Portals: In your pocket

This post is the seventh in a series about building portals for teams and groups to interact with customers. If you’re interested in reading more please follow us on twitter or subscribe in the right-hand margin of this blog —>

Team Leader: What do we want?

Team: Supercomputers in our pockets!

Team Leader: What do we got?

Team: Supercomputers in our pockets.

If you’ve made it this far in your journey toward a comprehensive customer portal: CONGRATULATIONS! You now have a system of customer engagement. This is a goal many brands fail at many many times before seeing success.

So – you know where I’m going next right? The customer. What do they want now? You’ve given them a voice, and enabled powerful access to your data and services.

What could customers possibly want besides everything?

Easy; they also want it all times and places.

They want this new system of engagement to be with them at all times. I’m working at 2am on my 23rd cup of coffee. I’m excited and inspired to make our company’s next new product.

Take the opportunity to delight your customers by fulfilling their needs at the time they need.

“Oh hey, I should tell finance about this material shortage that is predicted by our research partners” – goes to finance portal on iPhone.

“I need to order 300 pounds of rubber.” – goes to procurement portal on Android.

“I like Peter. What’s his email address?” – looks up employee info on a web browser on his child’s internet connected pillow.

These are the realities of today. These are not predictions. Your colleagues and co-workers deserve the right to work freely and to do so when it’s convenient to them and on their terms.

Does your portal require Internet Explorer 11 so that business rules can be enforced? Terrible.

Does your portal require a mobile version and a desktop version? Stupid.

Gone are these old perceptions of web development. Now there is only disruption, connection and communication. The rest is just a check-box on a management system.

Get every customer engagement on mobile to keep them as a customer.

Else; you may as well close the door on over half of your users, half of the time.