Power Platform
Power Pages
External-facing sites where customers, suppliers, applicants or members submit and track information, with real authentication rather than an email form.
Retail & Distribution · Business Applications
A customer experience rebuilt on a low-code portal
A large home and security products group, United States. The customer experience was fragmented across channels and systems, making it harder than it should have been for customers to interact with the business.
The situation
What the organization was dealing with
The customer experience was fragmented across channels and systems, making it harder than it should have been for customers to interact with the business.
Customer-facing portals are one of the clearest tests of whether an organization's customer record is real. If the portal has to assemble a view from three systems at page load, customers experience the fragmentation directly.
What was done
The work, and the part that was actually hard
A more streamlined customer experience was created using Microsoft Power Pages together with Dynamics 365 Customer Experience applications.
Building on a low-code portal connected to the customer record, rather than as a bespoke front end, keeps the portal and the record in the same governance model — which is what prevents the portal becoming a separate system with its own copy of the customer.
Results
What was published
These are the figures exactly as reported in the source. Nothing has been rounded, extrapolated or restated.
Customer-facing portal1
To Dynamics 365Connected
Customer experienceStreamlined
What changed
- A customer-facing portal connected directly to the customer record
- Interactions consolidated rather than spread across disconnected channels
- Low-code delivery rather than a bespoke development programme
- Foundation in place for further customer experience work
Platforms involved
What each product was doing here
Dynamics 365
Dynamics 365 Customer Experience
The customer-facing applications working together over one shared customer record.
What transfers
If you were to attempt this
Connecting a portal to the record rather than to an integration layer is the durable choice, and it is usually the less convenient one at build time.
Where it usually gets harder than expected: Portals attract scope. The discipline is deciding what customers should be able to do themselves and refusing the rest until that works.
How we would take it on
Our approach to Business Applications work
1
Shadow the real process
We sit with the people doing the work and watch what actually happens, including every workaround. Process documents and reality are rarely the same thing.
2
Design against your own data
We prototype and show you your own records in it, not a demo company, before anything is built.
3
Go live in a contained phase
By site, by practice group or by service line — with the group that wants it most going first, to a fixed price.
4
Measure against the baseline
We report against the numbers agreed at the start, including where the result fell short of the target.
Recognise the problem?
If any of the above describes your organization, tell us where it hurts most. We will tell you what the same platforms could realistically do in your environment, what we would measure, and whether we think it is worth doing at all.
Talk to our teamMore Business Applications storiesWe reply to every message within one business day.
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