Until a few years back, companies would hire a big workforce to handle their business aspects. Be it finance, customer service, sales or any other department; most of the tasks and processes would be manual.
With technological advancement, the landscape of the corporate world has changed dramatically now. A corporate web portal is among those few path-breaking digital advancements.
If you are also a business owner looking to integrate a corporate portal, this post has it all that you need to know. Learn what a corporate web portal is in detail, its types, objectives, and more.
First things first, here is the detailed concept of a corporate portal.
What is a Corporate Web Portal?
Before understanding what a corporate web portal is, there is a need to understand what a web portal is in detail.
A web portal is a web-based gateway that provides authenticated access to an organization’s data to different parties. In other words, a web portal is a web application that you embed into your website to serve as a gateway to your organization’s data repositories.
A web portal can be of different types based on the portal users. There are three major types of a web portal as below.
- B2B portal – It provides vendors, associates, etc. with access to the company’s relevant data. People typically refer to it as Extranet.
- B2C portal – It provides end customers (or clients) with access to their relevant data. People typically refer to it as a client or customer portal.
- Internal Portal – It provides the company’s personnel with access to various data fields. People typically refer to it as Intranet.
If you combine the functionalities of all these portals into one, you get what you can call a corporate web portal. You can also call this portal a hybrid of all the three major portal types that encompasses the functions and features of all of them.
Providing various parties in a business right from clients or customers to business partners, associates, or vendors to internal personnel with access to relevant data benefits a lot.
Now that you are familiar with the ABC’s of a corporate web portal, it’s time to discuss the business objectives and purposes it helps fulfil.
Business Objectives of a Corporate Web Portal
A corporate portal serves various key purposes of almost all businesses. It enables remote and authenticated access to crucial data to both business associates and customers as per their needs. It also helps eliminate the need to rely on physical mail, faxing, email, or call to access any information you urgently require.
Various types of B2B and B2C portals including a client portal, staff portal, sales portal, customer service portal, project management portal, partner portal, etc. are a part of a corporate web portal.
Let’s discuss in detail the benefits of a corporate portal you can avail of.
1. Easy Integration and Centralization – A corporate web portal helps integrate and bring all customers and corporate data on one platform. This integration of CRM data and customers together via a portal helps carry out administrative operations faster.
With all the crucial data in one place, you can get an eagle-eye view of your business aspects and manage them efficiently.
2. Consistency – Uniting back-end data across different portals remotely enables companies to store and depend on consistent data that you can share and collaborate upon.
3. Personalization – Providing personalized access to particular users helps you enhance the experiences of your internal staff as well as external customers or clients.
You can engineer your corporate web portal to personalize it according to the user. It helps all the parties involved have a unique view of the critical company data to make their work easier.
4. Security Benefit – As the owner or the chief admin of your company, you can fully control who can view what in your portal. You can decide on which parties to provide secure authenticated access to which data of your company. This secured access to different individual users or parties based on their roles or needs helps keep your company’s data secured.
5. Enhanced Customer Service – You can provide your customers and clients with secured access to the relevant information like purchase history, knowledge base, FAQs, from within a portal.
You can also let them generate tickets, track orders, or perform other customer-facing operations easily via your portal. This contributes to enhancing your experience and saves you overhead costs.
Also empowering your marketing managers will help you automate marketing campaigns with a corporate portal. All this helps you bring down the churn rate and boost your overall profitability and bottom line.
6. Reduced Load on Internal Staff – With a corporate web portal in place, the load on your customer service staff goes down. The automation of customer service workflows takes place which results in a drastic decline in internal communication requirements.
When your staff doesn’t have to handle redundant queries, they can focus more on solving bigger issues.
Also, the service hours that go into handling repetitive queries goes down. This significant reduction in manual handling of queries helps save the costs on time-intensive queries for basic operations.
Coming to the internal communication within your employees, it also improves a lot. Your company personnel can communicate, share, and update critical data directly on the portal for everyone to see. This reduces the need to arrange meetings and conferences to discuss small things every now and then. The efficiency, increases and benefits your company.
7. Enhanced Communication with Business Partners/Associates/Vendor
When your business associates, partners, or vendors view data relevant to them in the portal, it streamlines the communication with them.
For instance, a vendor portal makes viewing orders, documents, invoices, etc. easier for your vendors. Besides, it also makes viewing, managing, or updating your vendors’ details hassle-free for you. Similarly, a partner portal helps you engage your partners better by letting them view details like sales figures, project’s progress, or other things.
Steps to Build a Corporate Web Portal
1. Decide Who Will Build It – In-House or Outsourced Partners
Decide whether you want to build your corporate web portal by deploying your in-house engineers’ expertise or outsourcing portal development to trusted partners. For a start-up, outsourcing may be a better option as it helps you save time and costs on creating and maintaining the portal. This helps your internal staff focus more on the other critical roles.
2. Aim for Foolproof Security
Ensuring security of the portal is one of the critical aspects to consider. Robust security controls, secure coding methodologies, and various vulnerability and penetration tests can help you test the security of your portal before launch. You should also integrate authentication-based secure access mechanisms to retain security after launch also.
3. Decide How to Build It
There are two ways you can build your portal. The first typical way involves deploying an in-house or outsourced developer team to build your portal from the scratch. While this portal may give you an additional advantage of having full control over each functionality, there is a downside also.
It may be too cost-intensive for you to afford – especially when you’ve your business in its nascent stage. This is where a ready-to-integrate portal solution comes to rescue. Yes, there are several portal solutions by different portal companies that you can just buy, integrate with your CRM, and start off! You can also customize their features to cater to your specific business needs.
Looking for a ready-to-launch corporate web portal solution for your business? Our next-gen web portal can be your ideal fit to take care of your requirements. This portal can get your business off the ground instantly and easily. It is a ready-to-integrate and scalable solution that you can integrate and start off. If you want, we can customize it for you too.
So, let’s connect to get your portal ready!
4. Compliance with Data Laws
It is important that the portal you develop complies with data security standards – especially when you are building it from scratch. It’s because all the seasoned portal development companies typically follow standard data laws and regulations.
However, while building a corporate web portal; you may need to take extra care. This is because there may be loopholes in complying with security and data laws as you are new to this. Make it a point to keep privacy of all your parties intact and breach-proof. Don’t fail to comply with the local legislation of the country you are based in. As of now, 128 out of 194 countries have put in legislation to protect data and privacy as per the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
Get Your Corporate Web Portal Ready Now
A corporate portal is the key to optimized business operations, streamlined internal and external communication, and good profits. If you are all set to integrate a corporate portal, your search for the best portal development solution ends here.
We, at CRMJetty, can be your ideal portal development partner. We have our own web portal solution that’s got dedicated space, custom business logic, product/service integration, accounts and invoicing, and all the features that you seek for in your corporate web portal. Be your business B2B or B2C, stay assured you’ll get the best for both. You can manage all the parties – customers, partners, vendors, affiliates, and more.
Besides offering a launch-ready web portal, we also offer custom portal development services. There is a typical process that our company follows to get your feature-rich portal.
Our development team first collects your requirements. Our certified developers then analyze them first and determine if our launch-ready portal caters to them all. If there is a need to customize one or more functionalities to make it suit your requirements, they do it for you.
In case there is a large gap between your requirements and our portal’s features, we can help you build your unique portal from scratch too. We aim to make your portal development journey with us unforgettable and we promise that we shall!
So, let us help you build your best corporate web portal with synergy between you and us!
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