Create a Customer Portal With a XME. Platform

Tutorial! How to Design Customer Portals With a Fast Code Platform

71% of clients admit their customer experience depends on the speed of response.

As seen, you should care about time and respect the demand to receive services on time. Customer journey convenience defines the degree of loyalty to your company. And, sure, the shortest way to the client’s heart lies through flawless service design.

To ensure it, enterprises should provide full leeway to their audience. Self-services or online customer portals usage became a helpful solution. Shep Hyken, CAO at Shepard Presentations, once said:

"A self-service solution doesn’t mean you don’t offer customer service. On the contrary, self-service is a way to enhance customer service."

Online customer portal software deserves attention because it ensures a quality client-oriented approach.

So, let's consider what the technical path to flawless results is and how the fast code platform can lead your company to the stars without adversity.

Self Services for Business Process Improvement

Before talking about technical intricacies and comparing approaches, why not remember what self-service is. It could be any software product, like an app or a customer portal that allows customers to satisfy their needs independently. A high level of integration with other systems and scalability to handle a large number of requests simultaneously are a must for its flawless operation.

An ordinary self-service example is a snack machine at a gas station. You need to throw a coin and press the button to get what you want.

Of course, there are more complex samples every taxpayer or online shopping lover is familiar with. Almost all industries now use this tool to stay alert.

And so, how does self-service work? As seen, a company provides customers with resources and controls their work. That's it. All the rest is up to clients.

The last ones should log in and perform some actions to receive the desired result.

Due to self-services, you can get the required data at 2 a.m. or order around-the-clock food delivery to your home.

So, this approach simplifies serving processes on the one side and makes them customized on the other one. Isn't happiness?

How To Create A Customer Portal Step By Step

Step #1 Preparation

Before you start doing anything radical concerning the new online customer portal, check your readiness using the following checklist:

1. Shadow your customers to understand their journey and create a seamless user experience.

2. Form a clear business purpose on why your company needs a self-service customer portal.

3. Create detailed technical requirements to your portal.

4. Build a product architecture, determine a set of services for clients. Define points of integration with CRM, ERP, warehouse and other systems your new customer portal might need.

5. Analyze the architecture to estimate your project. Discover how much resources you should invest to launch a self-service.

6. Assign roles between team members.

7. Set a development project budget based on project estimation results.

8. Create a step by step road map on how you will achieve a final goal.

Step #2 Development

Here it is a crucial stage that can take a long time or fly by quickly. It can involve dozens of experts or several engineers. In both cases, the result will be quality. But how much resources you are willing to spend on the creation is up to you.

Under ordinary circumstances, online customer portal software development takes from 6 to 12 months and requires the effort of more than 10 employees.

We thought, why don't you choose a more rational way? At this stage, it will be so profitable to use the fast code platform. It’s a sort of open-source low-code platform for development process acceleration.

So, why should you pay attention to it?

First of all, because of the technical base availability. Nobody will waste time learning how to create a portal. No one will look for tools to help achieve results.

The core task - self-service creation - has already been done. Engineers can use its open-source templates and frameworks.

In turn, they have the opportunity to configure and customize a portal following your expectations. The prevalence of business logic over technical issues is a principal part of an effective development cycle.

Based on the above, self-service creation using the XME. open source fast code platform takes from one to forth months and requires the work of two medium-level developers with a business analytic involvement to describe processes.

Also, self-service creation is arduous. The business has no room for error. If the web portal does not satisfy the customers with something, you can say goodbye to them. As well as to resources spent on failed product creation.

The fast code platform eliminates these risks due to rapid idea validity checking. It is enough 2-4 weeks to understand what the product will be and whether it is worth investment.

The last thing left for you at the development stage is to migrate the users' data to a new system.

Step #3 Test

When the initial result is ready, you can proceed to testing.

Wait, who said that there should be one result?

What if you don't want to risk your reputation and decide to run multiple self-services for different user groups. What to do? Develop new versions of the service from scratch?

XME.digital comes to the rescue. The fast code platform is equipped with a multi-tenancy feature. You can create different versions of the same product and manage them from a single center. It makes testing much more efficient.

At last, you should select several groups of loyal customers, offer them new self-service options and analyze audience wishes.

Step #4 Work on errors

After you know the audience's opinion about the new self-service, finalize it. Many people are mistaken, thinking they need to create one more product that customers will like. Fast code platform allows you not to throw the result in the trash can. Here, you can improve the source material, configuring it for the customers' needs.

Step #5 Deployment

At this stage, your final product will see the world. Someone puts self-service into operation as carefully as they test: starting with small audience segments and ending with the rest of the users. Others initially deploy a solution covering all customers.

What scenario to act on is up to you. Much depends on your development specifics and the potential risks. But the first option seems to be much safer.

Step #6 Succeed

Embedded satisfaction tracking can help navigate through clients' expectations and increase loyalty.

Check how XME.digital implements Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.