be returned using stored procedures with added layers of security to ensure that your customers see only the data that you want to present to them. Consider consolidating data on a screen to reduce customer frustration when they can’t immediately find what they’re looking for.
But what happens when you need a secure place to store customer information that’s in pdf format, such as Invoices or statements? Those can be transferred to your partner via secure FTP and imported into a database. Then the pdf can be accessed by the portal, and either displayed on screen or downloaded to the customer’s computer.
Salesforce Integrations and Concepts
If you’re using Salesforce, powerful API integration exists to support your portal. In addition to retrieving and displaying data from Salesforce, processes can be created to add information to your system, including adding or updating contacts and customers, creating new leads, opportunities, and much more. Your hosted portal database can store ID information to link data together through relationships. Information can be validated on the fly – such as ensuring email addresses and websites are correct. Data can be extracted and stored in your local secure database with a common connector field for later reference if needed. Has a new contact or company been added? Your portal could automatically create a case or schedule a follow up call, so your company never misses a new opportunity.
Game-Changing Features We’ve Built
Below are some key features and functionalities that we have successfully brought to life in the portals we build:
- One Time Payment scheduling, complete with future processing date, ability to store banking information, and masked PII.
- Off-hours processing of payments, marking items in database as processed, creation of standard NACHA file and sFTP file to client for processing.
- Daily or weekly extracts of data compiled and sFTP transferred to client.
- Reports and administrative items available to certain logins, with buttons/menu items only displayed if the user has access.
- Scheduled sFTP retrievals of client data, automated processes to import or update data in the portal’s database.
- SSO Integration from your network to authenticate users automatically.
- Custom API or admin interface for your staff to add or disable users.
- Content management system so you can add messages, advertising graphics, and other elements to your portal as needed.
It’s important to have a partner that will take the time to listen to your unique needs and create solutions to provide your customers and/or dealers with the best possible experience when interacting with your equipment finance web portal.
Drop us a line at 317-863-7676 / info@jdrsolutions.com and we’ll schedule a discovery call with our experts that can help you grow your equipment finance business with the efficiencies of a web portal.
