Designing the perfect member portal
Despite the abundance of member portals currently out there, not all are made equal.
With the rise in online banking, more and more of us have become accustomed to managing our finances online. Workplace pension providers have quickly caught up, by developing online portals to help us better manage our savings and benefits.
But are these portals reaching their potential? Are they answering the unique needs of their users and providing seamless experiences throughout? There’s a lot that goes into creating the perfect member portal: a vision, a recommendation, and an implementation.
Vision
When it comes to creating a member portal, the goal is obvious: develop an innovative, dynamic, and market-leading platform for members.
But what is it going to consist of? What do you ultimately want to achieve? Whilst it will vary depending on project needs, we believe it comes down to these three core elements:
Elevate the user experience
- Understand wants & needs
- Pension view, modelling & management
- Improve brand implementation
- Personalise the user journeys
- Integrate a multi-channel communications approach
- Financial wellbeing & education support to help decision-making
- Intuitive & secure authentication
Optimise business processes
- Increase self-service
- Reduce the cost to serve
- Reduce inbound enquiries
- Reduce failure demand
- Integrate HR data
- A new merged CMS
Consolidate the IT infrastructure
- Re-engineer front & back end
- Build in-house IT expertise
- Site administration & configuration
- Cybersecurity measures
- Data manipulation & engineering
- Network & data center optimization
- Automation of IT processes
Recommendation
Next, it’s the recommendation; what are you going to deliver?
At Landscape, we would recommend one single system. Why you ask? A single system offers a range of benefits, including cost savings in development and ongoing hosting, in addition to improved data integrity and risk reduction, plus greater ease of third-party integration.
The system would include a high-level framework that covers the following:
- Registration/login
- Account details
- Pension details
- Educational content
- Modellers
- Document management
- Activity tracker
- Payments
Implementation
A good idea is nothing without the right plan in place to deliver said idea, especially when it comes to software and systems.
It starts with a clearly defined plan. This includes understanding what the new system can deliver, adequately preparing a client project team, anticipating employee needs, and more.
The biggest implementation challenges are:
Misaligned expectations
A project team needs to include a variety of stakeholders, such as project managers, team leaders, product managers, members communication experts, and subject matter experts. To ensure their expectations are met during the implementation process, there must be strong communication between the client’s internal project team and ourselves. By defining the milestones and deliverables required during the planning stage, meeting expectations in the implementation stage will be a much smoother process.
Data integrity
There may be a need to migrate data from an existing system to a new one. Understanding the level of interoperability between the systems ensures the data remains secure, no data gets lost or left behind in the migration, and privacy standards are upheld. During the implementation phase, the project team must continue to verify the integrity of the data, potentially involving a third party to moderate and ensure requirements are met.
Support
Full-service support should be provided, using a ticketing system where all the tickets are triaged and prioritised.
Software training tools
Provide training as well as full-scale documentation for the solution, starting with the web app user guide, FAQs, integration documentation, code documentation and software architecture implementation document.
If you’re looking to build upon or in need of a brand new member portal, get in touch with Landscape today.
