The E-mergo customer portal

With the innovative low-code platform Mendix you can create various applications and portals. One of the applications we built is the My E-mergo customer portal. In this blog by Mendix consultant Andy Berger you can read why and how we did that. Finally, he explains the benefits of such an application for us and for the customer.

What is a customer portal?

A customer portal is a secure environment specially set up for a customer. In it, they can arrange matters online with a company or organization. Customers have a personal environment there with data and/or tools at their disposal. Of course, not every customer portal is the same. Each company delivers different services and products, so the features offered will differ per customer portal. Some common components added to a customer portal are invoices, purchased services and products, and (open) tickets/questions.

E-mergo customer portal

We started building a customer portal with the intention of making information from various data flows available together in one place, 24/7, for our customers. This would lead to better customer retention and increased customer satisfaction through improved service and a faster way of communicating. In addition, the account managers benefited from the development of this portal, as part of their tasks would be made easier by it.

During development of the portal, the business department worked closely with the IT department. Here, the business department consisted of the sales, marketing, and finance departments. First, the wishes and needs of the end users were mapped out. Based on the requirements that followed from this, we looked at how all the necessary data flows could be brought together in one place. TimeXtender was used for this. This is an advanced data management platform. Through data warehouse automation, TimeXtender makes building a data management platform simpler, faster, and more reliable. Ultimately, all the necessary data flows come together here, so that Mendix can easily read this data.

How does the portal work?

The MVP (Minimal Viable Product) of the customer portal contains 4 pages for the customer:

1. Homepage: the homepage contains several sources of information, including the most recently posted blog, upcoming events (training, demos, etc.), and recent activities within the customer portal itself (booked project hours, submitted support tickets, and received invoices).
2. Consultancy overview: on the consultancy page you can find all ongoing activities and/or projects with the associated budget status.
3. Invoices overview: on the invoices page, the customer gets insight into all invoices received since the customer portal went live. Here it's possible to download invoices, for example when they can no longer be found in the mailbox. It's also possible to easily search by invoice number, description, or amount.
4. Support overview: via the support page, tickets can be submitted when there are problems with a particular project. There's also an overview here of all open, pending, and resolved tickets. 'Open' means the ticket has been successfully submitted, but still needs to be looked at by the support team. 'Pending' means the support team has directly requested additional and/or missing information, or is still waiting for information or an action from a third party. Finally, 'resolved' indicates that a ticket has been successfully closed.

To log in to the customer portal, one must have login credentials. Since E-mergo's customers already worked with login credentials from E-mergo's own Azure environment, a connection was made between Mendix and Azure. As a result, access to the customer portal is linked to an existing account of the customer in our Azure environment.

In addition to the customer's standard user role, the application also uses roles such as account manager and administrator. By using these roles, certain pages can or cannot be accessed, and certain actions can or cannot be carried out. For example, the account manager role has access to the information of all customers, and the administrator has access to advanced settings to keep the application running.

Benefits for E-mergo

These are the benefits E-mergo gets from building a customer portal in Mendix:

• When there's a question, customers can find an answer themselves via the customer portal
  • This takes less time to resolve routine questions
  • If account managers and administration spend less time, this saves costs
  • Account managers have more time for personal contact when it's really needed
  • Transparency in service delivery and invoicing
• Better connection with customers
• Higher customer satisfaction

Benefits for our customers

These are the benefits for customers who have access to the customer portal in Mendix:

• 24/7 access to their own information
• Insight into invoices
• Insight into consultants active at the organization
• Insight into hours worked
• Insight into the status of support tickets
• Insight into the status of prepaid hour card(s)
• Faster access to information related to E-mergo's service delivery and software

Are you interested in a demo of Mendix and in particular of our customer portal? Then check out this webinar. Want to discover what the possibilities are for your company or organization? Then get in touch via the contact form below or schedule a no-obligation appointment with us.

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Written by Andy Berger,
Mendix Consultant