Customer Collaboration Portal
This client is a global leader in household appliances and appliances for professional use, selling more than 40 million products to customers in more than 150 markets every year. The client’s largest markets are Europe and North America. The company operates through two segments: consumer durables (residential kitchen, fabric care, and cleaning) and professional products (industrial kitchens, restaurants, and laundries). The company focuses on innovations that are thoughtfully designed, based on extensive consumer insight, to meet the real needs of consumers and professionals.
Business Challenge
The client approached Northridge seeking to develop a centralized and comprehensive customer portal built on the SharePoint platform. The portal would serve more than 7,500 individuals from the company’s customer base including dealers, contractors, and distributors, as well as some 750 internal client personnel. The primary vision for the portal solution was for it to serve as a centralized customer channel communications platform, while also providing a single comprehensive marketing and sales knowledge base for product information, giving access to detailed product specifications, features, pricing, instructions, collateral and digital assets. Beyond supplying up-to-date and accurate product details, the portal would also allow users to create and print on-demand product brochures that include individual products or custom selections of multiple products to give to the end consumer. Finally, as part of the overall vision of creating a “one stop shop” for dealer, contractor and distributor customers, the portal would provide access to order history, invoice and shipping information.
Solution Approach
Northridge follows a proven, comprehensive business consulting approach to planning and implementing SharePoint solutions, called Navigate™, which leverages the Northridge True North Methodology™, experience and best practices. Utilizing the Navigate approach to define and validate client expectations and requirements for the SharePoint portal solution, Northridge developed and deployed the portal leveraging out-of-the-box SharePoint functionality, Northridge custom functionality and third-party integrations.
To centralize and provide all of the necessary product information to portal users, Northridge first worked with the client to consolidate information on its 1100+ products into a single, comprehensive Microsoft SQL Server product database that is now leveraged by the entire organization. This SQL database allows users to tie together and relate product specifications, features, pricing, instructions, and relevant collateral and digital assets. Northridge enabled administration of this product database through a custom Microsoft Silverlight application. Through this application, the client's marketing and product personnel ensure the product information is kept accurate and up to date as a “single source of the truth.”
With all product information stored in a single database, this database was then leveraged to create and manage foreign language translations of product information, specifications and feature text. Upon realizing the power of a single repository, the client also decided to feed the centralized product information to public websites and extranets, thus reducing data entry costs and content errors.
Within the new SharePoint portal solution environment, the client leverages collaborative features of the SharePoint platform to communicate product news, events, industry news and other critical information while users are provided with personalized news, updates and information based on their user profile. SharePoint’s security allows the client to move communications through an internal approval process and then target the communications based on defined roles. As SharePoint was configured with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) in integrated mode, internal users have access to SSRS reports published in SharePoint. The client leverages this additional functionality to automatically create time-specific reports in a versioned document library.
In order to enable customers to create and deliver the most up to date marketing collateral to the end consumer, Northridge also developed “Build-a-Brochure” capability as part of the overall SharePoint customer portal solution. Users create custom product brochures by searching and selecting one or more products from the extensive product database. These product brochures were further customized by the Northridge team, allowing for printing in several formats based on the specific audience messaging.
Adding to the feature-rich portal, Northridge developed third-party integrations connecting the portal to the client’s data warehouse through a web service call. The integration enables external users to view invoice and shipping information in real time.
From a user experience perspective, the SharePoint customer portal features customized branding, page layouts and user experience leveraging the award-winning SharePoint user experience skills of the Northridge SharePoint user experience team. In addition to the custom SharePoint user experience design, Northridge also enhanced the search functionality, allowing users to search and filter products by SKU, brand name, appliance type, power type, installation type, size and color.
From a security perspective, the client was able to take advantage of the SharePoint platform and seamless integration with other Microsoft products. All users are in Active Directory and authenticated through Microsoft Forefront’s Threat Management Gateway. This enables both internal and external users to leverage the power of the internet without worrying about possible threats.
From a deployment and governance perspective, in order to deliver value early and often, the customer portal was deployed in a phased approach. An initial rollout to key internal client team members, followed by a full internal client deployment and training, and finally a rollout to the full dealer, contractor, and distributor customer community aided in SharePoint adoption and governance. Northridge also engaged in SharePoint business process consulting to assist the the client's team in ongoing responsibility assignments and ongoing governance for the customer portal.
From an external user support perspective, the client’s external application support team had initially communicated concerns about supporting such a large external user base. The client’s staff was limited and they needed to maintain the high level of customer satisfaction. Northridge recommended the use of a third party tool to provide self-service user management. By providing self-service capabilities (create and manage their account, or retrieve forgotten passwords), the client team could maintain customer satisfaction levels without increasing the support staff.
Results Delivered
Launched in the second half of 2010, the customer portal has already proven successful. The customer portal is effectively driving sales and marketing efficiencies while providing on-demand access to additional client resources in both accounting and logistics.
Northridge continues to enhance and extend the customer portal solution through a formal SharePoint Solution Lifecycle Management process, while also providing SharePoint Environment Management, hosting and infrastructure management services.