What is a team portal?
A team portal is any published material that helps people understand what your team does, how it is performing and what to expect from it. Usually that means web pages and apps: ways to contact the team, a menu of services, status updates and more. But a poster on the wall of the team area is a portal too.
Every information consumer has the same basic needs. A portal should be:
- Easy
- Clear
- Fast
- Powerful
- Free to use on the person’s own terms
Meet those needs and people are happy the moment they use your portal. Librarians have known this for years.
Start with the people
A portal on its own won’t raise revenue, cut costs or improve governance. Those goals also need a team that works faster and more effectively, which brings us to the most overlooked part of every technology project: the people.
Every portal serves three groups: the customer, the provider, and your team and its peers. Each group has its own skills, goals and assumptions, and it is easy to get them wrong.
The five needs above are a starting point. Beyond them, it depends on what your team does. A hospital offering self-service check-in should probably put speed (#3) ahead of freedom (#5). For an IT team, easy (#1) and clear (#2) probably matter most.
That is where the work begins: understanding all of the users, from the customer to the fulfillers working the queues to the people they share work with. Each wants to be heard and to shape the portal. You can’t act on every frustrated user’s input. Treat it as research data for the design instead.
Good design is hard and is learned through practice. If you aren’t ready to learn user research and design, hire someone who has done it. Skilled designers are one of the best investments you can make in a portal that lasts.
Step 1: Get started with the basics
Portal projects tend to jump straight to the future: “We want to be like Amazon.” You can’t afford to be Amazon, and unless you are in retail, your goals are different. Your first priority is making customers and providers happy by getting them the information and actions they need.
The most visible feature of any portal is communication. Amazon tells you to buy something as soon as you arrive. Think of your portal as the sign on your door. What does it say about your team?
Groups communicate poorly because clear communication is hard, and people convince themselves it is simple. Your portal starts to build your team’s reputation. It may be the first time anyone notices your group exists. What do you want them to think?
If customers feel understood on their first visit, you have succeeded. You got there by understanding them, most likely by listening, or because you were once a customer yourself. Be careful with the second one: experience can cloud your view. Go back to the customer and base decisions on data rather than your gut.
The easiest way to start is a single web page. If you don’t have a web page, make a sign. Use it to introduce your team or give directions, then add instructions on next steps or where to go. That’s it. No fancy technology, no multimillion-dollar project, no integration and no automation, and your customers already get value from it.
Step 2: Open the lines of communication
Now you have a page (or a sign) and you are talking to customers. They will want more. What comes next depends on them, so ask.
Consider a story. You’re a customer of a garbage collection company, and they missed your pickup this week. You visit their website and see a banner: “We are experiencing a one-day delay in pickups,” with the customer service number. That’s a decent experience. It is also where most portals begin: one-way communication, with an option to start a conversation.
Communication runs both ways, and giving customers a voice makes them feel heard. The same applies to fulfillment and agent staff. Make it easy for everyone to talk to each other.
Your customers, clients and peers would probably all benefit from the same information. A portal lets you share it while keeping control of it. Depending on your culture, audience and web platform, that might mean:
- A chat option so users can reach agents or fulfillers directly
- A web form
- A phone number
- For a poster, a blank sheet next to it that says “Leave us a message”
Chat is the most useful option on a web page because it gives stuck users a universal way out, whether they can’t find something or have a simple question. Try several methods and keep the feedback loop going. How are your teammates handling chat? What happens when nobody is available? Plan for those questions before you launch.
Step 3: Give customers content they want
With a working site and two-way communication in place, add content: data, information, stories and videos. Show how your team helps people, and open up access to the systems and data your team uses every day.
Think about how much information your team holds. Suppose your team runs the library at a medical device manufacturer. People want to skim resources quickly and sometimes dig into in-depth research. Could you open the catalog through a web portal, an API or guest access? That one integration saves employees time and could lead to more disciplined product management, which means less risk.
Or suppose you are a bank. Your service partners hold information your customers would love to see, such as credit scores or tips for saving money. Some financial institutions now give that information away to attract and keep customers.
