Last month's newsletter talked about SaaS customer journeys and included my blog post on 5 key best practices for your customer's journey.

 

One key tool for supporting any SaaS customer journey is the customer portal, the entryway for your customers. At it's simplest level it is a website but often very quickly needs to evolve into much more. It is where customers login to your application, search for and interact with your content, request support and collaborate with you. In some cases they may also do financial transactions for additional services. As a provider you need to manage content, understand your customer interactions via analytics and manage security. All of this while potentially having multiple products and channels. Partners add another layer of complexity on top of this.

 

Gartner uses the term Digital Experience Platforms to describe the increasing complex software required. They just published their Magic Quadrant on Digital Experience Platforms. If you are looking to upgrade your tools in this area the Magic Quadrant report is a good place to start.

 

Remember if you don't have a way to easily measure interactions with your customer both inside and outside of your SaaS applications real improvement in customer experience will be difficult.