4 questions to answer for a successful portal implementation

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You decided to roll out a customer or partner portal. You’re excited about improving your customer

experience, making self-service possible, reducing channel conflict, and strengthening your online

presence. So where do you start?

From our experience, customers who successfully implement a portal start

by answering the following 4 questions:

1.  How can we get it right the first time?

2.  What are common roadblocks to avoid?

3.  How can we offer more in our portal to increase its value?

4.  How will we measure return on investment (ROI)?

As we take you through these questions, we’ll share lessons learned from two

customers—one of the largest open-source companies in the world, which implemented a partner portal,

and a medical records management company that built a customer portal.

As with any technology project, the planning and preparation stage is often the most intensive and time-

consuming. Investing in this stage will pay big dividends—you’ll save time and ensure you reach your

goals. Here are a few things to consider when you’re at the whiteboard.

Question #1: How can we get it right the first time?

Getting it right requires that you involve the right people, clearly define your priorities, and supplement

your own resources, if necessary.

 Get the right people early on – Building the project team should be the first order of business. Also

make sure you have executive involvement from the start to help shape the vision. Use this vision to

define your objectives, your priorities, and the metrics you’ll use to measure success.

 Define your priorities – Be clear about what you want to accomplish. For example:

•  Do you have a target case resolution time?

•  Do you want to reduce the number of inbound customer service calls by 15%?

•  Are you looking to have partners contribute 30% of your overall revenue this year?

Defining such management-level metrics will help with creating your processes and building reports.

These high-level metrics will be critical in defining your operational metrics, as discussed in “How will

we measure ROI?” on the next page.

AbstractRolling out a customer or partner portal involves

careful planning and execution.

This document will help orient you before you

dive into a portal implementation.

By: Jason Suen

4 questions to answer for a successful

portal implementation

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4 questions to answer for a successful portal implementation

BEST PRACTICE 2

 Get the expertise you need – Once your internal team is in place, make sure there are no gaps in your

implementation expertise. You have several options—remote guidance or on-site support, delivered by

Salesforce.com Consulting or our implementation partners. These organizations can help make sure

you’re on the right path from the start.

Both of our example companies brought in consulting partners to make their projects successful. Prior to

doing so, their progress was slowed by stalls and blunders. Both companies give substantial credit to on-site experts for their projects’ success.

Question #2: What are common roadblocks to avoid?

Common challenges include complexity, managing change requests, training partners, and keeping up with

what those partners want.

 Keep access rules simple – In most cases, less is more. Just as with your initial CRM rollout, determine

the levels of user access, record types, and the custom fields and tabs you need.

Initially, the software company mapped out the individual requirements and access needs for each

partner as well as for the different access tiers of users at each reseller. The result was dozens of different

partner profiles. As you can imagine, this approach was very complicated to implement and even more

time-consuming to maintain. The company revisited that arrangement and turned dozens of profiles intoa just a handful, without sacrificing the user experience.

 Manage changes – During the early pilot phases, there are bound to be dozens of updates, tweaks, and

changes. It’s a great opportunity for soliciting user feedback and making changes in an organized way.

For example, you can use the ideas functionality of Salesforce CRM to solicit user feedback and vote on

changes. And consider creating custom objects or a special case record type to log change requests.

As you define your change request process, keep in mind that Salesforce CRM includes a setup audit

trail to track changes made in your system. Go to Setup | Security Controls | View Setup Audit Trail to

get started.

 Train for high adoption – Building a training plan for your partners—or public documentation for your

customers—will bring adoption rewards. For more information about setting up a training plan, see the

Best Practice document “10 tips for a successful training plan.”

One highlight of the software company’s implementation was the creation of custom documents and

training plans for its global partners. The company wanted to increase partner participation from 30% to

80%, which it achieved in just a few months. The company credits training, increased collaboration, and

transparency for achieving these results.

 Don’t forget your users – To continue your change management process, be sure to keep in touch with

what users want. The medical records company used this approach with great success. By walking the

halls and interviewing end users (both internal employees and customers), it gathered valuable feedback 

that helped reduce data input errors by 17% and case turnaround time by 15%. With that feedback, the

company was able to improve the overall process as well as specific fields and page layouts that affect

users every day.

Question #3: How can we extend the portal’s value?

As you design your portal, don’t forget about the hundreds of  AppExchange applications—both free and

for a fee—for virtually any area of your business. Looking for a survey tool? You can find a pre-built app 

to poll your customers about their portal experience. Want to create documents based on information your

customers and partners provide? There’s an app for almost anything you can think of.

The medical records company took advantage of partner apps to listen to its customers by integrating

surveys into its portal. In addition, the company turned its portal into a revenue-generating machine by

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4 questions to answer for a successful portal implementation

BEST PRACTICE 3

using a payment processing app. Because apps from the AppExchange are pre-integrated, they’re a fast and

easy option to make your portal more valuable to your customers.

If you find yourself in uncharted waters with no existing apps, remember that the Force.com platform

includes lots of tools to customize your app or build new apps. Check out Developer Force to find out just

what you can do.

Question #4: How will we measure ROI?

After you roll out the portal, train your users, and enhance functionality based on user feedback and apps

from the AppExchange, it’s time to measure the results of your efforts. By using familiar dashboards, you

can compare the initial metrics you defined with the data you capture as the portal is used.

To get accurate ROI numbers for your sales or customer service organization, establish performance

benchmarks before your implementation. These benchmarks should reflect the priorities you outlined in

your vision and in the planning stage, discussed on page 1.

Here are some common metrics for customer portals:

 Case resolution times, case age

 Cases closed per rep, # of self-closed cases

 Average case response time (time spent in New status)

 Cost per case ($ spent on portal support resources/number of cases resolved through portal)

 # of escalations

For partner portals, try these metrics:

 # of deals registered by partner

 Pipeline generated by partner

 Average age of deals by partner

 Closed business by partner Cost per partner (marketing support, funding requests)

Together with custom training and high-touch engagements, the software company used dashboards to help

keep its partners on their toes. By using leaderboards that showed the comparative performance of its

partners, the company met its goal of increasing channel sales from 40% to 60% of its total sales.

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4 questions to answer for a successful portal implementation

For More Information

Contact your account executive to learn

how we can help you accelerate your

CRM success.

Summary and additional resources

For large projects such as portal implementations, getting started on the right foot and learning from other

successful projects is critical. One way to accomplish that goal is to make sure you have the proper

resources within your team—or getting help from salesforce.com or its partners. You’ll find that you’ll

save time, money, and avoid having to re-implement areas that went wrong.

If you’re ready to look into the finer points of implementing a portal, check out these resources:

 Customer Portal Implementation Guide 

 PRM Learning Center, where you’ll find a Getting Started guide, implementation tips, roles, and lots of 

PRM tricks

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