What is a portal and what purposes does it serve? At first sight a portal is nothing else than a web site, which is used by a large number of user as the first point of entry into the intranet or internet. Portals are often focussed on special topics and offer a wide range of (often) free services like search engines and forums. On the second sight however a portal offers the opportunity for a company to provide their services to their customers in a way that they can reduce their internal costs and charge the customers for using the services. In addition to this, target group specific marketing is possible by means of portals. The design of a portal should be reconsidered carefully in order to exploit the whole potential and not to miss the actual target group (e.g. private customers or corporate customers).

Private customer portals

Before you start with the construction of your private customer portal it is necessary to set the objectives. For example, banks are using private customer portals for the following purposes:

• Customer acquisition:
  • Providing market and product information in order to attract internet surfer to the own pages and gain new customers (marketing)
• Customer retention
  • Generating and analysing user profiles for specific sales pitch (personalised offering)
• Penetration
  • Using the already existing customer contacts in order to push the selling of more products (cross selling)
  • Intensifying the use of the online channel for transactions and services and consequently reducing the costs (up selling)

For the conception of the portal you focus on your customers' needs. From the private customers' point of view easy user guidance and an opportunity to adapt the portal sites to the specific wishes are important (personalisation/portal configuration by the customer).

Corporate customer portals

The requirements for corporate customer portals are significantly different to the ones for private customer portals. Essential aspects are the bundling of the different, often complex applications (procurement, tender, etc.) and the convenient administration of different access rights by the corporate customers themselves. In addition to this, a four-eye-principle has to be considered in order to release a transaction. The access to a portal is only possible for a restricted user group after a registration.

Efficiency

Portals offer a number of advantages to your customers as well as to your company. It is recommended to start with a efficiency check for your company and to identify the services with the biggest economic potentials before security mechanisms ( identification methods, registration of customers) are considered and technical service providers are chosen.

NOVOSEC can survey your company-specific questions and needs. Based on these, an activity plan can be established later on.