Measuring B2B Portal ROI with Client Identifier Codes

The starting point for achieving payback on any investment in web technology, or on any application for that matter, is to have people utilize what you’ve built. But “use” is a relative term. In the case of Business-to-Business Portals, it can be difficult or impossible to answer the basic question “how many clients are using our portal?” There is a certain irony when this occurs, especially when you consider the tidy sums often invested building and delivering functionality through a secure browser interface. This is a situation that occurs more than it should.

Here are some practical suggestions for how to build measurability into customer portals. As you will see in a moment, the recommendations all pivot around one simple concept: client codes. As with most B2B endeavors, the complexity lies not in the concepts, but in the difficulty with which they are dispatched. Before diving in, a few definitions:

Customer – an individual working at a client company

Project or Account – a unit of work for services or for managing and tracking the purchase of products

Client – the business line, business area or subsidiary a customer works within

Corporation – the ultimate parent company that houses all the clients, customers, accounts and projects we have currently, or could have in the future

Here’s some advice for how to capture the data you need to build flexible composite views of portal usage, as well as few examples of how the data can be used:

1. Create a set of unique codes for each of the items defined above and integrate them into the portal security system as well as key supporting applications. This is the starting point for tracking and monitoring all the people at a particular client and performing aggregate analysis to determine how often a corporation is using the portal, the number of customers using it, and so forth. Effectively, what I am suggesting is that the codes be captured in activity log files, along with information about portal use.

2. Create client code tables that capture key relationships between entities, for instance: one customer : one client, (hopefully) one customer : many accounts, (again, hopefully) many clients : one corporation; and so on. Work through these relationships in advance and accommodate them in your client code schema.

3. Use your application logging framework to create separate logs devoted to portal analytics. Log-ins, report views, uploads, downloads, requests, fulfillments, etc. are all potentially meaningful transactions. Just as WebTrends captures page views by visitors, so too should your portal capture key application interactions in a log output. Using a generic, data-centric log output format (such as XML or tab-delimited text) will give you flexibility in interpreting the output later in an analytic tool of your preference.

4. Roll out the client codes as standard identifiers across all systems that handle client data; in this case, including customer portals. You should be able to track activity longitudinally to relate the pieces together across the client lifecycle, starting with a client code for a new opportunity in your sales force automation system, all the way through to a satisfaction survey from an individual customer, and invoices for services and products.

If you follow these basic guidelines, you can begin to answer questions like:

• How many clients are using our portal and what’s the overall penetration of the portal for each of our business lines?
• What is the level of utilization of our portal by each of our customers and is there a relationship between high utilization and customer satisfaction (as indicated by the online survey that we just sent out, for instance)?
• What is our best estimate for the amount of internal labor cost savings of the portal, at the unit of work level, for the transactions that our clients perform?
• Do customers that use our portal buy more from us than those that don’t?
• Did the promotion we recently placed on the entry page of our customer portal drive any sales?
• How successful was our campaign to activate portal usage? Is our new client on-boarding process leading to portal activations?

With a little up front planning and some careful measurement design, you can begin to harness a lot of valuable information useful for measuring portal ROI. Your analytical capabilities become more strategic and powerful when combined with information from other systems. As you do so, you can begin to support strategic account development, customer satisfaction programs and the like.

There’s a lot to be said for moving from “fire and forget” development to strategic asset management. Once you do, you open the door to getting the management attention that online service and product delivery deserves. Programs to manage and deliver results can also get you a seat at the budgeting table, and a voice that speaks the ROI language. Client codes are the metrics foundation for building your customer portal house.