Corporate portal. What is it? What for? To whom and when?

What is it?

To begin with, let's understand the concept of "Corporate Portal". Too often it is confused with the "Corporate site", but you need to clearly understand the difference. Wikipedia tells us:

A corporate site is an Internet resource containing complete information about the company, its services / products, events in the life of the company, development history and much more.

However:

The corporate portal is a web interface that provides employees with access to company corporate data.

In other words, the corporate portal is your “virtual office”, which allows your employees to exchange information, documents, add, modify, delete, and most importantly work together. But this is in a general sense.

In fact, corporate portals provide a variety of specific functionality to meet the needs of the business. Some companies independently develop an individual and unique corporate portal for work (but this is not cheap to put it mildly), but you can take a ready-made solution and customize it to your specifics.

Why do you need a corporate portal?

Why do you, the owners of companies, need this. Let's look at the benefits of corporate portals?

The first is that we get a system for storing and systematizing all important customer information. We control incoming customer requests. If it’s simpler, then you receive letters, calls, requests from the site, messages on social networks and instant messengers. These can be applications from your new or existing customers, offers from your suppliers and partners. (All this is called LIDA). To begin with, all this information needs to be collected, stored and preferably classified. Then analyze and use, for example, to identify the most effective advertising sites. Bitrix24 automatically collects all the LIDs from different sources into a single database: LIDs are collected from corporate mails, “open lines” systems, from phone calls, chats and web forms of your sites and generally a lot total (I will talk about this in other articles).

What for?In order for your employees to stop hurting, I’m ready when they remember what they were talking with the client about Viber, Mail or Online consultant on the site. Your employees have access to this information from any place where there is Internet access; they can enter the portal even from the phone. You do not need to install any additional software on the computer, the employee’s business day will simply start - he came, sat down at the table, connected to the corporate portal and that’s it, he’s ready to work. All your employees (even if they work in different offices) can get quick access to information and communicate with each other.

The second - in order, but not in importance for your company, namely for the sales department - is a customer relationship management system - CRM . That is, after the application has arrived your manager needs to perform a series of actions before the client pays.

For example: You are a travel agency. An application has arrived from the site “I want to Turkey”. Your manager must contact the client and specify the information (client’s name, what dates he needs the tour, how many people will go, how many stars the hotel should have, etc.). Then he must formulate a commercial offer (possibly not one), send it to the client.

It is advisable to set yourself a reminder after 4 days "Call Pavel Semenovich and find out which tour he chose." If the client resists, then give him a discount of up to 10%. If you agree to everything, then draw up and send him a contract, insurance and invoice. At the end, you must save copies of signed documents and wait for payment.

This kind of sequence of actions in the company is called "Business Process". In fact, you have a lot of such processes and it would be nice if some of them would be automated (for example, the formation of a proposal document)

Why do you need CRM?In order not to lose a single client (you can’t even imagine how much you have already lost them simply because the manager did not call back on time). In order not to teach the new manager how to work, and that he would clearly understand what he should do. In order for you to have complete information about the client and you could, for example, sell something on its basis. So that when an employee leaves, you can easily transfer his clients to another manager, since you have the entire history of working with these clients. Why do you need automation of business processes? Everything is simple here. If many routine actions are performed automatically, then your employees do not spend time on this, then they work faster and they can process more customers and respond to them more quickly (compared, for example, with your competitors).


The third is task and project management systems . Any even modest business consists of tasks and subtasks that need to be entrusted to certain people and completed before a certain time. Frequently repeated sequences, such as billing for payments or the sequential approval of contracts or the approval of leave requests by all managers, can be automated. At the same time, a corporate portal must be required to have a convenient and intuitive (visual) interface for managing and monitoring all tasks, assigning roles to tasks (Who is responsible? Who helps? Who simply observes?), Simple control of task deadlines with reminders, task grouping by projects , the presence of regular tasks, which are set, for example, once a month or quarterly.

What for? If you are engaged in net sales, this system can accelerate the internal processes of the company (for example, a task in the support department for the purchase of office supplies or a task in the IT department for installing a monitor for a new employee, etc.). If you are a manufacturing company, that is, you release a certain product (material or software), then you need such a system as air. Your income is directly dependent on how many of your employees are comfortable using the project management system. In general, without it, you will drown in sticky yellow pieces of paper, outfits and reports.

Fourth . And of course, the final big block is Control and Analytics . The larger the company becomes, the more difficult it is to control employees. You should be able to get performance statistics for each employee. How many calls? How many completed tasks? How many overtime hours?

Also, your department heads should be able to analyze the performance of the department. As long as you cannot calculate the performance of the company in numbers, you cannot develop. The corporate portal, in turn, should allow you to build reports on a variety of parameters and do it simply and clearly.

Why do you need this?To improve labor discipline in the first place. How much time does an employee spend at work? How effective is it? What percentage of his applications become your customers? Secondly, to identify thin spots. Sometimes you don’t even know at what stage the implementation of projects and sales is hindered. And thirdly, to determine the development strategy of your company. But there is a nuance - all analytics in the corporate portal is relevant only when all the necessary staff works through it.

To whom and when?

Who needs a corporate portal?Almost any field of activity (trade, manufacturing, medicine, the provision of services, etc.), one way or another, creates an information system around itself. For example, all sales managers receive applications by phone and mail. Between each other exchange information via Skype. Approve contracts and statements with superiors in paper form. Naiads, also in the form of pieces of paper, fall into the production department. Every good employee carries reminders and task lists on his phone. And the customer base is at best in 1Sk with which not everyone can work, in the worst case, but often the database is generally in Excel tablets. And the heads of the calving bear reports with unverifiable data. If in these examples you recognize yourself and your company and understand why this is bad, then you need the Corporate Portal and you are ready to implement it.

And the worst question is when is it needed and where to start? You need to start by identifying, fixing and standardizing the most important business processes for your company. Most likely, now everyone does the work for you not according to some general instruction, but since he knows how and how he does it (albeit not always well), so you need to write, and preferably draw, flowcharts of all the important business processes of the company . Why do you need to do this before implementing a corporate portal? Simply, if this is not done, then everything will be repeated again, and your employees will work “some in the forest, some for firewood”. And how, with such a scheme of work, introduce and train a new person? No way. Therefore, the standardization of business processes in the first place, then instructions for working with the portal, and only then can you install a corporate portal.