Why customer portals fail.

If you think driving internal change is difficult, why waste time and money trying to drive change within your clients’ business?

A customer portal may sound like a great way to interact with your clients.  They can reduce administrative burden, minimise errors, save you time, help you collect valuable information about your customers and generally improve service levels. 

However, lets be honest, most customer portals are designed to make your life easier, not your customers' and especially not those customers that are not sophisticated purchasers of goods or services. 

If you’re HP, GE or even Coca Cola, you can dictate your customer’s behaviour.  If you’re not, you can’t - you need to respond to customer behaviour. 

This problem sits at the heart of why customers portals, launched to much fanfare, often sit underutilised.  Of course its easy to make the argument that having a customer portal allows your customers to control the order process and to interact directly with your business - "it makes so much sense, how could they not love it?".  Why not? Because customers have their own systems for placing orders and these systems have been designed by them to make their life easier.  It shouldn't surprise you to learn that these involve emailing, telephone and (gasp) faxing their orders.

Without putting the customer at the heart of your decision making process, you risk alienating your most important asset. 

But don't despair, there is a simple alternative to establishing a customer portal.  An alternative that is far more cost effective, will improve your processes and won't impact the customer experience one iota!

Before you spend a cent, sign up to our free OrdersInbox trial today.  We promise, no hard sell, just simply designed order management software that will save you time and money.  Sign up for your free trial now.

Enter your details and we’ll send you a username and password no questions asked.  The free trial will give you access to your own FREE OrdersInbox account for 3 months. 

Join great Australian companies like National Tiles to discover how OrdersInbox can help you.  For more information go to www.ordersinbox.com, or email (oi@ordersinbox.com) or telephone 03 9024 6268 to arrange a short demonstration.