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Customer Portal Solution

Software and Business Overview

Since 2005, ScienceSoft develops customer portals with strong self-service capabilities and industry-specific functions.

Customer Portal Solution - ScienceSoft
Customer Portal Solution - ScienceSoft

What Is a Customer Portal: Summary

A customer (client) portal is a digital environment where customers can submit service requests, get their issues solved, and access a company’s products/services online. Companies from different industries benefit from launching a collaborative space for their clients. Some industry-specific examples are Airbus Helicopters (aviation, manufacturing), Spire Healthcare (healthcare), DSM (agriculture), Parkland Corporation (fuel retailing), Zions Bancorporation (banking).

5 Must-Have Capabilities of Customer Portals

A customer portal solution is an online platform where customers get 24/7 access to your company information and interactions. Regardless of the specifics of your customer relationships, the following feature sets can form the core of your solution.

Digital customer onboarding

To reduce onboarding time and stress.

  • Step-by-step customer registration process.
  • Digital document upload.
  • E-signature capture and verification.
  • Automated customer identity verification.
  • Real-time multi-lingual translation for an international customer base.
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Customer support

To respond to customer inquiries.

  • Multi-channel ticket submission via a web form, a live chat, phone, etc.
  • Ticket response workflows: ticket routing, prioritization, resolution, escalation.
  • Self-help knowledge base.
  • AI-powered chatbot to address customers’ common requests.
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Customer communication

To create a sense of community.

  • Self-help customer forum.
  • Topic categorization for forum and knowledge base, filtering by post popularity and date.
  • Customer-generated product/service feedback.
  • Customer experience surveys and polls.
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Content management tools

To create content aimed at informing and educating customers.

  • A content library.
  • Diverse content formats: press releases, knowledge articles, user manuals, etc.
  • No-code page builder.
  • Content categorization and convenient search.
  • Customer interaction with the content: a possibility to comment, share, subscribe to updates.
  • Content versioning.
  • Scheduled content publishing.
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Customer account security

To protect the privacy of customer information.

  • Customizable settings for regulated customer portal access (for customers and internal support agents).
  • Compromised account alerts.
  • Staff permissions for customer document access.
  • Compliance with local laws and legislations (e.g., HIPAA compliance for storing and processing health-related information).
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Domain-specific portal features

Building customer portals for different industries, we at ScienceSoft mind the goals a portal pursues in each case and complement the core functionality with specific capabilities. 

Banking

A customer portal allows customers to access their bank accounts remotely and make financial transactions online.

A broad set of portal capabilities typically includes:

  • Downloadable bank statements.
  • Online payment to third parties.
  • Loan application and transactions.
  • Money transfers (including between cards).
  • Utility bill payments.

Tips:

  • Enable auto log-out after user inactivity to prevent unauthorized access to your customers’ banking information.
  • If you are planning to incorporate upselling in your banking portal, use machine learning and AI to tailor banking product/service recommendations individually and refrain from push-selling.
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Manufacturing and sales

Via a portal, customers access products or services offered by a company and can make an instant purchase online.

For this type of a customer portal, full ecommerce functionality is needed, including:

  • Product/service catalog management.
  • Product cards.
  • Shopping card and checkout.
  • Online payment processing.
  • Order management.

Tip:

  • Mind the difference in purchase decision-making of individual consumers and business buyers to complement your customer portal with B2C- or B2B-specific functionality. For example, volume-based discounts will help to boost B2B sales, while personalized and time-limited discounts will likely encourage more B2C buys.
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Healthcare

In the healthcare industry, customer portals can be designed for patients or healthcare institutions.

  • Patient portals allow patients to drive and supervise their treatment, schedule in-person visits, consult a doctor via messages and video sessions.
  • Medical solution providers or medical device and equipment manufacturers create user portals to sell their products/services, conduct online training events, organize training materials, and process service tickets from their clients.

Tip:

  • Offer patients a possibility to fill in intake forms and symptom questionnaires via a portal to put a doctor in the picture in advance and make a patient’s visit more result-oriented.
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Logistics

Logistics providers share the responsibility for the continuity of supply chains of their clients.

