In the previous ⭐ article ⭐, we covered the case study of a legal firm improving its B2B customer engagement process through the graduate transformation. Let’s have a look at the evolution of the solution over time.
As we discussed in the previous post and the one before, Outlook is the customer’s Go-to solution for engaging with external parties. It looks like it works first, but..
For the key business processes, like the legal advice request and the following B2B customer engagement, the main things we lose are:
- The ability to track KPIs of any kind on time-to-response across the multiple phases is even less feasible.
- The visibility of the request’s progress and status.
- Task ownership and the ability to reassign.
- The next required step.
- The business context we need – it’s literally everything in those emails, mostly irrelevant to the business process.
- The data quality. The data in emails is unstructured. You have to transform it manually before entering it into the backend system, and the quality isn’t great as a result: missing, incorrect, duplicated, and outdated data.
It’s a two-way communication, which is good, but not the best, considering everything mentioned above.
So how do we improve it?
One way of doing it, and we see it a lot, is to use some Office tools like Microsoft Forms to capture the data and even the documents.
It certainly addresses a couple of pain points, such as context and data quality. It introduces an additional problem: we now have one-way communication, so we keep the conversations via email. Still lots of manual labour, and data is all over the place. But somehow it’s getting better.
So what if we go even further and share our internal process with external users to improve our B2B collaborations? If we find a way to share data and documents and make the staged outcomes visible to customers and internally, won’t it be great?
By introducing the Power Platform app and Power Automate at the back, we tick lots of boxes: we now have a shared process, context, data quality, automated data entry, integration with the internal system(s), data ownership, and the ability to assign records internally. We can even track KPIs and meet SLAs. So happy days? Did we solve all the problems? Well, we solved most of them, but we also introduced new ones. Not even problems, but rather inconveniences.
There are costs associated with the app. We need M365 licences, we need Power Apps licences, we need to onboard customer users, ensure we share data and documents securely, and ensure guest users only have access to what they need. We literally invite them into the home organisation, so we have to take care of the guests.
The real problem starts with customer number three, whom we try to onboard.
To set them up, we need to copy the app, the SharePoint list structure, and the library, and configure everything to point to a new location. We need more setups, more licenses, and more security monitoring for the internal resources. Also, we need to ensure we direct the customer to their data and documents without compromising the security of other customers’ data. Also, our staff members need to switch between SharePoint lists and libraries, and there is no easy way to get a consolidated view. Now, let’s add app maintenance and upgrades to the picture. To spice it a bit.
And here comes customer number 4! That triggers a full panic mode because our old perfect solution doesn’t scale anymore.
It’s time for the real portal solution. It will take care of your external customers, vendors, partners, and volunteers, creating a secure layer for business processes, data, and document sharing, and for ways to interact, while keeping it all structured.
Now, external parties can participate in your internal processes without directly accessing the organisation’s internal resources. The portal handles security. Each partner or customer organisation has access only to their data and documents. System updates are deployed to all portal users at once. The onboarding is a matter of configuration.
The backend app allows internal users to access all data or only some, depending on their roles. Having a 360 customer view and reporting is easy and naturally supported by the solution.
To summarise, it may not be the final solution, but as you could see, the transformation is not something that happens to organisations overnight. Something we designed and built may work at first, but then stop working as the business grows. It’s important to recognise this and be ready for the next move.
Thank you very much to our amazing customers for trusting us to be a part of their journey!