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What becomes of portals – centralized repositories of essential information for consumer and business users – in today’s world of Facebook,  Wikipedia and YouTube? Those sites are intensely user-determined, with dynamic interfaces that often provide what users want with impressive predictive accuracy.

Fear not: new technologies and business processes are helping communications, entertainment and high-tech companies’ customer-facing portals pace these changes. New Web 2.0 interfaces are making portals easier. Meanwhile, social networking capabilities have transformed consumer portals into extended knowledge-sharing environments. Enhanced self-service capabilities further push “do-it-yourself.”

Using portals with these capabilities isn’t just “nice to have.” Rather, customers demand them. If a company’s user experience doesn’t match that of Gmail or Amazon.com, people will find it elsewhere. And while many communications, entertainment and high-tech companies already have portals, few have yet transformed them into a low-cost gateway for creating new, personalized customer interactions across marketing, sales and service functions.

Today’s portal business requirement is to reshape information management from being a back office or business intelligence (BI) function into a discipline delivering highly relevant, “just in time” information that retains customers and closes sales.

The New Portal Mandate

Portals must now do four things:

• Profile customers dynamically;
  
  
• Deliver information in context;
  
  
• Provide accurate, relevant recommendations; and
  
  
• Constantly highlight the bigger picture.

Portals must put anything a customer needs within easy reach – a broad mandate to be sure, and one that few companies have achieved. For example, Accenture's High Performance Business research finds that on average, only 22% of companies’ customer interactions are conducted online and processed automatically.¹

Hence the opportunity: a company that can combine its capabilities in innovative ways to deliver information in a user-friendly, engaging portal becomes essential in its customer’s decisions. Likewise, this company will attract and retain customers by knowing their interests and desires and then applying that insight to provide more relevant value-added services and content. Finally, by thinking about technology the way their customers do, business leaders can excel.

The Four Habits of Highly Effective Portal Practitioners

Today’s portal lives or dies based on a single metric: customer satisfaction via utility. This is true for any industry, but especially communications, entertainment and high-tech companies, which must attract and retain customers in a highly competitive marketplace. A satisfied customer is a retained customer, which is always cheaper than finding a new one.

There are four capabilities that lead to an appealing portal:

1. Profile customers dynamically.
   Achieving high performance today requires understanding consumers in motion. A portal must recognize a customer’s preferences, track his or her interactions across multiple sites, and maintain a constantly evolving profile of the customer based on his or her latest activities. This non-stop endeavor must encompass every marketing, sales and service channel.
   
   Autobytel is one of the largest online automotive marketplaces. It has connected 27 million car buyers with local dealers and generated billions of dollars in revenue.  Autobytel was looking to reduce its reliance on dealer leads for profit and increase its advertising revenues. Working with Accenture, Autobytel introduced a new, more engaging customer portal, consolidating multiple systems and including an intuitive search function – crucial for car buyers. By offering a better user experience and more in-depth information, Autobytel has learned more about its users and parlayed this into substantial year-on-year increases in advertising revenue.
   
   
2. Deliver information in context.
   Delivering information in context has several benefits. Imagine an entertainment portal through which consumers can watch movie previews on their phone, purchase movie tickets, and get directions to the theater. When the movie becomes available via DVD and download, the portal then offers either at a reduced price. In both cases, contextual information makes for happy customers, while also providing the opportunity to up-sell an existing client.
   
   To maintain an accurate, up-to-date customer profile, portals must persist across multiple devices, including PCs, laptops, kiosks, mobile devices and perhaps even televisions. On all of these, companies must offer rich experiences.
   
   
3. Manage information.
   More than just presenting information, portals must make sense of what users want to do, to the extent authorized by the customer. Such real-time insights, based on context and customer preferences, will help companies point customers toward information, services and products they may find interesting.
   