The launch of a customer portal enables real-time control over shipping and transportation:

  • Access to shipment documentation.
  • Scheduling shipments.
  • Tracking the shipment progress.

Tip:

  • You can offer a possibility to set up automated email or text alerts regarding the status of critical shipments.
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Insurance

Insurance portals enable customers to apply for insurance, instantly submit claims, and pay insurance premiums online.

Such portals provide extensive self-service options to enhance client engagement:

  • A self-service insurance premium calculator.
  • Template-based creation of insurance applications, claims, policy updating and renewal requests.
  • Paying premiums via a selected payment method.
  • Overview of the policy portfolio and a history of insurance transactions.

Tip:

Consider using intelligent bots to help customers solve their operational, transactional, security issues 24/7 and drive high client satisfaction. AI-powered virtual assistants can automatically process 50%+ of omnichannel enquiries, which helps free your sales and support teams for high-touch interactions.

Investment

Investment companies need to make their activities transparent for asset owners and offer high degree of freedom for the clients looking to manage trading operations by themselves.

Investor portals provide investors with vast self-service capabilities and comprehensive view of portfolio performance:

  • Real-time monitoring of investment positions across various portfolios and asset classes.
  • Instant access to the available investment documents.
  • Automated opening, confirmation, renewal, and closing out of investment transactions.
  • AI-based recommendations on the investment portfolio optimization.

Tip:

Introduce a self-help knowledge base and a Q&A forum for investors to educate your customers on the complicated investment aspects, proactively provide support, and help investors achieve the much-desired financial success.

Audience-specific portal features

The analysis of the behavior and needs of individual consumers and business clients shows that B2C and B2B types of customer portals will have different goals and functions.

B2C customer portal

The main reason for customers to use a portal is convenience. Individual clients expect to easily find all the info they need without turning to agents.

Launching a B2C customer portal, think of the following capabilities:

  • A loyalty program.
  • Real-time content personalization.
  • Self-service knowledge base with simple troubleshooting manuals for the most frequent issues.
  • A feedback form.
  • A possibility to schedule a callback or a visit of a field service agent.
Learn more

B2B customer portal

The main reason for you to launch a portal is to establish stronger trusted relationships with your business clients. You can do it via:

  • Tiered and bulk pricing.
  • Controlled access to different functions with a configurable system of roles and permissions.
  • Automated recurring services and scheduled ordering.
  • Multi-address delivery.
  • Possibility to contact an assigned sales rep.
  • Credit payment.
Learn more

Customer Service Portals Implemented by ScienceSoft

Our Customers Say

Secure-DeFi

We contracted ScienceSoft for end-to-end development of our client portal. The portal they delivered fully meets our expectations in terms of functionality and design. Now we have a secure web platform to ensure seamless customer access to our crypto products and promote our latest DeFi offerings. Plus, ScienceSoft managed to launch the portal quickly, which was essential to support the release of our new products.

We commissioned ScienceSoft to build a Dynamics 365 customer portal to help our sales team streamline communication with B2B customers. The B2B customer portal meets our business needs of enhanced pricing invoicing and contracting and overall client communication. We are fully satisfied with the solution and the assistance of ScienceSoft’s team.

Harding and Carbone has been very pleased with selecting ScienceSoft as a web app development company for developing a web portal for our customers. Their professionalism, expertise, guidance, organization, and timing has been wonderful. They were also very patient with explaining their process and the next steps if we ran into any issues that we did not understand.

Sample Architecture of a Customer Portal

On the diagram below, ScienceSoft shows a customer portal solution built with a Progressive Web Application (PWA) technology as it enables convenient mobile experience for customers. Among its clear advantages are the ability to work in low-speed networks and during network breaks, fast website speed and a possibility of home screen installation like with a native mobile app.

Architecture of customer portal - ScienceSoft

  • Customer portal + ERP: to avoid manual exchange of information on products and sales transactions.
  • Customer portal + CRM: to complement customer information in CRM with the data on a customer’s product/service preferences and customer support interactions.
  • Customer portal + ticketing system: to let customers conveniently submit service requests via a portal.

