Strategy
Jan Lemmens
Solution Manager CXM
Building or upgrading a customer portal? Great! But before you dive into user flows, wireframes or development, hit pause.
Here’s the truth: many portal projects fail long before they ever go live — not because the technology didn’t work, but because the thinking wasn’t clear.
In this post, we’ll walk you through how to set your portal initiative up for success before anything gets designed or built.
Not caught up on our series yet? Start with the foundations for a robust and scalable customer portal.
A customer portal is more than a digital tool — it’s a strategic asset. Done right, it reduces service pressure, enhances customer experience, and gives your teams room to focus on the things that really matter.
To get started, ask yourself two simple questions:
Your goals might include:
A great way to align everyone on the "why" of your customer portal? Try Benefits Mapping — a simple technique to connect technology, features and goals to real business outcomes and to align on measurable benefits (KPIs).
Your customers aren’t all the same. A retail client, a partner, and an internal user might all log in to the same portal — but for very different reasons.
Don’t guess what they need. Instead, talk to your customers! Define your key audience segments and invite customers over to talk about their needs and challenges. You can get a surprising amount of first-hand data from these conversations, allowing you to validate your assumptions and to extend archetypes you might've already created. It also allows you to gain more insights in your customers' journey and potential frictions.
Next to user research, consider the following actions:
Based on this information, define a one-line product vision, like:
"We aim to provide a platform our customers love and streamline all interactions in an engaging, fast, consistent and digitally native solution.”
Such a vision statement captures the essence of your initiative (the outcome) and should support future decision-making and prioritization.
Based on your overall product vision and input gathered from stakeholders, start drafting your portal use cases and prioritize them using effort/value mapping. It’s a quick way to spot high-impact, low-effort wins — and avoid wasting time on low-value features.
A blueprint is your architectural sketch. It helps your team see the big picture:
A strong blueprint brings clarify to the different stakeholders and allows to be iterated upon during implementation.
Sooner or later, someone’s going to ask: “What’s the return on investment (ROI)?”
Be ready with a business case that covers estimated total cost of ownership (TCO) and business benefits.
TCO is typically composed of:
These could include:
The most successful portals aren’t one-time projects — they’re managed as digital products.
This means going beyond just "delivering features" to consistently solving real business problems. Your portal should continuously evolve with your customers’ needs, not sit static after go-live.
To execute on your strategy, apply core product management techniques:
Managing your portal like a product means:
It’s a mindset shift — but one that pays off in velocity, engagement, and long-term value.
A portal can transform how you serve your customers — or fall flat if it’s rushed.
Start with clarity. Know your users. Align your teams. Focus on what brings value. And treat your portal like the long-term product it deserves to be.
Get the strategy right, and everything else gets easier.
In the wake of global disruptions and rising customer expectations, companies are increasingly digitizing their customer service/communications to improve user satisfaction and operational efficiency. Let's discover the best practices for building a future-proof customer portal.
Jan Lemmens
Solution Manager CXM