Measuring the ROI for a B2B customer portal in manufacturing

The potential benefits from implementing a B2B customer portal are compelling: Manufacturing companies could use the portal to drive revenue growth while also reducing operating costs.

But in making a business case for a new portal implementation, your team will need to do more than highlighting likely benefits. You’ll need to carefully evaluate the anticipated ROI. Implementing a portal is, after all, an investment in time and resources. You need to know that you can generate significantly more revenue and sufficiently reduce costs to justify the expenditures. Crunching some numbers and factoring in a few key decisions can help you and your leadership team determine whether a customer portal makes sense for your business.

Start your ROI analysis by defining your business objectives and establishing baseline data. Note the current costs for meeting your objectives without a portal. Then work methodically through implementation and operational costs. Let’s say your objective is to reduce customer service costs and grow sales with key accounts. Here is an example of possible costs:

Implementation costs of a portal (CapEx):

Total estimated implementation costs = € 200.000

Operational costs (OpEx):

Total estimated operational costs = € 87.000

Total implementation costs (CapEx + OpEx) = € 287.000

Projected increase in online sales: € 400.000 per year

Projected reduction in customer service costs: € 50.000 per year

Total benefits = € 450.000 per year

This example calculation shows considerable, tangible benefits for implementation. It would cost € 287.000 to implement and operate the portal for one year. But that portal would earn an additional € 400.000 per year in online sales while reducing costs by € 50.000 per year. The net could be € 163.000 in the first year alone. That benefit should improve in the second year, when you could avoid most or all of the CapEx costs.

Though your ROI analysis focuses on quantitative metrics, don’t forget that a B2B customer portal can also provide qualitative benefits that will ultimately improve your bottom line. For example, delivering a better customer experience through a customer portal can boost customer loyalty, increase your brand reputation, and improve your competitive position—and these benefits can drive more sales.

Conversely, consider the opportunity costs of delaying or not implementing a customer portal. If competitors offer better digital experiences before you do, your prospects might choose to work with those other companies.

As you begin planning for implementation, you will have a few architectural decisions to make. Because those choices will affect implementation costs, they can have an important impact on your ROI.

Your company might benefit from integrating a B2B customer portal with your marketing and brand websites through one platform. Using one platform allows you to more easily share content across channels, which can streamline content management and enable you to improve the consistency of omnichannel experiences.

If you are focused on business process automation, you might need centralized access to multiple services and tools. You need a platform that helps combine technology stacks or integrates multiple tools to create a single user experience.

You should determine whether the portal will serve as a single application or whether you will use multiple portals and tools in the same technology stack over time. Deploying multiple portals on the same platform can help strengthen your business case because you can share operating costs across multiple divisions.

DXP suites provide multiple tools from one vendor. While they might seem to simplify implementation or management, they have some significant drawbacks. For example, some of the suite’s tools might be more advanced than others. In addition, you might not need all the tools provided, but you still have to pay for all of them. Finally, choosing a suite locks you in. It’s difficult to add third-party capabilities or customize tools.

A composable DXP provides greater flexibility. You can select best-of-breed tools from a variety of vendors. And you can add or remove components, including microservices, as your needs change. This flexibility reduces costs: You pay for only what you need.

Should you buy a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution or build a custom solution? By buying a COTS solution, you can speed implementation, control costs, benefit from lessons learned from other companies, and access established support services.

But you might need capabilities that aren’t offered with COTS solutions. If you have the in-house personnel or a partner that can build what you need, that might be better. Many companies choose a hybrid approach. You could buy a CRM or ecommerce solution, for example, but then work with a partner to build a flexible, composable architecture.

As you analyze your ROI, you’ll need to compare the costs of buying versus building. And you should consider the potential financial consequences of getting it wrong: If you buy a solution but then end up doing some building in addition, you might negate the cost-saving and time-to-market benefits of buying a solution.

Your ROI analysis won’t stop when you’ve implemented a B2B customer portal. You’ll need ways to measure its success over time and prove that it is worthy of continued investment. For example, you’ll want to evaluate not only how many customers are using the portal but also how well the portal is supporting high-level business goals. With the right strategy for tracking key metrics, you can demonstrate the tangible benefits of a customer portal for both driving revenue growth and reducing operating costs.

Learn more about how to evaluate the ROI for a B2B customer portal and how to make an effective business case for implementing one. Read the white paper, “Assessing the ROI of B2B portals for manufacturing.”