Business application development
Customer and member portals that answer the questions people phone about
Most inbound contact is someone asking for information you already hold. A portal gives it to them directly, and gives your team back the hours spent looking it up.
The situation
Your team is a search interface for your own systems
When customers cannot see their own information, every question becomes a task for somebody. The cost is rarely measured, because it is spread across everyone.
- The same handful of questions arriving every day by phone and email
- Staff logging into two or three systems to answer one query
- Documents and statements sent out manually on request
- Customers chasing progress because they cannot see it
- Updates to details arriving by email and rekeyed by hand
- No record of what a customer was told, or when
What it covers
What a portal usually covers
Secure sign-in
Authentication appropriate to what is behind it, including multi-factor and single sign-on where that is warranted.
Account and profile
The details you hold, visible and editable by the person they belong to, writing back to the system of record rather than to a form.
Documents and statements
Invoices, statements, certificates and correspondence available on demand instead of sent on request.
Requests and case tracking
Raise a request, see its progress, and stop chasing — which removes the chase from your inbox as well.
Payments and renewals
Where relevant, paying, renewing or updating a mandate without a phone call.
Integration with your systems
The portal shows live data from CRM, finance and operational systems rather than a copy that drifts out of date.
How we work
How a portal project runs
The design question is not what could go in a portal. It is which questions people actually ask, and what it takes to answer them without a person.
Find the demand
Look at what customers actually contact you about, and what answering each of those costs today.
Design around the top questions
Build for the handful of things that account for most contact, rather than everything the systems could expose.
Build and integrate
Connect to the systems that hold the data, so the portal is a window rather than a second copy to maintain.
Launch and measure
Track which questions stop arriving. If contact volume does not fall, the portal answered the wrong questions.
Outcomes
What you are left with
- Fewer routine enquiries reaching the team at all
- Customers able to self-serve at the time that suits them
- One version of the information, shown live rather than copied
- A record of what was shown, requested and answered
- Detail changes captured once, by the person who knows them
- Capacity returned to the work that genuinely needs a person
Platforms and tooling
What we build with
Front end
- React
- Next.js
- TypeScript
Back end
- .NET
- Node.js
- Java
- Python
- REST
- GraphQL
Identity
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Auth0
- OAuth 2.0
- SAML
- MFA
Named as platforms we work with, not as formal partnerships.
Common questions
Questions we are usually asked
They use it when it answers the question faster than phoning. That is why the design starts from what people currently contact you about rather than from what the systems could display — a portal full of features nobody asked for gets used once.
No. A portal is normally a layer over what you already run, reading from and writing to your CRM, finance and operational systems. Replacing those is a much larger question and usually a separate one.
It is exposed to the internet and holds customer data, so it is built accordingly: authentication sized to the sensitivity of the data, encryption in transit and at rest, role-based access and audit logging. Penetration testing before launch is advisable and we can arrange it.
It should. Portal traffic is heavily mobile, and a portal that is awkward on a phone simply pushes people back to the phone call you were trying to avoid.
By measuring the contact it was meant to remove. Enquiry volume by type before and after is the honest test — usage figures alone can rise while the phones stay just as busy.
Yes, and this is often where the quickest saving is, because it removes both the inbound message and the rekeying that follows it. Changes write back to the system of record, with an audit trail.
Talk to someone who has built this
Not a salesperson working from a form. Tell us what the problem looks like and someone who has delivered this kind of work will come back to you, usually within one working day.
Book a free consultationRelated
Where this usually connects
- Web application developmentBrowser-based applications for work that outgrew a spreadsheet.
- Bespoke business applicationsSoftware shaped around how you work, when nothing off the shelf fits.
- Systems integrationMaking the systems you already own talk to each other.
- APIs and microservicesConnecting platforms that were never designed to be connected.
- Bespoke CRM systemsA customer database built to your process, with no per-user licence.
- HostingManaged hosting for the systems we build and the ones you already run.