BYD TechThe short answer
A customer portal is a private, logged-in area where your customers can serve themselves: check orders and statuses, download invoices and documents, reorder, raise requests and update their details. It saves your team from answering the same emails and calls, and gives customers answers at any hour. It is worth building when many customers ask the same questions about their own data, and the answers already live in your systems.
Key points
- A portal lets customers find their own information without contacting you.
- Common features: orders, documents, reorders, requests, account details.
- The value comes from connecting it to the systems that hold the data.
- Start with the questions your team answers most often.
- Access control is critical: each customer sees only their own data.
What goes in a portal
| Feature | Replaces |
|---|---|
| Order and delivery status | "Where is my order?" emails and calls |
| Statements and document downloads | Requests for copies of paperwork |
| Reorder from history | Orders taken by phone or email |
| Requests and tickets with status | Untracked email threads |
| Account and contact details | Changes typed in by your team |
| Team access for the customer | Shared passwords on the customer’s side |
Business customers and consumers
Portals are most common in business-to-business work, where each customer is a company with several people, repeat orders and paperwork. A distributor’s customers reorder, check statements and download certificates. Consumer portals exist too, for utilities, healthcare, education and subscriptions, and usually focus on account details and history.
When it is worth building
- Your team answers the same status and document questions every day.
- Customers reorder the same things regularly.
- The information already exists in your systems, but only your staff can see it.
- Customers ask to see their own history, or to add colleagues.
Count the questions first. The emails and calls your team handles each week are both the business case and the list of features.
Buy or build
Many business systems include a basic portal, and helpdesks offer customer-facing ticket views. If those cover your questions, use them. A custom portal makes sense when the data comes from several systems, the workflow is specific to you, or the portal is part of how you win customers. The general reasoning is in Build vs buy software.
Getting it right
- Separate each customer’s data strictly, and test that one cannot see another’s.
- Connect to the systems of record. Do not copy data into the portal by hand.
- Start with the two or three most common questions.
- Let customers invite colleagues, with roles.
- Make it work well on a phone.
- Measure the drop in emails and calls, and add features from what remains.
Customer portals and B2B portals for reorders and statements are part of our web app development work.
Sources
Checked when this guide was written.
