Web portals have become an essential part of many modern organisations, serving as central hubs to increase efficiency and provide accessibility for customers or other stakeholders.
Portals allow people to manage their interactions with an organisation by offering self-service tools, which reduces operational overheads.
Tech advancements have raised user expectations, particularly regarding the use of AI. As a result, effective portals must provide personalised experiences tailored to individual needs. Only by leveraging data can portals support customised interactions that meet contemporary demands.
This article explores strategies for maximising ROI from your web portal by effectively addressing these evolving expectations. Let’s start by examining common obstacles.
Frequent Portal Challenges
Despite their many benefits, portals face several challenges that can hinder their effectiveness and limit the return on investment (ROI).
- Lack of features: If a portal doesn’t offer the functionality people need, they’ll miss the human touch and choose other communication channels.
- Misalignment with user expectations: Even if your portal is stacked with features, usage will soon dwindle if it isn’t helpful or fails to meet user needs.
- Unintuitive experiences: A complicated design or confusing user interface is a surefire way to deter people.
- Poor performance: Slow load times and reliability issues frustrate users, decreasing engagement.
- Inadequate resources: Without accessible support materials like FAQs and guides, users may struggle to fully utilise some website steps and features.
- Complex integration: A portal that doesn’t integrate well with existing systems is ineffective if people can only access limited data or use a narrow range of features.
To realise the value of a portal and maximise ROI, these challenges must be recognised and addressed. Below are strategies and best practices that can help.
Overcoming Portal Challenges
Professional Design
User Journeys: Start by mapping out the typical user journeys to understand your users’ paths to achieve their goals. This involves identifying key touchpoints and ensuring your site design makes each step logical and straightforward.
Page Design: Each page should have a clear purpose, making it easy for users to navigate and understand. Prioritise key information, use an effective visual hierarchy and keep the design simple to avoid overwhelming people.
Form Structures: Design web forms that are easy to navigate, with clear labels and logical grouping of related fields. Aim to minimise the number of fields to reduce friction and make the form completion process less time-consuming.
Wireframes: We often use wireframes to plan the layout and functionality of our client’s portal pages. These can be tested with team members and intended users to identify potential issues and make adjustments before finalising the design.
Responsiveness and Accessibility: Choosing a dedicated portal product like Microsoft Power Pages ensures your website is inherently responsive, meets compliance and accessibility standards, and supports multiple languages.
Integrating CRM
Your portal may need to connect with various systems, but seamless CRM integration should be its foundation.
Data Accessibility: Determine which data should be accessible to authenticated users through your portal. To meet expectations, identify which is critical for user interactions, such as contact information, order history, and support tickets.
Process Management: What repeatable processes should be accessible to users in your portal? For example, you may want your portal to capture application forms or allow people to make bookings.
Development Needs: Do your CRM already manage these processes, or is custom development required? Even if these are handled in CRM, you may find opportunities for greater efficiency. Additionally, you might need to refine some workflows and rules to ensure consistent handling within the portal interface.
Security Privileges: Define and implement suitable security roles to ensure each user has the appropriate level of access. This involves precise control over which data users can view, edit, or delete. Role-based access controls will protect sensitive information and ensure that individuals have the correct level of access to their status or subscriptions.
Delight Users
Personalised Experiences: Connected data drives tailored portal user experiences, providing content and recommendations based on relational information, user history, and preferences. What data can you harness to achieve this?
Streamlined Processes: What repeatable workflows could your portal manage to benefit users? We’ve highlighted examples of how portals can handle booking and application processes. Other popular examples include expense claims, invoice submissions, contract management and onboarding steps.
Interactive Visuals: Consider what insights your website can provide beyond just presenting data. For example, you could embed Power BI charts and other visuals within portal pages. This approach will increase transparency and boost engagement by helping users interpret data quickly.
Incorporate AI features
Intelligent chatbots: Bot experiences underwhelm when they fail to provide helpful answers. This shouldn’t be the case if they tap into connected data and AI innovations. Intelligent portal bots can recognise authenticated users to provide personalised responses. Examples can include answering account-based questions or handling requests within a bot experience, which would previously require form completion.