   Such data is also crucial for business intelligence (BI) – to create near-real time feedback for businesses to fine-tune their business models.   Accenture helped electronics retailer Best Buy better track each customer’s purchases across multiple transactions. This gave them greater insight into customers’ habits and desires to fashion much more effective sales and marketing campaigns, as well as service programs. All this led to increased sales, profits and customer satisfaction levels.
   
   
4. Highlight the bigger picture.
   Portals must connect customers with relevant information and also connect them to others with similar interests. Mastering the mores of the social-networking environment requires a multifaceted understanding of customers’ online activities, buying and browsing habits, plus the social networks they utilize. Next-generation portals are an excellent tool for amassing such insights, and indeed one of the primary business benefits highlighted by early adopters.
   
   Perhaps no one has better perfected the new paradigm than high-technology product manufacturers and broadband providers. When a server customer or DSL subscriber requires troubleshooting, a company’s first line of defense can be its portal-based, customer-driven support community. This approach is cost-effective to build and maintain, and also good for business, because it provides consumers with an “always on” channel for immediate problem-solving.

The Upside of Better Information Management

By constantly profiling customers, delivering relevant contextualized information, offering relevant recommendations and facilitating social networking connections, portals become more than the sum of their technical, social and data aggregation parts. An effective portal will itself become a social magnet (and don’t discount the importance of popularity in the Web 2.0 world), allowing companies to create self-reinforcing portals leading to enhanced customer interactions and service.

This is a more interesting proposition for remaking portals. According to a recent IDC report, the combination of information, relationships and conversations “will give users a powerful information discovery platform that leverages trusted relationships with other people to filter and rank information.”²

Play to Social Networks

The new portal paradigm offers a simple technique for maintaining a competitive advantage: Build a better portal, improve customer satisfaction, yield greater revenues. Remember the social networking component. Global penetration of social networks amongst all Internet users has increased significantly and is up to 58% globally.³ More than half of all consumers’ buying decisions are most influenced by other’s opinions.⁴

For communications, entertainment and high-tech companies, customer relationships cannot be viewed as a binary equation: buy or didn’t buy, subscribed or didn’t subscribe. Companies must manage customer information – including buying activities, social networks and webs of trust – to create precise marketing segments, and then generate a differentiated sales, marketing and service experience for each segment that lures new customers and retains existing ones.

One of the world’s leading mobile communications providers needed to consolidate multiple marketing systems onto a single platform, to enhance customer communications and sales. Accenture helped them transition to a new enterprise content management platform offering greater functionality, reliability and scalability. Today the portal supports 52 country-specific sites and more than 50 languages. Even better, it has increased awareness of the company’s brand, leading to a 2% increase in market share – an annual revenue increase of more than $50 million.

The Portal Payoff

A more evolved customer understanding enables communications, entertainment and high-tech businesses to deliver high-quality contextual content via multiple channels. Better information – delivered via BI tools, content management systems and, yes, also portals –helps leaders make better decisions, improve customer interactions, and transform the business for high performance.

Intelligently managing the customer relationship– by creating dynamic customer profiles, delivering just-in-time information and connecting the current interaction with the bigger social networking picture – enables businesses to perform at a higher level and increase customer satisfaction and retention levels. Such customer-centricity and business agility, finally, increases sales and profits.

So what underlies the new portal movement looks a lot like karma. By more effectively meeting the needs of customers, businesses better help themselves, significantly improve their bottom line and enable high performance.

End Notes:

1. Source: “High Performance IT 2008: There’s No Substitute for Substitution” (Accenture).
2. Source: Information Access and Analysis Predictions for 2008: Consolidation, Specialization, Eureka 2.0 and the Wisdom of Crowds – January 2008. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=210362&pageType=PRINTFRIENDLY (IDC)
3. Source: “Power to the people, Social Media Tracker Wave 3”, March 2008 (Universal McCann).
4. Source: “Digital Consumer Behavior Study,” October 2, 2007 (Avenue A | Razorfish)

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