What a customer portal is actually worth
By John Marta, Principal & Senior IT Architect at GO Build Labs
A customer portal is one of the easier custom builds to justify, because almost all of its value shows up in numbers you already collect. You just haven't added them up in one place.
Here's how to build the case before spending anything.
Count the calls that shouldn't happen
Spend a week having whoever answers the phone tally inbound calls by type. You're looking for four: where is my order, can you resend an invoice, what's my price on this item, and can I place an order.
Every one of those is a self-serve transaction being handled by a person. Multiply the count by the time each takes and by the loaded hourly cost of the people taking them. That's your first number, and for most distributors and service businesses it's larger than expected, because nobody has ever counted.
Count the re-keying
If orders arrive by phone, email, or fax, someone types them into your system afterward. That's duplicate work, and it carries an error rate.
Pull the last six months of credits, returns, and corrections, and work out how many trace back to an order entry mistake. Each one costs the correction, the shipping, and some goodwill. A portal where customers enter their own orders removes that category almost entirely, because the person who knows what they want is the one typing it.
The part people miss: order size
The savings above are real but defensive. The interesting number is on the revenue side.
When customers order by phone, they order what they remember. When they can see your full catalog, their order history, and their own pricing, they order more, because they find things they didn't know you carried and reorder things they'd forgotten. This effect is consistent enough that it's usually the largest single line in the business case.
Estimate it conservatively. Take your average order value through assisted channels and apply a modest increase to the share of orders you expect to move to self-serve. Even a few percent across a meaningful share tends to dwarf the labor savings.
A reference point
One of us built and launched the B2B eCommerce platform at a manufacturer, serving as both lead developer and project manager. It now handles more than 90% of that company's orders and returned 125% on the investment, through a combination of reduced cost, process automation, and a better customer experience.
Your business isn't that business and your numbers will differ. But the shape holds: most of the return came from work that stopped being done by hand, and from customers buying more once they could see everything.
Measure these before you build
Write them down now, so you can prove the result later instead of arguing about it:
- Inbound calls per week, by type
- Average order value, split by channel
- Order entry corrections per month
- Time from order received to order in the system
- Share of orders arriving outside business hours
That last one is quietly important. Orders placed at 9pm are orders you previously couldn't take without someone being there.
When a portal isn't worth it
If your customers are few and your orders are large and genuinely bespoke, a portal solves a problem you don't have. Relationship selling over the phone is the right channel for some businesses, and putting a login between you and six major accounts helps nobody.
The case gets stronger the more customers you have, the more repetitive their orders are, and the more of your catalog they've never seen. If that describes you, the numbers above will make the argument on their own.