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In the last few years manufacturers, wholesalers and service companies successfully digitised the interactions with their business customers. But did they put them first?
\n\n\n\nAuthor: Mauro Boffardi, Customer Success Manager at Intershop
\n\n\n\nThe advantages of customer-centric digitisation efforts are well known: reduction of the cost of each interaction, fewer errors, freeing of resources that can be moved from repetitive tasks to added business value, all leading to the overall goal: improving customer satisfaction, margins, and broadening the sales channels.
\n\n\n\nIn the last weeks, for many people (both on the sales and supply sides) digital interaction has become the only available choice. All companies that delayed or underestimated digitalisation are now facing additional challenges and are quickly losing the competitive edge.
\n\n\n\nMany\ntech-savvy companies have already implemented a long list of digital\nself-services:
\n\n\n\nAll these are great initiatives, but need to be managed carefully to avoid dissatisfaction and even frustration: all those services provide different touchpoints, have their own authorization mechanism, and oftentimes provide inconsistent interfaces. They usually are part of an \"inside-out\" approach, where internal processes are published to the customers \"as is\". It is up to the customers to know those processes and adapt to them.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://cross-border-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/customer-first-Intershop-1024x535.png\")
So there are many great examples of digital self-services offered already. However, when organised as separate services, many well-known conflicts arise:
\n\n\n\nWhile\neach one of these stand-alone interactions can be very efficient, the overall\nexperience will be very unpleasant. There’s even more if the sales organization\nhas boundaries and limits that don’t have meaning for the customer! Think about\nunique touchpoints for different countries, product segments or business units!
\n\n\n\nThere is, fortunately, a good solution for this, and it is a Customer Portal. It is one of the biggest opportunities, and therefore one of the biggest trends in B2B commerce. A customer portal completely overturns this described perspective, creating \"outside-in\" processes. All interactions are designed starting from the customer needs, and the internal organization is adapting to them.
\n\n\n\nIn a single digital service, with a consistent interface over several touchpoints (web, apps, call centre, even embedded screens on machines), ALL customer interactions can be put together and streamlined. There is no need for customers to know the seller's internal organisation.
\n\n\n\nA visit to the Digital Customer Portal to learn about a machine can be the starting point of a configuration session, which then seamlessly becomes an RFQ whose status can be followed on the same website after login. There, it can be transformed into an order that is transferred automatically into the customer ERP via a standard protocol called Punch-Out.
\n\n\n\nShipping\ninformation and invoices follow in the communication area of the site, and once\ninstalled, the product is part of the installed base, where the customer can\norder consumables, monitor the machine status, and order specific spare parts,\nservices and so on. Of course, all documentation and history are connected to\nthe online profile of the machine.
\n\n\n\nBy this, a Digital Customer Portal is not a \"collage\" of applications, but rather a \"hub\" of different processes. Some of those are implemented directly in the Digital Customer Portal, some are connected to other parts of the ecosystem via a modern microservice/API architecture.
\n\n\n\nThis\nunique interface doesn't hold advantages only for the customers. A unified\necosystem can collect information through the whole chain of interactions, from\npresales to aftersales, and deliver insights on the customers for up- and\ncross-sell opportunities that wouldn't have been possible to be gathered from\ndifferent isolated repositories.
\n\n\n\nDo you want to know more about Customer Portals?
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