(A PSG Classic – Originally Published February
2005)
NETTING IT OUT
When I originally wrote this prescription in 2005, many companies hadn’t
yet implemented customer portals, although many did have partner extranets.
Now, many firms do offer customer portals. Others are planning to launch customer
and partner portals in the coming year. But few companies have gone to this
next logical step: combine the oversight of customer portals with the oversight
of partner portals. Most businesses still assign these responsibilities to
different business owners with little or no coordination between them (except
for some shared technology infrastructure). So, I decided the time is ripe
to revisit this recommendation.
We define customer portals as customer experiences that are designed and delivered
via the Web to specific groups of customers—for example, small business
customers, individuals in a specific client account, or individuals in a
common community of practice (such as corporate cash managers or high school
English teachers).
We define partner portals as customer experiences that are designed and delivered
via the Web to specific groups of channel partners—for example, partners
that serve small business accounts, partners that sell to the pharmaceutical
market, value-added resellers in Brazil, the system integrator that supports
your 10 largest accounts, or all of the employees who work for a particular
channel partner.
We believe that customer and partner portals should be designed and evolved
side-by-side in order to best serve both audiences and to leverage common
information and services.
But where should this function sit within your organization? Who should be
responsible for designing, evolving, and managing your customer and partner
portals? In this report, we provide some guiding principles you can use to
evolve your own customer and partner portal organizations.
HOW TO THINK ABOUT MANAGING YOUR CUSTOMER AND PARTNER PORTALS
In watching our clients struggle to come up with the “right” organizational
structure to manage and evolve their customer and partner portals, we keep
seeing the same mistakes being made over and over again. Maybe some of these
practices are creating problems for your organization, too.
In this report, our concern is specifically centered around portals that deliver
customer experiences to external stakeholders, such as customers and partners.1
You may (or may not) find some of these suggestions useful when you think
about portals for internal stakeholders—your executives, managers,
associates, and employees.
We have some “Do’s and Don’t’s” that may help
you design the roles and responsibilities for your own customer and partner
portal initiatives.
WHAT NOT TO DO
Let’s start with the “Don’t’s.” They are:
•
Don’t make portal design and evolution an IT function.
•
Don’t separate portals from ebusiness.
•
Don’t separate portal design and evolution from those of your other customer
touchpoints, such as contact centers and IVR systems.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these caveats.
Don’t Make Portal Design and Evolution an IT Function
In many organizations, portal design and management is still being handled
as if it’s an IT project—a project that you do once and then
move into maintenance mode. But portals aren’t projects; they’re
living, breathing customer experiences.
We believe that customer and partner portals should not only be specified by
the business, but they should be managed within the business. The look and
feel of a portal, the site navigation, the customer experience, the marketing
and e-merchandising of products, the findability of information, the accuracy
and consistency of the information presented, even the online tools and wizards
used by customers—these should all be under the direct control of subject
matter experts and professionals within the business. The functional evolution
of the sites, the continuous refinement of Customer Scenarios®, and the
continuous improvement of usability, content, merchandising, search, and
navigation should also be the responsibility of business users.
Portal platforms and tools are now becoming sufficiently mature that it’s
increasingly easy to let business end users manage the day-to-day design and
evolution of customer and partner portals, leaving to the IT organization the
tasks of implementing, maintaining, and supporting the underlying infrastructure.
Don’t Separate Portals from Ebusiness
Ebusiness was once considered a separate, fast-moving business unit that was
purposefully walled off from the “real” business. Since 2002,
however, ebusiness executives and their teams have been integrated back into
mainstream business operations in most firms. Today, many ebusiness executives
report to companies’ marketing organizations. They are responsible
for their companies’ faces to the outside world—for setting the
strategy and the priorities for evolving the companies’ various externally-facing
Web sites, extranets, and, most recently, customer and partner portals.
Portals for External Stakeholders Are Ebusiness Initiatives. Portals used to
be thought of as an evolution of companies’ intranets. Portal direction
and implementation used to be handled by an IT organization in consultation
with the departmental sponsors and end users of the portals. That’s
beginning to change. Portal initiatives are no longer thought of as IT projects;
they’re business initiatives. And, unlike “projects,” portals
don’t go away. They live on as vital customer relationship channels.
Here’s the bottom line: External portals shouldn’t be separated
from the rest of your ebusiness strategy and initiatives. Any portal that is
externally facing—a portal that is used by a group of customers, partners,
suppliers, investors, or other external stakeholders—should be designed
and managed by business leaders in much the same way that the rest of your
externally facing ebusiness sites—your corporate Web site, your ecommerce
site, your customer support site(s)—should be evolved and managed: to
deliver a consistent, cross-channel customer experience.
Don’t Separate Portal Design and Evolution from Those of Your
Other Customer Touchpoints
This brings us to our third “Don’t.” Your customers and partners
deal with your organization through a number of touchpoints and channels—not
just your e-channels. If you design and manage your customer and partner portals
separately from your contact centers, your IVR systems, and any other customer-touching
technology platforms, you’re much more likely to provide a fragmented
experience to your customers.
That’s why we advocate having a cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer
experience (CX) team that is responsible for the quality of all of your customers’ experiences
across all touchpoints and across all of the stages of those customers’ interactions
with your firm and its partners. Your customer and partner portal initiatives
should be tightly integrated into your cross-channel customer experience design
and management strategy.
WHAT TO DO
Emerging Best Practices and Principles
Here are some basic best practices and principles that may help you think through
the right organizational structure for your customer and partner portal initiatives.
Some of these practices predate the arrival of portal platforms as a distinct
technology solution. Yet many of today’s portal platform technologies
lend themselves well to the adoption of these principles. That’s because
portal platforms typically separate the logical design of customer experiences
from the physical design and delivery of the services that support those
experiences.
Here are some basic, but perhaps radical, ways we suggest you think about designing
and managing your customer and partner portals:
1. Customer segment advocates/owners are responsible for the design and evolution
of customer/partner portals.
2. Customer account/relationship managers should maintain the portals for their
accounts.
3. Customers and partners should administer, customize, and personalize their
own portals.
4. Your customer experience design team is a business organization, not an
IT one.
5. Your IT organization is responsible for developing, provisioning, and maintaining
portal services.
6. Portal design and delivery should be tightly integrated into a cross-channel,
cross-lifecycle customer experience design and delivery organization.
1. Customer Segment Advocates/Owners Are Responsible for the Design and Evolution
of Customer/Partner Portals
Who should “own” each customer portal? We’ve found that the
person best equipped to understand the specific requirements for each audience
is the full-time “advocate” or segment owner for that audience.
For many companies, the idea of having specific customer experience owners
for particular market segments is a new idea. For other companies, the customer
segment owner role is a natural evolution from existing ebusiness and/or
marketing responsibilities. The customer segment owner is the person whose
job it is to understand the requirements and needs of a particular group
of customers.
We’ve described the roles and responsibilities of customer and partner
segment advocates or “owners” in a separate report.<a href="#2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> In the following
example, we’ll recap and summarize many of the points that are most relevant
to our discussion of customer advocates’ involvement in portal design.
*Footnotes*
1) Please refer to “Customer Portals: Central to Your Customer Experience
Strategy,” January 27, 2005, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/psgp1-27-05cc,
and “Partner Portals Should Be Combined with Customer Portals,” February
10, 2005, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/psgp2-10-
05cc, for our discussion of customer
and partner portals and their interrelationships.
2) See “Customer (and Partner) Segment Advocates,” September
9, 2004, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/os9-9-04cc.
*Footnotes*