What is a Web Portal?
Web Portals Are About Personalized Access
Web Portals Are About Personalized Access
Examples of portals, particularly those that use a login experience, abound in most industries:
- Patient Portals
- Government Portals
- Intranets/Extranets/Workplace Portals
- Knowledge Management Portals
- Student Portals
- Vendor Portals
From Web Portals to Portal Platforms
From Web Portals to Portal Platforms
These three strengths support digital customer experience in the following ways:
- Integration capabilities allow organizations to unite systems and customer data on the back end.
- An emphasis on consistency across digital touchpoints gives these united systems a shared look and feel on the front end.
- Personalization through a combination of biographical data (who they are) and behavioral data (what they did on the site) gives enterprises the ability to contextualize experiences, usually facilitated by a login process
Web Portals Are Transforming Into Digital Experience Platforms
As the market for portals has matured, leading portal vendors have added broad feature sets that help enterprises create these user-centric digital experiences for web, mobile, social and connected devices. These features include content management, marketing, workflow, targeting and mobile support. Because of this, some portal platforms are transforming into digital experience platforms that use their strengths in integration and personalization to drive change throughout the organization.
According to Forrester, the number one technical challenge for digital customer experience initiatives is inadequate integration of back-end systems. Portal-heritage DXPs have a strong story around integration and provide the focus on personalization necessary to deliver consistent, connected experiences that are tailored to each user’s context.
There are other flavors of digital experience platforms, including those that have grown out of commerce servers and web content management systems. Even if you choose not to use a portal-heritage DXP, you will likely need to incorporate portal technology into your strategy in order to meet the integration needs of digital experiences across different touchpoints.
When to Use a Portal Platform
- Customer self service. Portals are well-suited to gathering information relevant to customers in the post-purchase phase, allowing companies to nurture long-term loyalty while decreasing the burden to customer service call centers.
- Business agility. Portal platforms that support mobile experiences and use modular architecture are now well-equipped to quickly roll out new digital touchpoints, while still carrying the user authentication and integrated back-end data necessary to connect experiences.