Customer portals
Customer portals, so clients can look it up instead of ringing
A customer portal is a secure logged-in area where your clients see their own jobs, documents, invoices and history without having to ask anyone. It removes a category of phone call and email that most businesses have simply accepted as the cost of doing business.
- Fewer status-chasing calls
- Documents in one place
- Built around your process
What a customer portal is for
Every business that delivers work over time accumulates a specific kind of interruption: the customer who wants to know where something is. Not a complaint, not a new order, just a status check that takes someone five minutes to answer and happens forty times a week.
A portal answers those questions without a person. The client logs in and sees their jobs and their stage, the documents that belong to them, what has been invoiced and what has been paid, and the history of what was agreed. The five-minute interruption stops happening, and the client gets a better answer than they would have got on the phone.
The second effect is usually the bigger one. When a customer can see their own record, the questions that do reach you are the ones worth having a conversation about.
A portal is normally built alongside a public site, which is covered on our page about web design in Nottinghamshire.
What usually goes in one
Chosen from what your customers actually ring up to ask, not from a feature list.
- Current jobs or orders with a stage that means something to the customer rather than to your system
- Documents: quotes, certificates, reports, drawings, contracts, held in one place with a date on them
- Invoices and payment status, with a route to pay where that helps you get paid faster
- History of previous work, which is often the part clients value most and ask for at the worst moment
- A message thread attached to the job, so the conversation is not spread across three inboxes
- Secure sign-in with the account controls a business needs, including removing access when a contact leaves
- Notifications when something changes, so nobody has to log in speculatively to check
Portals are where a website stops being a brochure
This is the point where a site stops being something you show people and starts being something your business runs on. It is also the point where having developers behind the website rather than designers stops being a marketing distinction and becomes the whole thing.
A portal has to know about your jobs, your customers and your documents, which means it has to talk to wherever those already live. That is application work with real authentication, real permissions and real data behind it.
- Individual logins with proper access control, not a shared password
- Data pulled from the system you already run, rather than typed twice
- Hosted, backed up and patched by the same team that built it
Proof
TradeyHub
TradeyHub is a job management platform for trades businesses that we designed, built and continue to run. The customer-facing side of it is a portal in exactly this sense: the people paying for the work can see where it is up to without ringing the office.
It replaced more than five spreadsheets for the business behind it, and it is the clearest evidence we can offer that this kind of build is something we do rather than something we would attempt.
Read the TradeyHub case studyStart with the questions you get asked most
The cheapest useful portal answers the three questions your customers ask most often and nothing else. Everything after that should earn its place.
If you are considering one, spend a fortnight writing down what people ring up to ask. That list is the specification, and it is more useful than any feature comparison you will find online.
Get in touch
Talk to us about customer portals
A few lines is enough. We will tell you straight whether we can help, what it would cost and how quickly we can be there. No hard sell, and no follow-up sequence if you decide against it.
- We reply within one working day
- A straight answer, including when it is no
- Free process review available, before any money changes hands
Would rather just ring? 01623 354250, Mon–Fri, 9am–5:30pm.
Frequently asked questions
If the answer is not here, ask us. You will get a straight one, from someone who does the work.
Mon–Fri, 9am–5:30pm
How much does a customer portal cost?
It is quoted as a software project rather than a website, and for a small business a focused first version normally lands in the low thousands. The variable is how many systems it has to read from. A portal fed by one system is straightforward; one that has to reconcile three is where the cost sits.
Is customer data safe in a portal?
It is handled the way it should be: individual accounts rather than shared logins, encrypted connections, access limited to each customer's own records, and hosting we run and patch ourselves. We will also tell you plainly which data genuinely needs to be in there and which does not, because the safest data is the data you did not put online.
Can it connect to the system we already use?
Usually. Most business systems offer a route in, and where one does not there is normally a workable alternative. We check that before quoting rather than after, because it is the single biggest factor in what the project costs.
What if only some of our customers would use it?
That is normal and it is still worth it. Portals rarely reach every customer, and the ones who do use them tend to be the ones generating the most administrative work. Removing forty status calls a week is worthwhile even if half your customers still prefer the phone.
How long does a portal take to build?
A focused first version is typically six to ten weeks depending on what it has to connect to. We would rather ship something narrow that gets used than spend six months on something comprehensive that nobody logs into.