How to Drive Customer Adoption of a Self-Service Portal

Estimating the success of a customer portal is easy – customers eagerly use it as a self-service tool and prefer it to other communication channels (like phone or email). To achieve that, ScienceSoft encourages you to follow several rules:

Estimate the workload of your customer service first to understand the feasibility of a customer portal launch. As a rule, larger companies see higher customer involvement into self-service while smaller companies can do well with in-person communication channels.

Even if you want to launch faster, invest time in UX research and usability testing. This will help keep the focus on the convenience of end users. The ROI of customer portal implementation will be higher if customers prefer the portal to person-to-person interactions to get the required information or address a problem.

At the desk or on the go, customers will use a customer service website with the same comfort if the viewing experience is optimal for any devices and screen sizes. There are several ways to achieve that – make a portal with adaptive design that adjusts the website for a screen size and may hide some functionality inconvenient for mobile viewing, get a standalone mobile app, or implement a portal as a PWA. Your portal development vendor will help you choose the best solution.

Technologies to Build a Customer Portal

Based on our experience in customer portal development, ScienceSoft recommends choosing between two implementation scenarios: a customer portal as a monolithic platform-based or a microservices-based application. Our sample technology portfolios are tailored to customer portals not intended for product/service sales. If you want to read more about ecommerce-focused development, explore our guide to ecommerce portals.

Sample technology portfolio for a platform-based portal

Built on Dynamics 365

Description

  • Power Apps portals – used for low-code customer portal setup.
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service – used as a ticketing system.
  • Microsoft Power Automate – used for portal integration with external systems and for automated workflow creation (e.g., emails triggered by various customer actions).
  • Dynamics 365 Customer Voice – used to create customer surveys.

Best for

  • Quick portal deployment (about 3 months for portal development).
  • Companies seeking for minimum development support after the portal deployment.

Sample technology portfolio for a microservices-based portal

Custom-built

Description

Back end:

  • Docker for app containerization
  • as app framework
  • MySQL as an open-source database
  • RabbitMQ as an open-source message broker
  • PHP as a programming language
  • Symfony, Swoole as PHP frameworks

Front end:

  • React/Redux
  • Ant as web components framework
  • Responsive Design
  • Webpack
  • JavaScript, HTML and CSS

Data layer:

  • Oracle Database

Best for

  • Full flexibility in customer portal functionality.
  • Iterative development: different functional modules can be developed one by one.

Factors Affecting Customer Portal Implementation Cost

The cost of your client portal software will depend on the functionality you want to provide.

  • Customer self-registration procedure.
  • Self-service capabilities: submission of customer support tickets and price quotations, booking, online buying, payment transactions, e-forms completion, more.
  • Content management capabilities: the diversity of content types you will need to create.
  • Customer communication channels to integrate: email and text messaging, phone calling, video calling, live chat, more.
  • Advanced functionality: an AI-powered chatbot, sentiment analysis, a tiered loyalty program, and more.
  • Back-office process automation: management of customer support tickets (number and complexity of ticket routing and escalation rules), payment gateway integration, order management, integration with business systems (ERP, CRM, etc.).
Pricing Information

We estimate the starting threshold for customer portal implementation as $70,000.

Commonly, companies see the return on customer portal investment within one year after the implementation. For example, the case study for a municipal utility company indicates that the very first year of customer portal usage brought a 20% increase in customer self-service involvement and a 65% reduction in call center traffic.

Want to know the cost of your future customer portal?

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Launch a Customer Portal with ScienceSoft

Each business has its unique requirements to a customer portal. Our team can help you unlock all the needed capabilities and implement a customizable client portal with due quality and in time.

Customer portal consulting

  • Conducting UX research to better understand your customers.
  • Choosing an optimal development approach and the right technology stack for your customer portal project.
  • Estimating project duration and cost.
  • Recommending a risk mitigation plan.
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Full-cycle customer portal development

  • Making a project proposal based on a thorough business requirement study.
  • UX-wise user interface design.
  • Platform-based or custom portal development.
  • Customer portal integration with business systems according to the planned solution architecture.
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About ScienceSoft

About ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft is an internationally present software development and IT consulting company headquartered in the US. Our experience in web portal development relies on 19 years in the domain. We have implemented customer portals for diverse industries including manufacturing, retail, healthcare, logistics, public services, banking, telecoms.