These integrations are not always easy. Sometimes it’s as simple as pasting an embed code; often it isn’t. Explore and test. Ask what people call your team about all the time that they could look up themselves.
Once you know which systems to share, check whether your portal platform can connect to them. This is the time to estimate the return on the integration (its effect on productivity or revenue) and its total cost of ownership. Does it need a license? Staff to run it? Answer those questions before you decide.
Step 4: Consistency builds trust
So far you have a page, an introduction to your team, ways to talk in both directions, and plans to bring another system into the portal. Whether you realize it or not, you have just made your life much harder.
The complexity of your portal has more than doubled. That other system can now hurt your customers’ experience. What if it changes? What if its data fails? How will customers feel, and what will they think of your team?
Every part of the portal has to hold up, and this is where total cost of ownership starts to climb. More services mean more complexity and higher operating costs. Some safeguards to consider:
- Replicate the data source locally and serve it from the portal, so your copy stays up if the source goes down.
- Make the portal adapt, showing a different page when a data source is unavailable.
- Add automated testing and alerting.
These cost money, so know what you are getting into. Experiment, but be ready to change course. Work with technology teams that share your goals and your burdens.
Colors, text and wording also shape the experience, and ideally they all match. In practice a perfectly unified look is unattainable: one site updates before the others, one document goes out of date. Expect to work on this indefinitely, and choose platforms that make it manageable.
Keep testing and keep listening. Customers will tell you when your search results are bad and when they can’t reach their favorite page in two clicks.
Common portal integrations
- Systems of record
- Employee directory
- Team directory
- Ticketing and knowledge base
- Databases
- Written guides and how-tos
- Company, team and project updates
- File shares
- Checklists
- Links and downloads
- Events and calendars
- Dashboards and reporting
Step 5: Put your portal in their pocket
If you have come this far and have a working system of customer engagement, congratulations. Many organizations fail at this several times before they succeed.
What do customers want next? Ask them. One likely answer: access to the portal whenever and wherever they need it. Most users expect it.
- “I should tell finance about the material shortage our research partners are predicting.” Opens the finance portal on an iPhone.
- “I need to order 300 pounds of rubber.” Opens the procurement portal on an Android phone.
- “What’s Peter’s email address?” Looks it up in whatever browser is at hand.
Your colleagues should be able to work when and where it suits them. A portal that only works in one specific browser, or that requires installing an app, gets in their way. Make every customer interaction work on mobile.
Step 6: Improve navigation and search
Before search engines, you either knew someone who knew where to look or you knew yourself. Is your portal like that? Does finding things take tribal knowledge?
Adding search to a portal is technically simpler than it has ever been, so turn it on. Then make sure it works:
- Does it find what people want?
- Can you see what people search for and where they land?
- Does it understand the names people actually use? Your “ERP system” may be “Domino” or “MyApp” to most users. Make search return the right result for those terms.
Once search works, look hard at your browsing categories. What makes sense to one user rarely makes sense to the next.
Step 7: Stay curious about the customer
Personas let you show the right things to the right people, and if you ask, people will tell you when to show them. Amazon suggests items related to what you’ve bought. Imagine if it also changed its navigation and product order based on your role. A marketer buys creative tools; what are the equivalent tools and information for your teams’ roles?
Here you have a real advantage over Amazon. You serve a much smaller audience and can know your people far better. Show them the tools available to them and help them use those tools. Take time to understand and sympathize with their problems.
Categories rarely help people who don’t know how things are divided. Each person has their own idea of where a service belongs. Test it: show customers your categories and time how long it takes them to find something. Then give them search and time them again. Which wins?
There may be cases where customers do want categories, such as a specific group or batch ordering. Can you offer that view to just those customers?
Secondary content (profiles, a cart if you have one, FAQs, contact details) also needs a place in the navigation. Navigation is never perfect, and simplicity usually wins. If your portal software doesn’t give you a good default, hire strong designers, do user research and keep collecting feedback. Getting close to what customers want takes sustained work.