Last Wednesday I met with one of our Hub clients who only had one day left in the office before she jetted off on holiday. The client had been using the Hub for about a year as a UK staff intranet. This quickly expanded to being a portal that also served the organisation’s external suppliers. Well why not? The Hub allowed them to provide tailored navigation for this additional audience and they could safely lock away information that was purely for internal eyes only.
Six months later, their sister company were so impressed with what had been achieved that they too joined in and the Hub grew to serve a whole new community. For the first time ever the two group companies were connected. Next, they decided to deploy a second Hub purely and simply to serve their customers. They already had a public facing website but wanted to provide customers with a little extra by giving them a login.to some special customer-only features.
The Hub had already proved useful to them in so many ways and another opportunity for it to shine had presented itself. Our client had a problem. Their public web site was a nightmare to update and rather ugly and a number of senior colleagues had asked why it couldn’t look and behave more like their Hub.
The Hub does have functionality for clients to build an entire ‘front end’ which is publicly accessible and greets people before they log in – but my beach-bound client also wanted to get this done before she flew off on hols and one would usually expect to take a bit longer than a day to put something like this together!
Well …. and I’m sure you saw this coming …. by Friday evening – about the time our client was thinking about her first sundowner on the beach – we had used their customer Hub to build a beautiful set of public facing pages which also allowed Customers to log in and access secure content.
Is it a Company Intranet? Is it a Supplier Extranet? Is it a Group Intranet? Is it a Customer Portal? Is it a website? Yes! The Hub's flexible format lends itself to all sorts of uses, we can tailor it to your specific needs - and it can happen fast! Meanwhile, relaxing on a beach somewhere, my suitably chilled client enjoying a suitably chilled sundowner...
Martin Boswell is Product Director at Pancentric Digital,RAR Digital Agency of the Year 2015. Contact him for all enquiries regarding intranets and client portals. Call 0207 099 6370, email hub@pancentric.com or see our website for further details.