If you've ever used a personalized B2C portal page, such as My Yahoo! or Google's Start Page, then you know that the terms "portal" and "customization" often go hand in hand.

But is this necessarily a convenient feature in B2B portals? Our experience has been "No". And even though i-Dialogue portals support customizable "My Pages", here's is why they are often not a good idea.

1) Yahoo and Google have disclosed that only 5% of their total customer base are even remotely familiar with the customizable page option. These people are called "Power Users".

2) 80% of site visitors that use customizable pages simply accept the default configuration assuming the page designer knows best.

3) The types of support call conversations that take place when customizable pages are enabled in B2B portals can be chaotic. For example:
Representative: OK. Login to the portal and click on your My Account page.
Customer: OK. I'm there.
Representative: Now on the left hand side of the screen you should see a list of "My Products".
Customer: I don't see "My Products" on my account page.
Representative: What do you see?
Customer: I have the NCAA Basketball scores widget installed and "My Cases" directly below that.
Representative: (Flustered) Alright. Click on the "Add Widgets" link and let's re-add your Products list to the page...

A consistent look-and-feel in customer portals gives CSRs the ability to quickly familiarize customers with the interface and resolve their issues.


When should you use customizable pages?

There are information design circumstances when a customizable page makes sense.
1) Rule of 3. The portal widget library must provide at least 3 widgets (aka portlets, web parts, components) that are of high informational or interactive value to the end user.

2) Productivity Gain. Saleforce users often spend several minutes and hours in the Salesforce user interface, therefore productivity gains can be achieved by customizing the UI per Profile or user. But customers are not using your web site as a productivity tool. It is purely informational. In fact, most B2B portal customers want to spend the least amount of time possible in your web site to resolve their issue and locate the information they need.

"Customization" is not the same as "Personalization"

Finally, "customization and personalization are not the same". Customization is the ability to add/remove/change content on a page. Personalization is delivering highly relevant content to end users, such as Amazon.com's "Others who have purchased X have also purchased Y" feature.

Interactive Marketing should emphasize personalization at all times and CRM driven portals are a great platform for delivering one-to-one relevant content.