NETTING IT OUT

Customer portals make it easier for your customers to do business with you. They’re portals that deliver your online customer experience. They support all of your customers’ Customer Scenarios®, providing access to all the resources that your customers need in one convenient, custom-tailored environment.

We surveyed our community of readers, subscribers, and consulting clients to understand the adoption, functionality, governance and organization, and technology selection, usage, and management of their customer portals.

More than 200 of you, representing organizations of all sizes in all industries, have responded. You told us that your customer portals:

• Support broad functionality
• Have been deployed beginning more than two years ago and will continue to be widely deployed in the future
• Can be deployed rapidly
• Vary widely in governance and organization
• Contain a small number of custom-built portlets
• Deploy on a wide range of portal platforms

CUSTOMER PORTAL SURVEY

Customer portals are the ideal mechanisms for delivering your online, cross-lifecycle customer experience. They can contain all of your customers’ key Customer Scenarios® in a single technology environment that can be customized for customer segments and/or roles, or personalized to individual customers.

In our customer portals research, we’ve found that the types of resources that your customers can access, the scope and scale of your efforts to provide that access, and the way that your company manages development and implementation are key factors in customer portal successes. These factors provide the basis for our first customer portal survey, a survey designed to gain a broader understanding of these success factors.

We designed the survey so that respondents could complete it in five minutes or less. The survey contained 10 questions on three pages. The questions were:

• What functionality does your customer portal deliver to your customers?
• When was your customer portal deployed?
• How long was your effort to design and develop your customer portal?
• How do you govern your customer portal and how are you organized to develop and deliver its capabilities?
• How many portlets have you built and what was your effort to build them?
• Which portal platform did you use for your customer portal?
• How large is your company and what kinds of customers do you have?

In addition, we asked respondents for their contact information, offering this report in exchange. We also asked them whether or not they were interested in participating in further customer portal research. We plan to ask them clarifying questions on their responses to this survey and we hope to create and support a customer portal community.

Now, on to the results of the survey.

WHAT FUNCTIONS CAN CUSTOMERS PERFORM?

Customer portals give you the potential to let customers access, retrieve, and display Web or document content and/or let them access operational systems to retrieve data and perform services. On our survey, we asked if respondents’ customer portals let their customers:

* Access and display content

* Access and present data from operational systems and/or data warehouses

* Access services in operational systems

Respondents could select any or all of these answers or could select “other” and specify exactly what functionality their customer portal offered. Their responses are shown in Illustration 1. By far, most customer portals contain all three types of functionality. We had expected a split between content access and services access with more customer portals supporting only content access. Our expectation is dated. Respondents have deployed customer portals very rich in functionality that can support virtually any Customer Scenario.

Customer Portal Functionality
Customer-Portal-Functionality.jpg
Illustration 1. This illustration shows the functionality supported by respondents ’ customer portals.

WHEN DID YOU DEPLOY YOUR CUSTOMER PORTAL?

We were interested in how long ago our respondents deployed their customer portals. Portal platform suppliers and most of the organizations with which we spoke in doing our research series on customer portals told us that customer portals were a recent development that got traction in the last year or two. As you can see in Illustration 2...