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4 questions to answer for a successful

portal implementation
You decided to roll out a customer or partner portal. You’re excited about improving your customer
experience, making self-service possible, reducing channel conflict, and strengthening your online
presence. So where do you start?
From our experience, customers who successfully implement a portal start
by answering the following 4 questions: Abstract
Rolling out a customer or partner portal involves
1. How can we get it right the first time?
careful planning and execution.
2. What are common roadblocks to avoid? This document will help orient you before you
dive into a portal implementation.
3. How can we offer more in our portal to increase its value?
By: Jason Suen
4. How will we measure return on investment (ROI)?
As we take you through these questions, we’ll share lessons learned from two
customers—one of the largest open-source companies in the world, which implemented a partner portal,
and a medical records management company that built a customer portal.
As with any technology project, the planning and preparation stage is often the most intensive and time-
consuming. Investing in this stage will pay big dividends—you’ll save time and ensure you reach your
goals. Here are a few things to consider when you’re at the whiteboard.

Question #1: How can we get it right the first time?


Getting it right requires that you involve the right people, clearly define your priorities, and supplement
your own resources, if necessary.

 Get the right people early on – Building the project team should be the first order of business. Also
make sure you have executive involvement from the start to help shape the vision. Use this vision to
define your objectives, your priorities, and the metrics you’ll use to measure success.

 Define your priorities – Be clear about what you want to accomplish. For example:
• Do you have a target case resolution time?
• Do you want to reduce the number of inbound customer service calls by 15%?
• Are you looking to have partners contribute 30% of your overall revenue this year?
Defining such management-level metrics will help with creating your processes and building reports.
These high-level metrics will be critical in defining your operational metrics, as discussed in “How will
we measure ROI?” on the next page.
4 questions to answer for a successful portal implementation

 Get the expertise you need – Once your internal team is in place, make sure there are no gaps in your
implementation expertise. You have several options—remote guidance or on-site support, delivered by
Salesforce.com Consulting or our implementation partners. These organizations can help make sure
you’re on the right path from the start.
Both of our example companies brought in consulting partners to make their projects successful. Prior to
doing so, their progress was slowed by stalls and blunders. Both companies give substantial credit to on-
site experts for their projects’ success.

Question #2: What are common roadblocks to avoid?


Common challenges include complexity, managing change requests, training partners, and keeping up with
what those partners want.

 Keep access rules simple – In most cases, less is more. Just as with your initial CRM rollout, determine
the levels of user access, record types, and the custom fields and tabs you need.
Initially, the software company mapped out the individual requirements and access needs for each
partner as well as for the different access tiers of users at each reseller. The result was dozens of different
partner profiles. As you can imagine, this approach was very complicated to implement and even more
time-consuming to maintain. The company revisited that arrangement and turned dozens of profiles into
a just a handful, without sacrificing the user experience.

 Manage changes – During the early pilot phases, there are bound to be dozens of updates, tweaks, and
changes. It’s a great opportunity for soliciting user feedback and making changes in an organized way.
For example, you can use the ideas functionality of Salesforce CRM to solicit user feedback and vote on
changes. And consider creating custom objects or a special case record type to log change requests.
As you define your change request process, keep in mind that Salesforce CRM includes a setup audit
trail to track changes made in your system. Go to Setup | Security Controls | View Setup Audit Trail to
get started.

 Train for high adoption – Building a training plan for your partners—or public documentation for your
customers—will bring adoption rewards. For more information about setting up a training plan, see the
Best Practice document “10 tips for a successful training plan.”
One highlight of the software company’s implementation was the creation of custom documents and
training plans for its global partners. The company wanted to increase partner participation from 30% to
80%, which it achieved in just a few months. The company credits training, increased collaboration, and
transparency for achieving these results.

 Don’t forget your users – To continue your change management process, be sure to keep in touch with
what users want. The medical records company used this approach with great success. By walking the
halls and interviewing end users (both internal employees and customers), it gathered valuable feedback
that helped reduce data input errors by 17% and case turnaround time by 15%. With that feedback, the
company was able to improve the overall process as well as specific fields and page layouts that affect
users every day.

Question #3: How can we extend the portal’s value?


As you design your portal, don’t forget about the hundreds of AppExchange applications—both free and
for a fee—for virtually any area of your business. Looking for a survey tool? You can find a pre-built app
to poll your customers about their portal experience. Want to create documents based on information your
customers and partners provide? There’s an app for almost anything you can think of.
The medical records company took advantage of partner apps to listen to its customers by integrating
surveys into its portal. In addition, the company turned its portal into a revenue-generating machine by

BEST PRACTICE 2
4 questions to answer for a successful portal implementation

using a payment processing app. Because apps from the AppExchange are pre-integrated, they’re a fast and
easy option to make your portal more valuable to your customers.
If you find yourself in uncharted waters with no existing apps, remember that the Force.com platform
includes lots of tools to customize your app or build new apps. Check out Developer Force to find out just
what you can do.

Question #4: How will we measure ROI?


After you roll out the portal, train your users, and enhance functionality based on user feedback and apps
from the AppExchange, it’s time to measure the results of your efforts. By using familiar dashboards, you
can compare the initial metrics you defined with the data you capture as the portal is used.
To get accurate ROI numbers for your sales or customer service organization, establish performance
benchmarks before your implementation. These benchmarks should reflect the priorities you outlined in
your vision and in the planning stage, discussed on page 1.
Here are some common metrics for customer portals:

 Case resolution times, case age


 Cases closed per rep, # of self-closed cases
 Average case response time (time spent in New status)
 Cost per case ($ spent on portal support resources/number of cases resolved through portal)
 # of escalations
For partner portals, try these metrics:
 # of deals registered by partner
 Pipeline generated by partner
 Average age of deals by partner
 Closed business by partner
 Cost per partner (marketing support, funding requests)
Together with custom training and high-touch engagements, the software company used dashboards to help
keep its partners on their toes. By using leaderboards that showed the comparative performance of its
partners, the company met its goal of increasing channel sales from 40% to 60% of its total sales.

BEST PRACTICE 3
4 questions to answer for a successful portal implementation

Summary and additional resources


For large projects such as portal implementations, getting started on the right foot and learning from other
successful projects is critical. One way to accomplish that goal is to make sure you have the proper
resources within your team—or getting help from salesforce.com or its partners. You’ll find that you’ll
save time, money, and avoid having to re-implement areas that went wrong.
If you’re ready to look into the finer points of implementing a portal, check out these resources:

 Customer Portal Implementation Guide


 PRM Learning Center, where you’ll find a Getting Started guide, implementation tips, roles, and lots of
PRM tricks

For More Information

Contact your account executive to learn


how we can help you accelerate your
CRM success.

BP_PortalImplement_2010-03-08

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