If you’re working in the B2B sector, you’ll know that there’s a lot of talk about how web portals are making a serious comeback. If you’re in B2C, you might not have heard quite as much about the portal’s phenomenal ability to transform your digital customer experience. Rest assured, you soon will. Portals are quickly becoming the B2C technology of the moment, too. 

Though historic portals may have been underpowered and relatively basic, modern digital portals are changing how organizations interact with their customers, partners, suppliers, employees, and any other stakeholder you can think of. They can bring together a remarkable range of features and functions behind one intuitive interface, allowing for more effective communication, streamlined workflows, and an obstacle-free customer journey.

To demonstrate just how much value modern web portals offer, we've compiled a list of five of our favorite web portal examples. We'll give you a brief rundown of why each was created and implemented before revealing why and how they have been so successful. They feature a combination of customer, employee, and partner portals, so you get a feel for different applications across the entire portal spectrum.

1.    Stromnetz - Customer portal

Stromnetz is a Hamburg-based utilities company that's owned by the city government. Before creating its current portal, the business struggled to manage several independent web portals and service access points. To improve its service offering and offer a superior user experience to both business and individual customers, it wanted to create a single portal that would allow them to perform essential functions through a well-designed and intuitive interface.

As well as allowing customers to see how much electricity they were using, switch providers and view contractual information, customers can schedule maintenance appointments. The portal also enables Stromnetz to push content to customers. As the portal replaced a range of independent portals and the customer base is now largely centralized in one channel, content delivery is far more efficient.

Stromnetz’s success comes down to its portal’s ability to draw information from a diverse array of systems and display it within an easy-to-use interface. This is best demonstrated by the way customers can view details of their historic energy use no matter which energy provider they are currently using and which they have used in the past.

2.    CNP Assurances - Partner portal

CNP Assurances is a French insurance company that works closely with those key partners tasked with selling CNP's insurance policies to the general public. The selling process had to be streamlined and simplified to improve efficiency and reduce costs. The company achieved this by implementing a partner portal capable of automating those tasks that were most time and labor-intensive for its partners.

Today, the digital portal is the source of all the information a CNP partner could need. Insurance brokers can look up pricing and marketing information, find documentation on specific policies and register their sales. In effect, the platform enables CNP's external sales team to do its job without relying so heavily on regular contact with CNP agents.

The CNP partner portal has revolutionized how the business and its partners work together. Brokers are now more effective and more productive. They no longer have to pick up the phone and speak to a CNP rep every time they need particular product details, nor is their pipeline dependent on CNP providing documentation. This makes CNP a more attractive insurer to represent. Finally, by enabling brokers to self-serve, CNP has drastically reduced the cost of running and servicing its network of partners.

Find out more in the CNP Assurances Success Story

3.    Barcelona de Serveis Municipals - Workforce portal

If you’re looking for a fantastic example of how workforce web portals can be used to facilitate greater collaboration and streamline workflows, there’s no better web portal example than the Barcelona de Serveis Municipals portal. BSM is owned by the City Council of Barcelona and was built to combine all of the city’s services into a single entity by Infinitum Digital. Part of this process involved creating a workforce portal that allowed employees to work remotely and collaborate more effectively across services.

The web portal acts as a centralized storage space in which documents and information can be accessed by relevant services and their employees. It also facilitates remote working practices and makes connecting and collaborating with other employees easier. This has improved employee efficiency and allowed BSM to offer its staff more flexible working conditions. 

All of this has improved the city government's ability to provide the city with high-quality services while also reducing operating costs by automating important tasks and processes. This demonstrates that workforce portals don't just benefit staff. They have a knock-on effect on the customer experience, too.

Find out more in the Barcelona de Serveis Municipals Success Story

4.    ffgolf - Customer portal

The Fédération Française de Golf (the French Golf Federation or ffgolf) represents a little over half of France’s amateur golfers. However, it’s aiming for rapid expansion and plans to become the country’s dominant federation over the coming years and therefore invited digital agency Codéin as its technical partner to implement Ibexa DXP. 

When it first implemented its portal, ffgolf membership was around 420,000 people. The organization derived most of its revenue from its members, though this was supplemented by advertising revenues. 

The portal provides a centralized space where members can access all the information they need. It also allows them to interact with one of the federation's most popular features - the event calendar. Golfers can download and submit entry forms for tournaments and perform various other transactions. 

At the same time, ffgolf's membership portal allows the organization to inform its members about changes to its services, communicate important information, and target advertisements. This ability to tailor content to individual members has proved particularly valuable. It makes ffgolf a far more enticing proposition for business affiliates while also providing members with content that helps justify their annual fee.

Find out more in the ffgolf Success Story

5.    Resah - Customer portal

A purchasing and logistics specialist that operates in the healthcare sector, Resah is a French Public Interest Group (GIP) that coordinates purchasing with more than 7,000 healthcare establishments. To do so, it has developed a network of more than 600 suppliers. In total, more than 8,000 users engage with its services.Resah needed to find a way to showcase its vast product catalog. With more than 63,000 offers, the catalog had to be able to handle large product quantities, as well as significant traffic from Resah’s 8,000 users. It also needed to facilitate segmentation and enable Resah to show different product pricing for different users. 

To do so, it joined forces with Coexya to build a customer and partner portal that can promote offers to users, display the catalog, process transactions and help users to manage their accounts. Most importantly, the portal allows for price differentials between customers that have access to the private membership portal and customers using the publicly available website.

The result was a resounding success, and Resah implemented a digital portal that achieved all of its aims. The portal's central marketplace publicizes the organization's latest offers, while the fine-grained rights management approach that Resah adopted in both the front-end and back-office has helped to streamline workflows. Perhaps most significantly, the organization understands its users better than ever before, allowing Resah to provide a superior customer experience.

Find out more in the Resah Success Story

Perfect web portals with Ibexa DXP

Each of the five web portal examples chosen for this post has been designed to overcome a unique set of challenges and serve a distinct group of users. All have also been developed using Ibexa DXP - our state-of-the-art Digital eXperience Platform. 

Though portals are just one aspect of a modern business’ customer service system, they’re increasingly important. Even more so when they’re combined with content management, digital commerce, and website-building capabilities. Ibexa DXP is a modular system that you can scale as your business grows, adding more features as and when they become necessary. 

This adaptability makes it a supremely useful tool and provides the foundations on which all five of the companies cited above are building their world-class customer service systems. For some organizations, the portal will form the centerpiece of their customer engagement strategy. For others, the portal will be one important channel amongst many. In all cases, it will drive greater customer satisfaction, reduce customer service costs and ensure your business is as effective and streamlined as possible.

If you want to take a deeper dive into how portals are transforming digital commerce and the customer experience, our Unlocking the Potential of Portals eBook is available for download. As well as providing insights into why digital portals have made a comeback and how they can benefit your organization, it takes a more in-depth look at each of the excellent portals included in this post.