A wholesale business handled most of its partner relationships by phone and email. Partners rang to ask where an order was, emailed to request a delivery note or an invoice copy, and waited for someone in the office to look it up and reply.
The information existed — it sat in the order and accounts systems — but partners had no way to see it for themselves, and the office spent a large part of each day relaying it.
The team had considered a portal before but worried, rightly, that a self-service screen showing stale or wrong information would be worse than no portal at all. A partner who is told one thing online and another on the phone loses trust in both.
The challenges we had to solve
- Order and document data lived across more than one back-office system, none designed to face the outside.
- The portal had to show the same status staff saw, or it would create disputes rather than settle them.
- Each partner could see only their own orders and documents, which made access control a first-order concern.
- Partners ranged from large and technical to small and not, so the portal had to be obvious to use.
How we approached it
We scoped the portal around the small number of questions partners actually asked: where is my order, what is its status, and where are my documents.
Rather than copy data into a separate store that could drift, we built the portal to read from the back-office systems through a controlled interface, so what a partner sees is what staff see. We were deliberate about access, so a partner’s login exposes their records and only their records.
We released a first version covering order status and document downloads, put it in front of a few friendly partners, and adjusted from their feedback before widening it out.
We kept the interface plain enough for a small partner to use without instruction. On handover we documented the integration points and the access rules, so the team can add partners and extend the portal without coming back to us for every change.
Where it stands
Partners who want to self-serve now can, at any hour, and the office spends less of its day reading order statuses down the phone.
Because the portal reflects the same systems staff rely on, the online answer and the phone answer agree, which was the whole point. The work the team still does by phone is now the work that genuinely needs a person.