SOL-05 / SOLUTION
a Customer Portal
built.
Customers should be able to see and act on their own information without contacting staff.
- Objective
- Customers should be able to see and act on their own information without contacting staff.
- Suits
- Businesses with repeat customers, memberships, bookings, subscriptions or long-running orders.
- Divisions involved
- 3
- Composed entities
- 10
A portal succeeds when a support conversation stops being necessary. That means the data shown has to be correct, the actions have to be safe, and the boundary between customers has to hold.
What is usually needed.
These layers are what this objective normally requires. They are not a quote, and you are not expected to need all of them.
Portal surface
Authenticated pages scoped to one person, verified server-side rather than in the interface.
Authenticated space for customers or members
Account and recovery
Identity, session handling and account recovery, integrated with any existing system of record.
Authenticated space for customers or members
Software where the user is doing work
Self-service actions
The specific tasks staff currently handle by email or phone, moved into the portal.
Authenticated space for customers or members
What may or
may not apply.
Each of these is contingent. Whether any of it is needed depends on your situation, and the right answer is sometimes none of them.
Payments
Required only where the portal is also a billing surface.
A storefront where the checkout is the product
Making sure the numbers a decision rests on are actually measured, once, without double counting.
Growth work on the public site
A portal that few people reach needs the acquisition work that precedes it.
A site that has to stay correct for years
Fixing the parts of a site that decide whether search engines can use it at all.
Content and onboarding
Where the portal needs explanation for first-time users.
The visual standard a site holds itself to
Producing the material that gives a campaign and a site something to point at.
NEXT STEP
Describe the customers, what they need to see, and which tasks should stop requiring staff.
Nothing on this page carries a price, a delivery window or an outcome claim. Those follow from a scope, and a scope follows from a conversation.