Count the emails and calls your team handles in a week that ask for something the customer could look up themselves. Where is my order? Can you resend the invoice? What did we order last time? Can I get a copy of the delivery note? A customer portal answers all of those without a human being involved, and customers prefer it, because it is instant.
What a portal is
A secure area of your website where customers log in and see their own information: orders, invoices, deliveries, documents, contracts, tickets, and whatever else is relevant to your business. Increasingly, it is also where they take action: reorder, pay, request support, approve a quote, upload a document.
The requests it removes
- Order status and tracking. The single most common enquiry for most product businesses.
- Invoice and statement copies. Especially at month end.
- Order history and reordering. Trade customers in particular want to repeat last month's order in seconds. See B2B trade portals.
- Documents. Delivery notes, certificates, contracts, reports, specifications.
- Support requests. Logged with context, tracked to resolution, visible to the customer.
- Quotes and approvals. Customers view and accept quotes online, with a record of who approved what.
- Account details. Addresses, contacts, payment methods, notification preferences.
The benefits for you
Less admin. Fewer interruptions for the sales and accounts teams. Faster payment, because invoices are always available and can be paid online. Fewer errors, because customers enter their own details. Better data, because you can see what customers look at and order. And a professional impression that competitors who still work by email cannot match.
The one rule
The portal must show live data from the systems you actually run: your ERP, accounts package, CRM or store. A portal fed by manual exports is out of date the moment it is loaded and quickly becomes something nobody trusts. This is why portals are integration projects as much as web projects. See what is system integration.
Ways to build one
On your ERP. If you run Odoo, a customer portal for orders, invoices, deliveries, tickets and signed documents is part of the platform and can be extended with custom features. No integration needed because it reads the same database.
On your eCommerce platform. Shopify and WooCommerce include basic account areas that can be extended, particularly for B2B.
Custom. A bespoke web application connected to your systems by API. Most flexible, most expensive, right when the portal is central to how you serve customers. Our custom software cost guide gives ranges.
Where to start
Do not build everything. List the enquiries you receive most, pick the top two or three, and build those first. Order status and invoice downloads are usually the winners. Launch, get customers using it, then add features based on what they ask for. This is the MVP approach applied to a portal.
Getting customers onto it
Announce it, but more importantly, use it. Every time someone emails for something the portal provides, answer with the link. Put the login on invoices and order confirmations. Have account managers walk key customers through it. Adoption is a habit change and it takes a few months of consistency.
Security
Customers are trusting you with their data. Each account must see only its own information, sign-in must be protected, and the application must be built and tested against common web vulnerabilities. Ask any developer what security testing they include; it is a fair question and the answer tells you a lot.
We build portals on Odoo, on eCommerce platforms and from scratch, depending on what you already run. Read about our custom software service or request a quote.
Key takeaways
- A customer portal lets customers do for themselves what they currently phone or email you to do.
- The biggest wins are order status, invoices and documents, reordering and support requests.
- It must read from your real systems, or it becomes another thing to keep in sync.
- Start with the two or three requests you get most, then grow it.
Frequently asked questions
Need help with custom software?
eSolution Hub is a UK company with its own engineering team in Lahore. Every project starts with a free 30 minute discovery call and a written quote. Read about our custom software service or request a quote.
Request a quote