Customer portal benefits: how it drives the digital change in your organization

We live in an instant culture. Book a dream holiday, make a doctor's appointment, adjust the room temperature. A few clicks are enough and the task is done. These experiences have certainly changed your customers' expectations too. Because if your company does not offer fast, intuitive support, your customers are liable to move on. One solution: introducing a digital customer portal with some promising benefits.

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What are digital customer portals?

Customer portals are digital platforms through which companies offer self-services to prospects and existing customers. Matters that users previously had to contact their provider about can now be settled quickly by the users themselves through the customer portal.

The goal is to improve the customer experience, take pressure off staff and make processes in marketing, sales and support more efficient. Incidentally, terms such as self-service portal, help desk or online branch are sometimes used instead of customer portal, depending on the purpose chosen.

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Which services can you offer in customer portals?

A customer portal can offer almost all the services you previously provided through other communication channels such as email, telephone or post. If the portal is designed around the customer, users have a single point of contact for everything they need. Not least because of the increasing integration of artificial intelligence, staff are involved either not at all or only to a small extent in the process.

• Managing orders: customers can check the status of their orders, invoices and payments, and initiate returns.
• Getting support: if anything about using the product is unclear, they can get help 24/7, via chatbot or by submitting a ticket.
• Configuring products: customers can unlock additional digital services or upgrade digital products and use new features immediately.
• Managing contracts: existing contract information can be viewed through the portal, and cancellations or contract extensions submitted.
• Changing personal data: customers can update their master data and contract data themselves.

Customer portal: which benefits does it offer you and your customers?

From a company perspective, there are many reasons for introducing a customer portal. You are not only meeting your customers' wishes, given that around two thirds of users want digital customer care and self-services, you are also generating tangible business value. These are the biggest customer portal benefits:

Improving customer satisfaction: when customers solve their problems quickly and without support from customer service, that strengthens their satisfaction and their attachment to your brand.

Increasing revenue: customer portals simplify and intensify interaction and thereby increase the chances for upsells and cross-sells. According to a study by Boston Consulting, a seamless digital customer experience can increase revenue by an average of 9 to 10 percent.

Reducing costs: another customer portal benefit is that companies using portals in customer support can expect cost reductions of up to 25 to 30 percent, according to McKinsey.

Developing products around the customer: customer portals are a good tool for observing your users' behaviour and collecting data. You learn which services they use particularly often and which information they call up frequently, for example.

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For a customer portal to succeed, your organization has to transform

Ideally your customer portal delivers a fully digital brand experience that covers every phase of the customer journey. From marketing through sales to support and on to repeat purchase or contract renewal. Not all functions have to be available from the start.

You can build the portal step by step. That gives the teams affected time to handle the digitalization of their working processes. At the same time you stay flexible, so that early practical experience with the portal can feed into further digitalization.

The prioritisation I recommend

Prioritising the features correctly contributes decisively to the success of a customer portal.

1. Start by digitalizing standard processes that require a connection to the customer database, so that customers can view invoices or change their master data themselves, for example.
2. In the next step you can optimise processes by taking pressure off your support with self-service functions such as filling in forms, submitting documents or scheduling appointments.
3. Only after that do you extend the portal with more complex functions such as personalised AI-based recommendations and functionality that requires integrating different data sources, and offer new digital services.

What to keep in mind when designing it

Customer portals are as varied as companies themselves. Functions and user interface always have to be tailored to your goals. When designing one, we therefore recommend that you first build a comprehensive picture of the value you want to generate with the portal. Do not decide in an ivory tower. Talk to all the relevant stakeholders in order to make the most of the benefits of a customer portal.

Customers: companies often have a distorted view of their customers' problems. Get reliable, direct feedback. Ask what problems and difficulties customers have in contact with your company or in using your products.

Support or sales team: talk to your sales and support teams about frequent customer questions or objections. What value do customers want? Where is there cross-selling and upselling potential? This information is strategically valuable not only for the initial build but also for developing the customer portal further.

IT team: which functions can be delivered in the customer portal straight away, and for which does new data have to be collected first? How should internal data management be adapted? Your IT staff play a decisive role in introducing and running a customer portal cost-efficiently.

How your teams' tasks change

Introducing a customer portal deliberately changes familiar workflows and long-held responsibilities. In the end, though, it is not only your customers who gain but your own staff as well.

Customer support: when self-services take over routine enquiries, your staff have more time for complex customer matters where the technology has no answer. Continuously developing the knowledge base, which forms the basis for online support, comes in as a new area of work.

IT department: personalised functions and recommendations in the customer portal place new demands on data preparation and data management. Depending on the portal features you want, your IT team will have to build new skills in AI and data analytics.

Marketing: your marketing team gains further touchpoints to look after and fill with content. The effort can be minimised with a headless CMS and it pays off, because portals deliver data on customer behaviour that lets campaigns be targeted more precisely. Results can be measured and improved in a data-driven way.

Sales: another customer portal benefit is that your sales team can identify new lead generation opportunities from how individuals use the customer portal, and develop personalised sales strategies. Thanks to data-based insight into customer behaviour, your sales staff are considerably more efficient at upselling and cross-selling.

Which technologies are used for customer portals?

Customer portals are not tied to any particular technology and can be built with all established web technologies. As a rule, companies first decide on custom development of a web application and then extend it with mobile apps in a second step.

Instead of building monolithic infrastructure, microservices can be combined today in order to keep pace easily with technological developments, keep performance high and integrate new functions when needed.

For hosting, the cloud platforms of hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are a good fit, so that portals can scale quickly. Frameworks such as React are an option as frontend technologies, while in the backend modern TypeScript-based frameworks such as nest.js are a good choice. Which tech stack is the best choice has to be decided case by case, based on your existing IT, your goals and your requirements for performance, scalability and usability.

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Info: headless CMS

Until now it took a lot of manual work to deliver relevant, personalised content to customers at every digital touchpoint, from the website through the web-based customer portal to the chatbot and the newsletter. Using a headless content management system (CMS) now makes this much easier and can prove a major advantage for your customer portal. A system like this separates the delivery of your content from your output channels: you upload content to the CMS only once. Interfaces then display it flexibly wherever it creates value. Headless CMS therefore reduce the manual effort of content maintenance considerably. Your digital customer communication becomes scalable and flexible enough for you to follow future trends easily.

Conclusion: a customer portal on its own brings no benefits

Customer portals are no longer a competitive advantage. They are a hygiene factor that many customers across numerous industries increasingly expect. In fact quite a few German companies already use a customer portal in one form or another. But in many cases the portal does not meet customers' expectations, and the hoped-for effects on customer loyalty, costs and image do not materialise.

To spare you misplaced investment like that and to help you make the most of all the customer portal benefits, we recommend a customer-centred approach that starts with research into customer problems and internal hurdles to an optimal customer experience. A successful customer portal makes life easier for customers first of all. Further benefits then follow for you, such as lighter workloads, more effective data-based marketing and sales activity and stronger customer loyalty.

If you would like support with designing and implementing a customer portal, or want to optimise your existing portal, just get in touch. We are there for you as a sparring partner in the individual phases of portal development, or we accompany you step by step from requirements analysis to the go-live of the application.