AI Insights: Rather than merely presenting data in static lists and pages, how could AI make these views helpful and interactive? For example, AI summaries could simplify page content, such as terms and conditions or provide highlights for an accompanying table, helping people gain insights.
Real-Time Assistance: Employ AI to identify when portal users need help and provide real-time assistance. For instance, you could achieve this through a bot experience that includes sentiment detection or search summaries that aggregate results and reduce the need to click through to individual pages.
Predictive Analytics: User actions and behaviours within a portal can provide valuable insights into future needs. AI-based predictive analytics can analyse tracked portal behaviour to enrich data. This approach helps anticipate requirements and offer proactive recommendations, contributing to increased engagement and a higher ROI.
Portal Templates
Rather than starting portal designs from scratch, starting with a template for frequent usage needs will often be quicker and cheaper. These include:
Customer Self-Service Portals: Empowering clients with detailed FAQs, account management, comprehensive knowledge base and online support.
Partner Portals: Connecting partners to marketing resources, enabling lead tracking, centralised communications, and clear guidelines simplify onboarding.
Supplier Portals: Streamlining order management, invoicing, and procurement with real-time tracking and integrations with supply chain management systems.
Member Portals: Featuring community engagement tools, event management, eCommerce integration and easy membership renewals.
Enhancing Portal ROI
Further ideas to maximise your portal ROI include:
Extensive Integration
Beyond CRM integration, APIs for other services allow for seamless data flows that enhance portal capabilities and user experiences. For instance:
Address validation: Integrate an address lookup API for easier web form completion, which reduces effort, saves time, and ensures accurate data.
Payment processing: Integrate secure and efficient payment processing APIs such as Stripe to facilitate smooth transactions.
Mapping APIs: Incorporating mapping or positional tracking APIs can be particularly beneficial for logistics or any portal use cases requiring geolocation.
Promoting the Benefits
To effectively communicate your portal, consider the following:
Promote 24/7 availability: Your audience wants to be able to do business at their convenience. Promote your portal as a resource accessible anytime, anywhere, on various devices. This round-the-clock availability ensures that users can obtain the information or services they need without the constraints of business hours, thus enhancing their satisfaction and interaction with your organisation.
Focus on the launch: The launch phase is pivotal in ensuring user adoption and engagement. For example, use the primacy effect to shape initial perceptions that significantly impact user experience and trust. Create a buzz around the launch by informing stakeholders and users well in advance. Highlight the benefits and provide sneak peeks into the new features. By hosting launch events, you can present guided portal tours, run Q&A sessions, and offer exclusive first-access privileges. These initial interactions set the tone and establish a positive, confident perception of your portal.
Marketing efforts: Develop a targeted marketing campaign highlighting the convenience of your portal. Use case studies, testimonials, and visual demonstrations to showcase the benefits, especially to new customers. Provide communications and online resources to ensure everyone is aware of new features.
Listening to Feedback
To improve ongoing portal changes, implement mechanisms to gather user feedback, such as surveys, user testing, and analytics that will help identify areas of enhancement.
Not all feedback will have the same level of urgency or impact. Prioritise requests based on factors such as frequency of mention, potential impact on user experience and alignment with your business goals.
Regular updates and new features should reflect user input to improve your portal continuously. Transparent communication about these changes helps build trust and demonstrates your commitment to addressing user needs.
Focusing on these steps shapes user perceptions from the outset and ensures continuous improvement. Meticulous attention to the launch phase and ongoing feedback ensure higher adoption rates, maximising your ROI.
Final thoughts
Before developing a portal, consider what you want to achieve with it. Are you looking to share information, automate processes, or cater to all service needs? Defining clear objectives from the start is essential for success.
Throughout this article, we’ve highlighted the importance of web portals, the challenges involved, and the critical functionalities and strategies to maximise ROI.
A well-designed portal can significantly enhance operational efficiency, increase satisfaction, and ultimately help achieve business objectives. Working with the best technology and partnering with an expert like The Portal Company can make a world of difference.
For personalised consultation and implementation services, use our team’s expertise to deliver a portal that drives sustained success for your organisation.