It's ironic how customer portals are deployed on the premise of providing "self-service" and "call deflection", but when poorly implemented, portals actually result in a net increase in administrative responsibility.

Portal administration time wasters:

• Granting access to portal
• Resetting passwords
  

Here are some general rules that ensure customers really are getting self-service to the information they need and reducing the time you spend managing the online relationship.

Rule of Least Privilege
All Leads and Contacts should automatically be members of the portal without any manual intervention. They are granted minimal privileges on the website by default. Granting access to more features requires changing a "role" or "rule" on the profile or account record.



Consistent Online Account
A customers online identity should remain consistent throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Once a lead self-identifies on a website and creates an account, that account/password must never change as a result of some front or back-office change, such a CRM Lead-to-Contact conversion or ERP account creation.

Single Sign On
Similar to being consistent with a single account, single-sign-on (or "SSO") ensures customers have access to "all" online applications and features using a single account.

Password Recovery Options
Most portal related support calls are related to password recovery, or inability to access the portal.

Anytime a password is being requested to access a portal, customers must have immediate access to their password recovery options. The password recovery process should *immediately* send an email to the requested account with instructions on how to reset or recover their password.

A link to online help on the signon page is also a great preventative measure.


As a fallback, a password reset button should be made available in the CRM system. The "reset and email" workflow should be contained in a single dialog box for the portal admin or CSR.

Portal Activation Invitations
When rule of least privilege is automatically granted to all Leads and Contacts in a CRM system, it becomes necessary to allow customers to activate their account and establish their password online.

A "welcome" page template is made available that allows customers to enter their email address and progress through a simple 2 step process to set their password before accessing the portal.

The welcome page should prevent subsequent activation attempts by already activated users.

Implementing the measures above has proven to dramatically reduce the administrative overhead of managing a portal and increasing customer satisfaction when using online portal services.

I see TechCrunch is calling "Web 2.0" dead... but it will never truly disappear.

The spirit of Web 2.0 "apps" will forever live in future applications as "features", just as the answering machine emerged as an add-on application to basic phone services and later became a standard "feature" of the utility, the following aspects of Web 2.0 will become standard "features" in all web applications:

• Responsive pages (More AJAX . Less POSTs)
• Tagging
• Commenting
• Rating
• Bookmarking
• Status Publishing
• Easy Integration (via REST, SOAP, APIs)
  

Web 2.1 is a "back to business" mentality that acknowledges the innovation of recent years and carries forward the best ideas and concepts in pragmatic solutions.

As an example, would you be more likely to apply this shoutbox example to an existing portal solution as a new "feature", or create a new domain and application around the concept of www.ShoutBox-Shizzle.com? (If you answered the latter, let's talk. I'll settle for a reasonable royalty )

Fun little shoutbox application in less than 40 lines of code using the i-Dialogue AJAX API and Controllers.

Let's face it. Every website could use a facelift or some aesthetic diversity every once in awhile.

i-Dialogue Themes allow you to pick a pre-built theme or create your own. If your organization's style guide has very specific RGB color value or font requirements, you'll appreciate i-Dialogue's support for JQuery ThemeRoller created themes.

Our best portal solutions emerge when our interests align with our customers. Such is the case with our Quote to Cash (Q2C) process, which we not only use for our own business, but plan to offer as an AppExchange application. After all, what better demonstration can any company give than how they use their software to run their own business?

At it's most simplest, the Q2C process is as follows:

1. Lead is generated and entered into Salesforce
2. Lead is converted to Opportunity
3. Product Line items are added to Opportunity in response to customer needs
4. A link to an online quote/service order is sent to the customer for review
5. The customer provides feedback on quote
6. Finally, the customer purchases online. Opportunity is updated as Closed-Won


You'll notice that step 4 provides a link to quote "slash" order form. Traditionally, "quotes" and "orders" are two separate entities. For an optimized online Q2C process, these are one and the same (just be sure to add some standard expiration verbiage to the quote template).

So, there are clearly some significant benefits to this process. But what are some drawbacks?

1) Change history. By default, if your Sales rep goes through 2-3 iterations with a customer and generates several quotes, you'll lose the change history. The workaround is to enable history tracking in Salesforce on the Opportunity record. An audit trail will exist, but you'll need to reconcile change events with dates to determine exactly what the customer saw on a particular date. Because this need to audit quote history only happens 1% of the time in our process, this trade-off is acceptable. Sales reps optionally have the ability to PDF print a quote at any time.

2) Contract signature. There is an implicit step 5.5 in the process above for getting the customers signature for certain types of agreements. We use our own i-Dialogue HTML to PDF converter for taking a snapshot of the online quote then send it out for signature via EchoSign. But some opportunities where an agreement is already in place, such as site upgrades, it is sufficient to include legal verbiage in step 6 that says "you agree to the terms and conditions available here". The onus is then on the customer to print the agreement for future reference.

3) Online payment processing. We're happy using our own Pay Pal cloud connector in step 6 for accepting online payments and automatically updating the corresponding Opportunity, but we work with several clients that must use particular payment gateways for compliance reasons. It's not difficult to plug this process into any payment gateway, but extra effort is required.

This process is kept simple by design in order to enable re-purposing the solution as an AppExchange application. We could, for example, use a custom Quote object to address the change history issue, or correlate Quotes with Campaigns for influence reports; but this can quickly lead to dual maintenance of records, plus we can't assume all Salesforce customers will have access to these features.

This Q2C process is nearly identical to the online donation process for non-profits, which I'll describe in upcoming weeks. Stay tuned and "happy quoting"!