E-Commerce Integration: 4 Tips for Customer Portal Design Part 3

E-Commerce Integration: 4 Portal Design Best Practices

Hopefully, our previous articles in this E-Commerce Integration - Customer Portal Part 1 and Part 2 series helped give you an understanding of the ABCs of customer portals – what the cost and service benefits are – and the five main features your customers want out of a customer portal.  In this article, we are going to touch on making sure your portal doesn’t look like an afterthought. This segment will cover how to design a look and feel for your portal that reflects your brand, industry and customers. t is important to enter this process knowing that a the goal of a customer  portal  is to strengthen your customer’s opinion of you and your products or services.

4 Best Practices for Customer Portal Design

1.    Branding

Branding should be consistent throughout all of the print, web, and experiential marketing that your company uses.  This means exactly the same styles, colors, spacing, voice, and personality to your portal as you would in your brochures, website, blog, social media, and any other representation.Of course avoid looking like your portal belongs to a different company. Test your layout and design by asking non customers if it looks like it belongs to your company. If there is any hesitation, seriously re-evaluate your design. It could be as simple as adjusting the margins or using a custom template.. Often times it is as easy as changing the navigation color or something in the user experience realm. It is crucial to obtain a fluid appearance in order to ensure customer loyalty and faith in the brand as a whole. And, like the potential for expansion referenced in the ABCs, consider that branding may change or develop as your company grows and be sure to create the portal with this potential in mind.

2.    Using the Customer’s Language

It is important to ensure that your portal is intuitive to your customers. Naming your topics and requests in the language a typical customer would use as search terms will ensure that they have a frustration-free user experience. Putting yourself in the seat of the user will amplify the experience and draw your attention towards service in a way that can only be beneficial to all parties. If you are having trouble with this, consider searching other similar sites to see what type of language they use.

Additionally, using recognizable icons and a text description of each icon will help your customers differentiate which section applies to their needs. Call to action icons should make the experience easier, not more challenging. For example the topic “Software Request” can be expanded to say, “To request software licenses, add a user or add an extension, make requests here”. 

3.    Organizing Your Navigation

Keeping your primary navigation “above the fold” increases satisfaction with the customer’s user experience. As there may be a large number of navigation topics, you may need to subgroup them for easier navigation. Some users may be using a large computer screen or a phone or a tablet. There are several other organizational things you can do to make the customer’s experience more streamlined:

• Ordering your navigation by the most frequently used or most recently searched
• Utilize drop down menus
• Contextual assistance for fields that need to filled

4.    Create a knowledge base

As previously mentioned in the ABCs of efficiency, the first blog on our series about Ecommerce Business Customer Portals, knowing your customer’s frequent questions is an ideal mining opportunity to create a knowledge base, FAQ section, or blog/help entries that will add value to your portal. With all of this information, your customers just may end up coming to you when they need absolutely nothing! Being a resource of information elevates your business: no longer merely a site for customer service, your site becomes prime real estate for community involvement. Don’t forget to review the 5 Key features of a Successful Portal when designing the knowledge base.

In case you missed the first two blogs in our series:

Part 1: E-Commerce Integration ABC's: How Customer Portals Boost Satisfaction: Part 1

Part 2: E-Commerce Integration: 5 Features of a Successful Customer Portal: Part 2

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Another version of this blog was previously posted on the I-BN Blog: Part 3: Portal Design Best Practice

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