The E-mergo customer portal

With the innovative low-code platform Mendix you can create a wide range of applications and portals. One of the applications we have built is the My E-mergo customer portal. In this blog, Mendix consultant Andy Berger explains why and how we did it. Finally, he outlines the benefits of such an application for us and for our customers.

What is a customer portal?

A customer portal is a secure environment set up specifically for a customer. In it, customers can arrange things online with a company or organization. They have a personal environment with data and/or tools at their disposal. Of course, not every customer portal is the same. Every company delivers different services and products, so the functions on offer will differ per customer portal. Some common components added to a customer portal are invoices, purchased services and products, and (open) tickets/questions.

The E-mergo customer portal

We started building a customer portal with the intention of making information from various data streams available to our customers in one place, 24/7. This would lead to better customer retention and higher customer satisfaction through improved service and faster communication. In addition, our account managers benefited from the development of this portal, as part of their tasks would become easier.

During the development of the portal, the business department worked closely with the IT department. 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 resulting requirements, we looked at how all the necessary data streams 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 streams come together here, so that Mendix can easily read in this data.

How does the portal work?

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

1. Home page: the home page contains several sources of information, including the most recently published blog, upcoming events (training sessions, demos, etc.) and recent activity 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 their budget status.
3. Invoice overview: on the invoices page, customers get an overview of all the invoices they have received since the customer portal went live. Here it is possible to download invoices, for example when they can no longer find them in their mailbox. You can also easily search by invoice number, description or amount.
4. Support overview: on the support page, tickets can be submitted when there are problems with a particular project. There is also an overview of all open, pending and resolved tickets. 'Open' means the ticket has been submitted successfully, but the support team still needs to look at it. 'Pending' means the support team has asked directly for 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 closed successfully.

To log in to the customer portal you need login credentials. Since E-mergo's customers were already working with credentials from E-mergo's own Azure environment, a connection was set up between Mendix and Azure. As a result, access to the customer portal is linked to an existing customer account in our Azure environment.

Besides the standard customer user role, the application also uses roles such as account manager and administrator. These roles determine whether certain pages can be accessed and whether certain actions can be performed. 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 customers have a question, they can find the answer themselves in the customer portal
  • It takes less time to resolve routine questions
  • When account managers and the administration spend less time on this, it saves costs
  • Account managers have more time for personal contact when it is really needed
  • Transparency in service delivery and invoicing
• Better customer retention
• 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 the consultants active at the organization
• Insight into the hours worked
• Insight into the status of support tickets
• Insight into the status of prepaid hour bundle(s)
• Faster access to information related to the services and software provided through E-mergo

Interested in a demo of Mendix and our customer portal in particular? Then watch this webinar. Want to discover the possibilities for your company or organization? Get in touch via the button below or schedule a no-obligation appointment with us.

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