Client and partner portals

Any process with more than two parties in it ends up run from someone’s inbox. The client phones to ask where they are. The partner who brought the work in phones to ask the same. The person who should be moving the next step along spends the morning answering both.

The state of the thing lives in a chain of emails and a spreadsheet that is wrong by Thursday. The people who need to act find out late, and the client finds out last.

It gives each party one view of the record, with the fields they are allowed to see and nothing else. For the client: where they are, what is needed from them, and the documents in one place with who has signed what. For the people who sell or refer on your behalf: live availability, the materials, and proposals under their name with your numbers. For the third parties who have to act: the one screen that replaces the chasing email. And a staff side for the admin that never had a home.

A portal is judged by whether people outside your business use it without being made to. The ones we have built are used every day by our clients’ partners, by the professionals on the other side of their deals and by the people they serve, and none of them were made to. One of those professionals put it this way:

Portals share a database with the CRM. A step completed in the portal is completed in the pipeline in the same second, and the commercial fields stay where only the people who should see them can. There is no nightly sync to break and no second version of the truth.

How many kinds of user, how much of the process they can act on rather than view, and whether the portal sits on an existing system or starts one. A read-only progress portal is a few weeks. A partner portal with availability, documents and progression is a build in its own right.