What makes a great customer portal? Read how these companies use different portals to deliver tailored user experiences.
Whether you’re a B2B, B2C, or B2B2C company, improving customer experiences should be at the top of your list when exploring digital solutions. Investing in quality customer service technology, like customer portal software, can improve retention rates and increase profit. However, in order to see the benefits a customer portal can offer, your portal needs to be user-friendly, intuitive, and efficient for your users and support team.
Here we’ll draw insights from eight organizations across different industries that used Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to build successful customer portals.
1. Merkur Versicherung
As Austria’s oldest insurance company, Merkur Versicherung wanted to find new ways to put their customers’ needs first. In order to do this, Merkur needed to provide customers, employees, external brokers, and partners with tools to create seamless customer experiences.
Liferay provided updated portals that helped equip customers with self-service tools to view contracts, submit bills, and sign up for prevention programs. The insurance organization also merged and standardized communication across all parties by implementing a new intranet along with innovative customer, sales, and broker portals within the company. Merkur’s improved intranet helped organize large amounts of information and easily manage documents, allowing employees, brokers, and cooperation partners to work more efficiently.
2. Gulf Insurance Group - Kuwait
Gulf Insurance Group is the largest insurance company in Kuwait offering services in automotive, marine and aviation, property and accident, engineering, and life and health insurance. The company struggled to consolidate several different platforms due to many services on the table. This resulted in a number of problems, including inconsistent user experiences and limited online functionality.
Liferay helped Gulf Insurance Group create a unified solution to consolidate all their digital offerings. The insurance company implemented an improved customer journey that allows the customer to purchase a new policy or request a quote online. Gulf Insurance Group - Kuwait became the first insurance company in its region to provide customers multiple insurance policies online as well as a digital health claims approval service. This resulted in the flexibility needed to adapt to digital services during the COVID-19 pandemic and a 30% customer increase. To continue the success seen with the first Liferay DXP implementation, Gulf Insurance Group is planning to create a B2B corporate customer portal next.
3. HDI Assicurazioni
The leaders at HDI Assicurazioni, an auto, home, and life insurance agency, had a mission to create an organization that was “by their customers’ side, putting their needs first.” But, in order to achieve this goal, they needed to provide customers with real-time interactions that were simple and enjoyable to use.
After building a new self-service customer portal, HDI Assicurazioni was able to streamline client experiences and improve their internal operations.
“Clients now have a communication channel with the company available to them which is always open for monitoring their position, autonomously managing operations, and immediately requesting support,” says Stefano Fini, the chief information officer of HDI Assicurazioni.
4. Thales
As a global technology leader in aerospace, transport, defense, and security markets, Thales needed to create a portal that would boast operational efficiency for thousands of their active users. They specifically wanted to focus on their civil and defense customer base, and create a customer portal that could replace various individual portals used by separate customer entities.
The Customer OnLine portal built on Liferay is a dynamic and collaborative solution that now allows users to order products through the portal, track progress for repairs, and share documents or discuss topics on a forum space. The success of the customer portal led to the creation of their supplier portal, Supplier OnLine.
5. Airbus Helicopters
More than 3,000 civil and military operators rely on Airbus Helicopters’ customer portal to keep their aircraft operational. The company needed to redesign the portal in order to turn it into a modern customer engagement tool that could be accessed anytime through any device.
Airbus Group chose Liferay for its rich features and customizable elements. Keycopter, the new portal, was rolled out to over 24,000 users across 3,000 companies. In Keycopter, operators can view and download up-to-date technical documents, manage claims and warranties, purchase spare parts, and track online invoices — all through a single platform. Modernizing this online service helped Airbus Group enhance the B2B customer experience and simplify its operations.
6. Spire, Inc.
As the fifth largest publicly traded gas utility in the United States, Spire wanted to update its two separate online account management websites to a single platform solution in order to improve customer service.
Their new portal, myAccount, successfully integrates with existing ERP systems, which includes two payment processing systems and two mobile workforce management systems. It also displays gas usage charts, enables online bill payment, and provides self-service tools for enrolling in payment arrangements and paperless billing. The myAccount site is easy to use and responsive on all devices. In response to the positive customer feedback, Spire plans to introduce cutting-edge features, like real-time technician tracking and smart device integration in the near future.
7. EATEL
EATEL is a family-owned and operated communications company in Louisiana, US. This organization needed a responsive self-service customer portal to support their residential and business customers. After using Liferay DXP to create a new website, EATEL also used Liferay to build their customer portal.
The launch of the new service portal reduced customer support tickets for agents, provided greater accessibility through responsive design, decreased billing issues, and improved overall customer satisfaction.
“The flexibility of Liferay has been key,” said the director of IS at EATEL. “So much of the portal is editable by non-developers, allowing us to focus our most technical internal resources on the intricacies of integrations and highly advanced content pages. This also enables us to be quick to market with offers and promotions that might have taken up to a month to reach users through other means.”
8. Suez
Suez, a water and waste management company in Australia, realized that they would have to create a digital platform for their customers in order to deliver better customer support. The company had to undergo deep digital transformation due to their outdated legacy systems and technologies. They required a digital platform with updates and flexible integration capabilities.
Suez’s new customer service portal allows customers to perform self-service scheduling, request new services, and access reporting on analytics like environmental impact. Suez is able to stay competitive and provide first-class customer service with their innovative digital solutions.
Finding the Right Portal Technology for You
Although these organizations had different and unique needs, they all sought to achieve the same thing: improve user experiences for more satisfied customers.
No matter what features you need in your customer portal, Liferay DXP can be the foundation for your company’s digital transformation. Learn more about leveraging customer portals to create intuitive, cost-effective self-service solutions with Liferay’s innovative platform.