Article by Andy Orton, Founder of DotPerformance
Customer portals often fall by the wayside, neglected and outdated. When we’re invited into a business, we frequently find portals that are clunky relics, built long ago by IT-focused developers without input from designers, customers or support teams.
The result? Clunky portals that lack value, with poor user experiences and irrelevant functionality. Customers avoid them, and businesses assume self-service isn’t what their audience wants. Meanwhile, phones keep ringing, and support teams grow larger just to manage the load.
The truth is, a well-designed customer portal is a powerful tool. It’s not just a functional asset—it’s a critical part of the customer journey. When built and maintained with care, it becomes a seamless extension of your brand, offering real value to customers, reducing overheads, and streamlining support.
Every portal deserves to be kept relevant, intuitive, and purposeful. Don’t underestimate its potential—it’s where great customer experiences can begin.
How we work.
Step one: Analyse your existing portals or the opportunity for those who don't have portals in place.
Step two: Spend time in your customer support team, eavesdropping on conversations to understand exactly what customers were asking for. Within no time, patterns emerged—common reasons for calls and the features customers would genuinely find useful in a portal.
Step three: Armed with that insight, we map out what was possible.
Step four: Design, development & integration with your existing systems.
Step five: Launch. The critical part is user adoption. The marketing of the portal includes messages on all correspondence, a strong pitch on the website and social media, training and scripts for customer support staff, SMS and email comms.
The cost savings? Massive.
But the real win? Customers start to chose you because you offer something no competitor has—a seamless, innovative self-service experience.
Juan, John, Simon and Rach working on a customer portal.
Is it right for you?
If your business processes large volume and you're not using optimal digital self-service tools, you’re not just missing out on an opportunity to make life easier for your customers. You’re essentially asking them to sit in line at a bank, waiting for a teller to do something they could easily handle themselves.
The question you need to ask yourself: Why? Why are you still making your customers go through all that hassle? Why aren’t you giving them the self-service tools they need, when they want them, at their fingertips? You’re not just missing out on convenience—you’re missing out on the competitive advantage of being the business that lets customers solve their own problems, instantly and effortlessly.
You can see some of the work that we do amongst our case studies but here's a taster...
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The TT Races Live Timing
This presents live timing data across the 37.7 mile circuit to millions of fans across the world.
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Ship2Man
Clients can login to manage, pay and track their shipments. They can also book collections and even dispose of their old white goods.
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The TT Marshals
E-learning and roster systems handle the placement of 3500 marshals over 4 weeks of the year.
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Boal & Co
Clients login to check and manage their pension schemes.
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Garforth Gray
Clients login to book viewings and valuations instantly, manage their property alerts and much more.
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Supply Teachers Booking System
Schools login to request supply teachers who can chose to accept work, automatically creating timesheets and payroll.
You really have to do very little to make this work for your business, the reliance on internal teams is minimal, this is something you can completely outsource.
